As Angela suggested, posting on the Village Pump is a great way to let Wikipedians know about your idea. There's bound to be many willing to help.

Alternately, you could contact individual contributors. Last month WikiInquirer ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:WikiInquirer ) contacted a seemingly random selection of Wikipedians for a survey. Perhaps you could talk to him/her and see what technique was used, or what tips he or she has on finding participants.

One way to get a really random selection of users is the largely undocumented http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random/User , which will give you a random User: namespace page (and thus a random user) every time you use it.

Anyway, I hope that helps. Good luck with your research. :)

Garrett

On 23/04/07, Neni Pogarcic <npogarcic@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi!

I am currently busy with a research about virtual communities and knowledge creation, and use Wikipedia as an experiment and test for the illustration of knowledge creation. As background information, and thorough understanding of Wikipedia I want to conduct interviews with Wikipedia users.

Does anyone has a useful mailing list for this, or another source where I can reach Wikipedia contributors? 

Sincerely,
 

Neni Pogarcic
(Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam)
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