Re: [Wiki-research-l] [Wikimedia-l] Unsolicieted email from "wikimedia research"

RCom, as far as I know has not been active in the past year or more *RCom is not dead. It changed into something less formal and less hierarchical. You can still email me and Dario to get support for your research plans. We'd still reconvene the committee if it looks like that'll help. * While RCom hasn't met in a long time, the process for subject recruitment hasn't slowed. We don't have a technical requirement that all recruitment studies must follow The Process, but I have been helping researchers document their studies and obtain feedback and sometimes consensus for more than five years now. Really, RCom has morphed slowly into the Research Team at the WMF + a few interested volunteers that we can manage to pull in to help us with review work (shout out to Daniel Mietchen, Nemo, Yaroslav & BluRasberry). Within the research team, we *do* have structured processed for supporting researchers access to data and engineering support, but subject recruitment has been mostly left in my (volunteer time) hands. Regretfully, I wasn't involved in the planning of this project or I would have directed it towards best practices for minimizing disruption <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Research_recruitment> -- e.g. an RFC. I would have also pushed Leila to find a way to make posts on talk pages work (since they are known to be generally preferable, police-able, etc.), but I can understand why concerns around privacy might be worth discussion. I regret that this discussion only happened after-the-fact as it could have informed the study design for the better. FWIW, SuggestBot posts recommendations on user talk pages and also does not filter for offensive content (to my knowledge). Finally, I think it is important to consider the source of this research work. Leila is not some random academic or industry researcher who is planning to take advantage of Wikipedians for a study, but not give back. Leila is working with a team at the WMF tasked with building better translation tools. She helped them design an experiment that would explore the effectiveness of these tools so that when something is deployed, it's actually better and we know it scientifically. A lot of the work I do with external researchers is to help make sure that their work has the potential to benefit Wikipedia/Wikipedians/Wikimedia/Open knowledge. In this case, the Leila's team is just helping the product teams engage in best practices around empirical software change practice. After all, every software deployment is an experiment that is inflicted upon you without consent. In this case, Leila's job is making sure that we know the effect before we deploy. So, what I really mean to say is: 1. You're right. We should do this better. We have a process and everyone should go through it. It might have caught some of the issues that have been raised. 2. Leila is WMF staff. She's trying to help the WMF build better software for the purpose of benefiting Wikipedians. Her team deserves some slack. The alternative of not running the study is less desirable. -Aaron On Sat, Jun 27, 2015 at 12:56 PM, Michelle Paulson < mpaulson(a)wikimedia.org&gt; wrote: