---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: James Salsman jsalsman@gmail.com Date: Tue, Feb 14, 2012 at 12:19 AM Subject: Re: [RCom-l] Fwd: Actual Inactive Wikipedia administrator survey (swalling at wikimedia.org) To: rcom-l@lists.wikimedia.org

On 12 February 2012, Steven Walling wrote:

I did not receive any prior contact from Salsman about this before he began to send emails out.

That is blatantly untrue. See this IRC Office Hours log from http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/IRC_office_hours/Office_hours_2012-02-10

[09:41am] jsalsman okay, well I guess the first thing I need is to know who in Zack's department will be point of contact for editor recruitment efforts [09:41am] Philippe jsalsman: that hasn't changed. [09:41am] jsalsman who then? [09:41am] StevenW jsalsman: you can talk to me and Maryana [09:41am] jsalsman okay ... [09:59am] jsalsman StevenW: I'm going to go ahead with the three-year old inactive admins survey and send you access to the results spreadsheet

On 13 February 2012, Philippe Beaudette wrote at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators%27_noticeboard#Heads_...

I was unaware of distribution mechanism and was certainly unaware that it would list a Foundation staff member as the contact.

That is also blatantly untrue, as is clear from the plain language of the IRC log above, as well as http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Legal_and_Community_Advocacy/Com...

On 14 February 2012, Dario Taraborelli wrote at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Inactive_administrators_survey#Lack_of_R...

This survey has not been reviewed by the Research Committee and as such it's in violation of our Research:Subject recruitment.

The page linked to there says, "Until an official policy is approved by the Wikimedia Research Committee regarding subject recruitment, individual requests can be submitted following these instructions." The only Wikipedia Research Policy was announced at http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wiki-research-l/2010-April/000955.html and all of the provisions for subject recruitment approvals were removed from that policy as described in http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wiki-research-l/2012-February/001839.ht...

Moreover, Steven Walling has stated twice so far that I continued sending email surveys after he asked me to stop.  That is easily disproven.  I stopped sending them four hours before he asked me to stop.

As for the survey, it's been an enormous success, with several formerly inactive admins returning to editing so far, and profoundly helpful data for resolving issues surrounding admin and editor attrition.

It is abundantly clear from http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Thread:Talk:Task_force/Community_Health/F...) that this survey had been approved in September 2010 but never acted on. I brought this up repeatedly in the years since and was ignored. It took me three days to administer the survey.

The intentional lies about my conduct are *not* ethical, and I am owed an apology.

Sincerely, James Salsman