Hi Jodi,

In terms of etiquette, it’s totally fine to post these kinds of interview requests on WikiProject Talk pages. I’d expect though that the people who read WikiProject talk pages are skewed towards more highly-engaged participants. Their habits for assessing scientific and technical information may not be representative of Wikipedia contributors overall in the topic area.

As a frequent contributor to climate change articles, I’ll also mention that if you want to know how Wikipedia contributors assess information about climate change, I suspect you’ll get different answers if you ask at WikiProject Climate Change than if you ask at WikiProject Tropical Cyclones.

Cheers, Su-Laine (Wikipedia volunteer)

On Jan 12, 2023, at 12:34 PM, Isaac Johnson isaac@wikimedia.org wrote:

Hey Jodi -- thanks for asking the question. Some of my thoughts about how researchers can solicit off-wiki interviews:

• If you have not already created one, I suggest creating a project page

on Meta https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Projects and linking to it in any posts. This gives interested editors a single page on wiki where they can find relevant information on the project if they're curious. The benefit of Meta in particular is that it also provides a consistent format, has privacy/transparency guarantees, has a place for discussion (talk page), and is discoverable by other researchers.

• If the research is extractive in some way (i.e. not just passive data

analysis but asking for editor's time as with interviews), you want to make sure it also provides clear benefits for those Wikimedian individuals/communities. When soliciting interviews, it isq quite helpful to communicate these benefits to editors so they can judge whether it's worthwhile to participate.

• Your inclination to post on talk pages for topic-specific WikiProjects

(collaborative spaces) is spot on. This helps a lot with reducing interview-request spam for editors and if your research leads to actionable findings / tools, then you have a community of folks who know the project and you can hopefully work with to disseminate.

• Start small (maybe posting to one group to begin with). This wll help

you gather feedback -- e.g., address questions/concerns from editors -- before posting in more places.

• Also consider looking for local events to attend -- e.g., an

edit-a-thon or Wikimedian conference https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Events. This is a great way to find editors for interviews in more relaxed spaces and potentially get to observe and ask questions about their editing processes first-hand. For instance, I saw you're at UIUC: maybe the Wikimedians of Chicago User Group https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedians_of_Chicago_User_Group#Activities has events that could be attended? Sometimes there are nearby Wikimedians-in-Residence https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedian_in_residence#Full_list_of_past_and_present_WiRs who could potentially help you connect with local communities as well.

Hope that helps and curious to hear thoughts from others.

Best, Isaac

On Wed, Jan 11, 2023 at 5:42 PM Jodi Schneider jschneider@pobox.com wrote:

...

Hi wiki-research-l folks,

Can the list point me in the right direction about how researchers should solicit off-wiki interviews? I'm seeking to interview editors of English Wikipedia who have provided information about scientific and technical topics. I'm struggling to find up-to-date documentation about expectations for researchers...

Currently the focus is COVID-19; in future years the focus will shift to climate change; and AI and labor. Overall the project seeks to understand how knowledge brokers (including Wikipedia editors) assess the quality of technical and scientific information. This is part of my 3-year, US-based, IRB-approved research study: https://infoqualitylab.org/projects/knowledgebrokers/participate-y1

My inclination (in the absence of specific best practice directions) would be to post a message the Talk pages of the most obvious WikiProjects, with information about the project and how to reach me: WikiProject COVID-19 WikiProject Medicine / Pulmonology WikiProject Viruses WikiProject Disaster management Is that appropriate? I'd welcome a pointer to specific requirements or best practices. Offline advice also welcome!

-Jodi User:Jodi.a.schneider jschneider@pobox.com https://jodischneider.com/jodi.html _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list -- wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe send an email to wiki-research-l-leave@lists.wikimedia.org

-- Isaac Johnson (he/him/his) -- Senior Research Scientist -- Wikimedia Foundation _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list -- wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe send an email to wiki-research-l-leave@lists.wikimedia.org