Hello all, This is sort of related to the previous thread on consent, and is something that's been on my mind for a while. As someone who is reasonably visible in the wiki research community and Wikipedia, I get asked fairly often to either a) help recruit participants for studies of Wikipedia, or b) participate myself in such studies. The common theme of such requests is often: * The researcher wants to find people who are invested in Wikipedia, for qualitative studies of contributors * The researcher does not know how to go about doing this * What "invested" means is often poorly defined, since the researcher is often trying to figure out what participation looks like more generally * The researcher has done the standard things (posted on the mailing list, on the village pump) and hasn't gotten any results; or has semi-randomly posted on people's talk pages, potentially getting a warning about spamming in the process As a result: * many of the same people (i.e. very visible contributors) keep getting asked to participate in different studies; or * the researcher is left with a self-selected group of people from the mailing lists or other places, which may in no way represent 'the community' (my hypothesis is that we have many small communities, working under the greater umbrella of Wikipedia); and who may be people who are particularly outspoken or disgruntled; or * the researcher does not get enough participants to do a good study So: * Is there a good solution for these problems? * Can we come up with "best practices" or advice for people who are trying to recruit Wikipedians for studies? * What about some sort of infrastructure or wikiproject to support these requests? Every time I get one of these emails I would really like to pass it on to a group of people to deal with, but I am not sure who, and this mailing list seems too small and focused to support such requests. best, Phoebe p.s. I think "any wiki with a large base of contributors" could be substituted for "Wikipedia" here -- this is probably a problem with studying any large community-run site. But most of my requests have come from people specifically interested in Wikipedia. - phoebe s. ayers | phoebe.ayers(a)gmail.com