(I originally sent this to WikiEn-l - but intended to send it here to foundation-l... my email reader got confused..)
Hi Dario,
This proposal went through a long review process, involving community
forums, the Research Committee and various WMF departments since early 2010.
The Berkman research team first approached WMF to discuss this study in January 2010. They suggested a protocol to recruit English Wikipedia contributors to participate in an early version of this study by March 2010 and posted a proposal to the Administrators’ noticeboard to get community feedback [6]. The community response at that time opposed the proposed recruitment protocol (posting individual invitation messages on user talk pages). It was suggested instead that the recruitment should be handled through a CentralNotice banner to be displayed to registered editors, but concerns were raised on how to minimize the disruption.
This is not a good summary of the conclusions there at all; and it is worrying that it has been read that way...
You seem to have taken that discussion as implicit approval to run a CentralNotice banner - although that was certainly suggested as an option at the time I think it was reasonably expected for further community input later down the road. Certainly when I supported the suggestion of some sort of targeted site notice I envisioned a text link, or something.
Throughout the review process of this recruitment protocol, the research team received constant feedback from the Foundation’s legal team, the community department, the tech department and the communication team before the campaign went live.
But not the community?
The campaign was announced in the CentralNotice calendar one month before its launch [11] and the launch was with a post on the Foundation’s blog. The banner was enabled on December 8 at 11:00pm UTC. 800+ participants completed the study within a few hours since its launch. The banner was then taken down by a meta-admin a few hours after the launch due to the concerns described above.
Again; not announced to the community. There was a clear an present communication failure here.
We realize that despite an extensive review, the launch of this project was not fully advertised on community forums. We plan to shortly resume the campaign (for the time needed by the researchers to complete their responses) after a full redesign of the recruitment protocol in order to address the concerns raised by many of you over the last 24 hours. Here’s what we are doing:
• Provide you with better information about the project We asked the research team to promptly set up a FAQ section on the project page on Meta [13], and to be available to address any concern about the study on the discussion page of this project. The project page on Meta will be linked from the recruitment banner itself.
• Redesign the banner We understand that the banner design has been interpreted by some as ad-like (even if the goal was to make clear that this study was not being run by WMF, as it implied a redirection to a third party website for performing the experiment). In coordination with the research team, we will come up with a banner design that will be more in line with the concerns expressed by the community (for instance by removing the logos from the banner).
• Make privacy terms as transparent as possible Upon clicking on the banner, participants accept to share their username, edit count and user privileges with the research team. The previous version didn’t make it explicit and we are working to address this problem. To make the process totally transparent we will make the acceptance of these terms explicit in the banner itself.
Once redirected to the landing page, participants will have to accept the terms of participation in order to enter the study. The project is funded by the European Research Council: the data collected in this study is subject to strict European privacy protocols. The research team will use this data for research purposes only. The research team is not exposed to and does not record participants’ IP addresses.
You need to tell this *to the community*. Otherwise the discussion will simply strike up again once you re-enable it. I notice you posted this exact same message to wikipedia-en-l. The lack of recent discussion on that list should tell you how effective that is as a communication tool.
The vast majority of English Wikipedia discussion occurs on-wiki, and the vast majority of editors prefer discussions to occur on-wiki. If you want to interact with the community, and in this case I think you have to, then you really have to do so on-wiki :)
We would like to hear from you on the redesign of the banner to make sure
it meets the expectations of the community and doesn’t lend itself to any kind of confusion. We will post the new banners to Meta and try to address all pending questions before we resume the campaign.
Most en.wiki editors don't hang out on Meta - and I think it is reasonable not to expect them to. Especially as this is purely a project focused on English Wikipedia; it needs to be discussed on English Wikipedia. If you need help with the right places/protocol then I would be happy to oblige.
This once again highlights the huge disconnect between Wikipedians, the foundations and the various higher level commitees. It's the same every time - something big appears, the community get cross/upset/confused, the foundation etc. express incredulity... and no one talks.
My final comment is this; I am fairly active around here. I am on foundation-l, I read meta for important notices, and I am active on en.wiki. And the first time I knew about this (since the Admin Noticeboard discussion some months back) was when the banner appeared. So how anyone else stood a chance of giving input I do not know :) Whilst much of the discussion was public, it was "hidden". And the key failing here is in not making it open and accessible.
Tom