On Wed, Jul 16, 2014 at 7:39 AM, Lane Rasberry lane@bluerasberry.com wrote:
Hello,
I feel that this is an unethical research project and I have told the researcher so. We exchanged several emails and were unable to understand each other. I asked them to please have their university ethics board contact me.
I asked the researcher about RCOM and other things. This person said they posted to RCOM, but "the Meta page states that submissions should receive responses within 1-2 weeks, and yet our messages went unanswered. We have institutional ethics approval, but that doesn't last indefinitely, and so after receiving no response we opted to go ahead."
I am not going to share more than this publicly, but in short, I talked with the researcher to the limit of their interest and they feel that they must proceed with the research. Their oversight is at http://www.uwo.ca/research/about/research_offices.html
The survey is voluntary, obviously, and anyone who doesn't wish to participate need not. No one is under any obligation to promote it, and we have no rules barring anyone from posting a notice of such a survey to public mailing lists. The survey may not be well designed (we don't necessarily know the full aim of the research), or well targeted, but I do not see how that makes it unethical. No time or effort is consumed that is not volunteered by anyone who elects to participate.
The WMF research committee is not the sole arbiter of who can perform research or analysis of the Wikimedia movement or any individual projects; it merely promises recruiting assistance as the result of approval. The proposal for this survey was submitted to RCOM in January, with evidently no comment or contact from RCOM since. The RCOM page says it has not met since 2011. The process appears to be defunct and no researcher should be required to wait for it to be resurrected.