On Wed, Apr 13, 2011 at 2:39 PM, MZMcBride z@mzmcbride.com wrote:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Dynamics_of_Online_Interactions_and_Behavior
Does anyone know what this is? There was some discussion on the talk page, but that's now apparently been cleared away.
It's a joint study by some researchers from Sciences Po (in Paris) and Harvard's Berkman Center. Like most other projects, you can see other details at the list of research projects on Meta.[1]
The basic gist is that they're going to be running a survey for Wikipedians as part of their study. Participants will be paid (by the researchers, not the WMF) since it's quite a long survey, and there will be an option to donate your funds to the Foundation if you like.
Myself and the Community Dept. are helping them with some logistics, but it's not ready to run in any form yet. They initially went to English Wikipedia's Administrators Noticeboard with the idea of sending user talk page messages via bot to invite people to participate in the survey, but the community quite correctly told them that it was not a good idea, especially at the scale of thousands of users. Eventually we will help them run a small sitenotice or watchlist notice for no more than a week to advertise the study, but it's not ready and there are other such messages going out in the near future anyway, such for Wikimania and the Foundation's own editor survey. Obviously running multiple banner or watchlist notice requests for survey participation concurrently or in short succession is a bad idea.
I'll make sure either someone from the Foundation or from their research group sends out mailing list messages when there is new plans to get feedback on. Apologies if it was confusing so far.
1. https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/meta/wiki/Research/Projects
Steven