Hi everyone!
Thanks for your interest in our Harvard – Sciences Po study! I just wanted to jump in and add a few comments to Steven's answer. As Steven has rightly pointed out, we are currently conducting a quite large scale research project on the dynamics of online interactions and behavior, and we would like (and are now ready) to invite Wikipedians to participate in it. All participants are paid and Wikipedians have the possibility to donate their earnings to the Foundation if they wish to do so.
We updated the information posted on the research project page on Meta. Sorry if the previous version (work in progress) may have appeared a bit confusing to some. Before starting the study, we wanted to make sure that we were following the best practices possible according to community principles, as this is a priority for us. So we first integrated in our protocol the suggestions of the Research Committee ( http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Notes_on_good_practices_on_Wikipedia_research... http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Subject_Recruitment_Approvals_Group) and asked advises to other researchers. We also went on the Admins’ noticeboard to present our envisioned research protocol and eventually modified it according to the feedback we got. We thank the Admins who got involved in the discussion as this was very important to us: we wanted to set an exemplary precedent of a successful and respectful cooperation between the Research community and the Wikipedia community. So we hope that this approach will set the path for future researchers willing to recruit participants from Wikimedia projects. As we also think that developing research is a way to contribute to Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects, we will make all of our research outputs available under an open access licence, share our datasets with the community (as far as will be consistent with preserving the privacy of participants) and propose to present our research at a Wikimania conference. We also opted for the use of a FLOSS software to conduct this study.
The SiteNotice option stood out in the discussion as the most efficient, least intrusive and least disruptive method for advertising the study, so Steven and the WMF very nicely agreed to help us out with this solution. We are now totally ready to open the survey for Wikipedians to participate and are waiting for a convenient date to start. In coordination with Steven, we will make sure that all relevant informations are sent to this list as soon as that time comes!
Jérôme (on behalf of the research team).
2011/4/14 MZMcBride z@mzmcbride.com
Steven Walling wrote:
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.
[...]
Ah, thanks for the explanation. Much appreciated. :-)
I put a link to this e-mail and to Meta-Wiki's "Research/Projects" page at the top of the talk page, so that will hopefully prevent future confusion: http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?diff=2496408&oldid=2495842.
John Vandenberg wrote:
This was mentioned back in January
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2011-January/063703.html
Ah, thanks. I'd had a tab open to remember to look into this and I'd completely forgotten how I'd come across it initially. I remember first thinking it was spam, to be honest. (Looking at the page's logs, it seems I wasn't the only one.) When I went to look at it again today and noticed the cleared talk page, I figured I'd just ask the list and that someone would surely know what was going on.
MZMcBride
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