Dear UWO Wikipedia Research Team,

Your survey does not appear to have been approved by the Wikimedia Research Committee (RCom). You can find contact details at https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research_Committee.

Due to concerns with regard to privacy, such as recording their IP address against statements of their Wikipedia activities, Wikimedians are not encouraged to participate in unapproved surveys.

I doubt that many Wikipedians would want to separately find and analyse the UWO Code of Conduct to check what is tracked or not, and they would need to do this before opening the fluidsurveys.com website. I note that this website is not apparently owned by the UWO, but is a private site that is unlikely to be legally bound by UWO codes of conduct.

Fae

On 16/07/2014, Thyge ltl.privat@gmail.com wrote:

the http:// part has been left out. Correct link is

http://fluidsurveys.com/s/WikipediaSurvey/

Regards Sir48/Thyge

2014-07-16 8:29 GMT+02:00 Peter Southwood peter.southwood@telkomsa.net:

...

Link does not work. Cheers, Peter

-----Original Message----- From: wikimedia-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org [mailto: wikimedia-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Nicole Askin Sent: 16 July 2014 04:00 AM To: wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: [Wikimedia-l] AFD survey

We are looking for Wikipedians to participate in a survey. The survey is designed to help us understand group decision-making and Wikipedia’s Articles for Deletion (AfD) process. The research is being carried out under the terms of the University of Western Ontario - Code of Conduct; it will not lead to any sales follow up; no individual (or organization) will be identified in our reporting.

If you are an adult Wikipedian, we would be grateful if you could spare approximately 10-15 minutes to complete this survey.

As a token of our gratitude, for each completed survey we will make a charitable donation of CAD$2 to the Wikimedia Foundation. If you have any questions, please contact Lu Xiao at lxiao24 (at) uwo.ca.

To start the survey please click ONCE on the link below: http:// fluidsurveys.com/s/WikipediaSurvey/

Please try to complete the survey by August 1, 2014.

Thank you very much for your time, we really value your input.

Sincerely,

UWO Wikipedia Research Team _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe

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In Polish Wikipedia there is no voting for deletion for around 3-4 years. There is discussion and then final decission is made by one of admins who regularly maintains the deletion process.

2014-07-16 10:20 GMT+02:00 Federico Leva (Nemo) nemowiki@gmail.com:

Thanks. All questions were generic and about "Wikipedia", so I answered with the Italian Wikipedia in mind. Also note that it.wiki is perhaps the only wiki which switched deletions from voting to non-voting: the experiment was already done, you only need to measure and interpret it. :-) See http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2013-January/123334.html

I had problems with two questions:

• "Are you concerned that somebody would change or remove your

rationale? Please choose the most applicable response." This question assumes that removing a comment is bad; I would have answered "Yes when appropriate per law or policy" but there was no such option.

• "Do you read the rationales in the discussion before making the final

decision?" This assumes that this is just a matter of personal taste; sometimes policy and process requires it, sometimes not. (For instance in the classic it.wiki deletion process, but certainly also in some specific sub-process triggers on en.wiki and others.)

Nemo

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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 Their RCOM page is at < https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:The_Use_of_Rationales_in_Wikipedia_...

My concern here, as with many surveys, is that the researcher greatly values their time and assigns less value to Wikipedia community time, and is comfortable asking for lots of volunteer time on the pretense of helping our community. This kind of research is, in my opinion, not helpful to Wikipedians because the questions make no sense due to having been designed by an outsider, and additionally so many people have these same questions and only want to target our most active and busiest and valuable volunteers. Furthermore there is no compliance here with community values in research. Bad surveys create "survey fatigue", in which volunteers are later disinclined to participate in good and useful community-approved research.

If anyone sees research problems in the future I am interested in talking about these things. I have been thinking of becoming more involved in supporting RCOM for some time.

The basic problem is that practically all researchers assume that the number of highly active Wikipedians is huge, and therefore, they imagine no problem for them to ask for any amount of volunteer time to be diverted from Wikipedia to their personal and private collection of survey data. The reality is that there are not more than hundreds or low thousands of Wikipedians who are active to the extent they imagine. This survey is targeting English AfD, where I imagine there are only low hundreds of at most of continually active participants, and the reality may be much lower participation than that.

I asked this researcher to discontinue the survey pending a check on the impact of it on the Wikipedia community. I said this because I feel they are out of compliance with even the soft suggestions in research that are available, and they know this.

yours,

On Wed, Jul 16, 2014 at 6:53 AM, Srikanth Ramakrishnan < srik.ramk@wikimedia.in> wrote:

If the people who have created this survey can fix the problems raised by Fae, I'd be happy to share this with several language Wikipedians in India. I'm sure that at this point nobody would want to be part of it. On Jul 16, 2014 1:54 PM, "Tomasz Ganicz" polimerek@gmail.com wrote:

...

In Polish Wikipedia there is no voting for deletion for around 3-4 years. There is discussion and then final decission is made by one of admins who regularly maintains the deletion process.

2014-07-16 10:20 GMT+02:00 Federico Leva (Nemo) nemowiki@gmail.com:

...

Thanks. All questions were generic and about "Wikipedia", so I answered with the Italian Wikipedia in mind. Also note that it.wiki is perhaps the only wiki which switched deletions from voting to non-voting: the experiment was already done, you only need to measure and interpret it. :-) See

http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2013-January/123334.html

...

...

I had problems with two questions:

• "Are you concerned that somebody would change or remove your

rationale? Please choose the most applicable response." This question assumes that removing a comment is bad; I would have answered "Yes when appropriate per law or policy" but there was no such option.

• "Do you read the rationales in the discussion before making the final

decision?" This assumes that this is just a matter of personal taste; sometimes policy and process requires it, sometimes not. (For instance in the classic it.wiki deletion process, but certainly also in some specific sub-process triggers on en.wiki and others.)

Nemo

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Good points, Lane. Such things were possibly discussed before, but it's the first time that I see it it spelled out like this.

This approach should be advertised a bit somehow, so that the researchers know how to do it ethically and for everybody's benefit, and so that the experienced Wikipedians would know not to start answering such surveys.

-- Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי http://aharoni.wordpress.com ‪“We're living in pieces, I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore‬

2014-07-16 14:39 GMT+03:00 Lane Rasberry lane@bluerasberry.com:

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 Their RCOM page is at <

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:The_Use_of_Rationales_in_Wikipedia_...

...

My concern here, as with many surveys, is that the researcher greatly values their time and assigns less value to Wikipedia community time, and is comfortable asking for lots of volunteer time on the pretense of helping our community. This kind of research is, in my opinion, not helpful to Wikipedians because the questions make no sense due to having been designed by an outsider, and additionally so many people have these same questions and only want to target our most active and busiest and valuable volunteers. Furthermore there is no compliance here with community values in research. Bad surveys create "survey fatigue", in which volunteers are later disinclined to participate in good and useful community-approved research.

If anyone sees research problems in the future I am interested in talking about these things. I have been thinking of becoming more involved in supporting RCOM for some time.

The basic problem is that practically all researchers assume that the number of highly active Wikipedians is huge, and therefore, they imagine no problem for them to ask for any amount of volunteer time to be diverted from Wikipedia to their personal and private collection of survey data. The reality is that there are not more than hundreds or low thousands of Wikipedians who are active to the extent they imagine. This survey is targeting English AfD, where I imagine there are only low hundreds of at most of continually active participants, and the reality may be much lower participation than that.

I asked this researcher to discontinue the survey pending a check on the impact of it on the Wikipedia community. I said this because I feel they are out of compliance with even the soft suggestions in research that are available, and they know this.

yours,

On Wed, Jul 16, 2014 at 6:53 AM, Srikanth Ramakrishnan < srik.ramk@wikimedia.in> wrote:

...

If the people who have created this survey can fix the problems raised by Fae, I'd be happy to share this with several language Wikipedians in

India.

...

I'm sure that at this point nobody would want to be part of it. On Jul 16, 2014 1:54 PM, "Tomasz Ganicz" polimerek@gmail.com wrote:

...

In Polish Wikipedia there is no voting for deletion for around 3-4 years. There is discussion and then final decission is made by one of admins who regularly maintains the deletion process.

2014-07-16 10:20 GMT+02:00 Federico Leva (Nemo) nemowiki@gmail.com:

...

Thanks. All questions were generic and about "Wikipedia", so I

answered

...

...

...

with the Italian Wikipedia in mind. Also note that it.wiki is perhaps the only wiki which switched deletions from voting to non-voting: the experiment was already done, you only need to measure and interpret

it.

...

...

...

:-) See

http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2013-January/123334.html

...

...

...

I had problems with two questions:

• "Are you concerned that somebody would change or remove your

rationale? Please choose the most applicable response." This question assumes that removing a comment is bad; I would have answered "Yes

when

...

...

...

appropriate per law or policy" but there was no such option.

• "Do you read the rationales in the discussion before making the

final

...

...

...

decision?" This assumes that this is just a matter of personal taste; sometimes policy and process requires it, sometimes not. (For

instance

...

...

...

in the classic it.wiki deletion process, but certainly also in some specific sub-process triggers on en.wiki and others.)

Nemo

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https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l,

...

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-- Lane Rasberry user:bluerasberry on Wikipedia 206.801.0814 lane@bluerasberry.com _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe

To avoid confusion with researchers in the future, I've made some minor changes to the research related pages on Meta (see below). This should help ensure that outdated documentation does not cause unnecessarily delay and/or expense for those interested in doing Wikimedia-related research.

1: Posted a notice to the top of https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Subject_recruitment to the effect that RCOM no longer evaluates research projects or participates in recruiting participants, and removed the assertion that research requires approval from RCOM.

2: Updated https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:FAQ to make it clear that the WMF / RCOM does not evaluate specific research proposals or assist in recruiting, and that any researcher intending to conduct on-wiki interaction should seek approval from the local projects using whatever methods have been established locally.

3: Removed the reference to RCOM approval from https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Projects

I would suggest that it doesn't become not a vote merely by not calling it a vote. I note all the closes that count "!votes" and how the not-voting pattern on a given AFD is frequently brought up at DRV.

On 16 July 2014 12:25, Todd Allen toddmallen@gmail.com wrote:

English hasn't used voting for a long time either. AfD discussions are closed based on strength of argument and compliance with policy. On Jul 16, 2014 2:24 AM, "Tomasz Ganicz" polimerek@gmail.com wrote:

...

In Polish Wikipedia there is no voting for deletion for around 3-4 years. There is discussion and then final decission is made by one of admins who regularly maintains the deletion process.

2014-07-16 10:20 GMT+02:00 Federico Leva (Nemo) nemowiki@gmail.com:

...

Thanks. All questions were generic and about "Wikipedia", so I answered with the Italian Wikipedia in mind. Also note that it.wiki is perhaps the only wiki which switched deletions from voting to non-voting: the experiment was already done, you only need to measure and interpret it. :-) See

http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2013-January/123334.html

...

I had problems with two questions:

• "Are you concerned that somebody would change or remove your

rationale? Please choose the most applicable response." This question assumes that removing a comment is bad; I would have answered "Yes when appropriate per law or policy" but there was no such option.

• "Do you read the rationales in the discussion before making the final

decision?" This assumes that this is just a matter of personal taste; sometimes policy and process requires it, sometimes not. (For instance in the classic it.wiki deletion process, but certainly also in some specific sub-process triggers on en.wiki and others.)

Nemo

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On 07/16/2014 07:44 AM, Federico Leva (Nemo) wrote:

AFAIK deletion has never been a vote by policy on en.wiki.

No, but it almost always devolves to a vote de facto. Interestingly enough, that particular question (did you close discussions by counting show of hand vs evaluating the rationales) appears in the survey, which shows that they are at least aware of the dichotomy.

-- Marc