On 3/19/06, Andre Engels andreengels@gmail.com wrote:
2006/3/19, Vedant Lath vedantlathetc@gmail.com:
The IP address of the sender (219.79.22.41http://www.dnsstuff.com/tools/whois.ch?ip=219.79.22.41) is from Hong Kong, and AFAIK, China blocks wikimedia projects.
Mainland China and Hong Kong are acting mostly independently in that respect, so I think it would not be blocked in Hong Kong
So, how can a person from Hong Kong possibly access wikipedia extensively so as to analyse the contributions and nature of wikipedia?
See above; interestingly, on another university in Hong Kong (the University of Hong Kong) there is also research into Wikipedia, led by Andrew Lih ([[w:en:User:Fuzheado]]).
and moreover, he says that he is sending it to only 100 wikipedians. This can make the result very different from the actual fact.
There will always be large differences, because people who answer an enquiry like this are not a random sample from the total population of people having been asked.
should i participate in the enquiry?
That should be your free choice, in my opinion.
-- Andre Engels, andreengels@gmail.com ICQ: 6260644 -- Skype: a_engels
Andre's just said pretty much everything that I was going to - I most definitely agree with participation in research being a voluntary decision. As a researcher myself, I know about the problems attached to consent, ethics, sampling, bias etc. I'm not going to comment on how someone else conducts their research - unless they ask - that's up to them to be conscious of. But researchers should be open to questions from participants about their own process - you should feel free to ask questions about how and where the information is used etc, before you decide to say anything. Or if you don't want to say anything, tell them why not. This itself is good feedback.
General comments: there is and has been lots of research done on participants of Wikimedia projects - see, for example: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research . The questions you've been asked are not unusual - I've asked more or less the same ones myself ;-). And a sample of 100 is not unusual either. There is a limitation on conclusions drawn from *all* research - again, it is up to the researcher to be conscious of this.
Cormac [[w,m,b:en:User:Cormaggio]]
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