I'm writing this mail to make public my project, which is studying Wikipedia as a learning community. This is for an M.Ed. I am undertaking in the UK. I've already had some contact with a limited few people who have filled out a questionnaire, some of whom are on this mailing list, but I am now mainly looking at interpersonal dynamics and sociological aspects of the project at large which will serve as research for my dissertation, which I hope to eventually make available to Wikipedia.

I'm already aware of a number of people who are either engaged or interested in studying similar aspects, for example a recent post to the wikiEN mailing list: http://mail.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2005-February/019136.html I will be pursuing a similar methodology in the sense that it will be low-key 'monitoring' of various exchanges/discussions within the Wikimedia network. But how my approach differs is that I would also like to include Wikimedia mailing lists such as this one, as part of my inquiry. This means that I'd like to (with permission) use discussions that arise here as part of my research. The key issue here is permission/consent - I wouldn't assume consent unless someone explicitly gave me theirs. This then raises the issue of whether I would have to write individually to each person whose opinion/mail I would like to use, or whether I could use these opinions and assure confidentiality as a basic given to all. That is my main question to the list - whether this latter approach or the former seem reasonable, or what you would suggest I do instead? I'm also interested in comparing languages, which is why I'm posting this message to the foundation list among others. In addition to this I'll be contacting particular individuals for their individual experiences and of course consent, but details of that are outside the purpose of this list.

I expect that there will be several comments and possibly some objections arising from this message. If you would prefer to contact me directly with any questions as opposed to posting to the list, that is fine. But this email is not a request to participate, rather an announcement of my project and a query as to the feasability and ethics of reproducing material from this list.

Further details can be found at my en:WP user page [[User:Cormaggio]], which also has details of my previous small scale pilot study. I have also set up a page in Meta, which I hope will serve as a discussion for those interested, at this address: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research/Wikipedia_as_a_learning_community There are a number of questions there to which I would be interested in hearing the answers from as wide a range of people as possible. However, I am not putting out these questions as a questionnaire per se, rather a prompt for further research.

Thank you for your attention.

Best regards, Cormac Lawler cormaggio@gmail.com, cormaggio@yahoo.co.uk