[RCom-l] The tragedy of the Commons

Wed Dec 14 13:46:48 UTC 2011

The controversy over Berkman is not in my view primarily a communication
issue and it certainly isn't about the legitimacy of that survey. I believe
that the community trusts RCom as a regulator of research to know whether
research is legitimate or not.

A big part of the controversy is over advertising, and I'm not convinced
that you can design a banner ad for a third party research survey that
isn't seen by some as advertising for that third party. An Omnibus survey
could be a Wikimedia one and therefore I would argue an internal ad rather
than a third party one. Perhaps that isn't our only option, and maybe there
are alternative ways to solve that, one way would be to change policy to
allow advertising for bona fide research. But that would be a difficult one
to sell to the community, particularly on the heels of a fundraising drive
where "Wikipedia doesn't take ads" was a core message.

The other aspect of being a regulator of research is the issue of how we
control the amount of research requests made to the community. To my mind
that is fundamental to what we should be doing, and it is a major reason
for my being on this committee.  But this is almost an opposite thought
process to "promoting research".

There are two proposals that I've made as to how we do this, one would be
to contact everyone once a year with an Omnibus survey, the other rather
more complex one is to throttle back research surveying by volume and limit
each campaign to a small subset of the community. The two approaches can be
hybridised by rewarding institutions that collaborate by allowing them to
use our systems to approach a larger proportion of editors. One reason why
I was opposed to the Berkman survey was that it was the worst of both
worlds - one single research project going to all or almost all of our most
surveyed community.

I'm not convinced that the community currently has confidence in RCom to
regulate the amount of research requests that wikimedians and especially
English language Wikipedians are exposed to. Nor am I convinced that
everyone on this committee regards that as our responsibility. To my mind
this gives us a couple of possibilities, one would be to try and agree a
mechanism for limiting the amount of surveying that Wikimedians are
subjected to, and then sell that to the community via a request for
comment. One option in any such request for comment could be for the
community to agree not to put any constraints on researchers, but I'd be
surprised if that option got consensus however strongly it was promoted by
some members of RCom. The other possibility would be to clarify that the
remit of this committee is to promote legitimate research by vetting
proposals and otherwise communicating with the community; and to inform the
community that if it wants to put constraints on legitimate researchers
contacting wikimedians via the site then it needs a an additional process
other than RCom.

WereSpielChequers

On 12 December 2011 18:50, Diederik van Liere <dvanliere at gmail.com> wrote:

> Dear WSC,
>
> I think we need to be very precise about what the Berkman controversy is
> about. My understanding is that the use of banners with logo's on central
> notice during the fundraiser and the kickback of donations is at the heart
> of the controversy. It is not about the legitimacy of the research
> institutes, nor is it about surveys as a research methodology, or the
> actual research questions. As such, I think that we need to discus how to
> to promote research studies but not debate the merits of Wikipedia research
> itself.
>
> Best
>
> Diederik
>
> Sent from use  my iPhone
>
> On 2011-12-12, at 13:30, WereSpielChequers <werespielchequers at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> I'm comfortable with a meeting next week, but I think that the community
> and our research partners will want to hear something in the meantime.
> There would also be a benefit if we could hold some on wiki discussions as
> to the Omnibus survey or any other option.
>
> Clearly one of our options would be to run an RFC to seek consent of the
> EN wiki community for us to resume Berkman and run similar things in the
> future. But even if we promised some sort of vanilla  advert for it I doubt
> we would get consensus or anything close.
>
> We could probably get consensus for an opt in research system so that
> those who wanted to could subscribe to some sort of research mailing list
> of questionnaires. But I don't think that opt in would give us the volume
> that researchers are likely to want and I fear we'd have skews.
>
> If anyone can think of an alternative option I would suggest creating a
> draft such as I have at
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Omnibus_Survey so that we and the
> community can consider it.
>
> Another way to defuse current tension would be for Rcomm  to invite a
> couple of the people who have been arguing against the Berkman survey to
> join us in our meeting next week.
>
> Regards
>
> WSC
>
> On 12 December 2011 17:52, Dario Taraborelli <dtaraborelli at wikimedia.org>wrote:
>
>> Hi WSC,
>>
>> thanks for starting this, I agree we need to have a serious assessment of
>> what happened with the Berkman incident and discuss alternative options (if
>> any) for the future.
>> I suggest that we hold an extraordinary RCom meeting some time next week
>> to discuss these measures since we have other SR requests on hold.
>>
>> If nobody objects I am going to start a doodle to find a date that suits
>> most of us (cc:ing Dana). It'd be great if those among you heavily invested
>> in SR discussions/reviews could make it.
>>
>> Dario
>>
>> On Dec 12, 2011, at 6:50 AM, WereSpielChequers wrote:
>>
>> Dear All,
>>
>> After the rather hostile response on the English language wikipedia to
>> the Berkman survey I would like to revive my proposal from five months ago
>> for an annual Omnibus survey.
>> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Omnibus_Survey
>>
>> I appreciate that this would put some constraints on the researchers and
>> would actually cost the Foundation a bit of money. But unless someone else
>> can come up with an alternative way of fairly throttling research surveys
>> to the point where the community can accept them, I would suggest that this
>> is the only viable option on  the table other than a simple blanket ban on
>> third party research surveys.
>>
>> Regards
>>
>> WereSpielChequers
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