phoebe ayers wrote:
- The researcher has done the standard things (posted on the mailing
list, on the village pump) and hasn't gotten any results; or has semi-randomly posted on people's talk pages, potentially getting a warning about spamming in the process
As a result:
- many of the same people (i.e. very visible contributors) keep
getting asked to participate in different studies; or
- the researcher is left with a self-selected group of people from the
mailing lists or other places, which may in no way represent 'the community' (my hypothesis is that we have many small communities, working under the greater umbrella of Wikipedia); and who may be people who are particularly outspoken or disgruntled; or
There is an interesting tool: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random/User If anybody wants a truly random sample of Wikipedia users, that's a good way to do it.
Is asking for a survey spamming? That's a good question. If we could raise it on a community page and get a consensus that it is not, than we could potentially create a bot that could be fed a survey and would deliver it to x random users via the above page.