Piotr Konieczny wrote:
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.
One of my colleagues was metaphorically eaten alive for posting requests for research participation on user talk pages (a few dozen IIRC). In her case the users in question were chosen fairly specifically (perhaps by the kinds of pages they edited?), and I think she had 100-200 candidate participants.
I've bcc'ed her in case she wants to chime in.
Let me voice my strong support for Phoebe's effort. I'm not sure what I can do personally (though please enlighten me if you know), but some process with community buy-in for soliciting random Wikipedia users for research purposes would be extremely useful to the research community.
Reid