[Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia as a learning community

[Cormac Lawler]

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 at gmail.com, cormaggio at yahoo.co.uk