By golly I suppose you'd better just call Michigan State University
and tell them the bad news.
Surely, when they read this INTERNET CONVERSATION they will surely see
their folly in conducting this study. Gerard I think you'd better
contact Harvard, too. Keeping your great wisdom from them is inhumane.
-S
On 3/21/07, Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Hoi,
Given that the argument why only American people were included was the
cost of international telephony, your argument sucks. By restricting the
study to the United States it is explicitly about Wikipedia usage in the
United States. When you want to come to a conclusion on any subject with
respect to policies in the English language Wikipedia, the result will
not reflect how this project works.
When you study left handed people, you will find only what is only true
to left handed people by comparing the results to right handed people.
Thanks,
GerardM
Robert Brockway schreef:
On Tue, 20 Mar 2007, Gerard Meijssen wrote:
US Wikipedians will probably all be working on
the English language
Wikipedia. It means that all the skills and experience associated with
small communities, working on an encyclopaedia that does not cover all
subject matter. Working on languages where the community it is done for
does not know what Wikipedia is, it is that experience that will be
missing. In that way it will hardly cover the breadth of Wikipedia.
He doesn't claim to be attempting to cover the breadth of Wikipedia.
Implicit in the post is that it concerns Wikipedia usage in the United
States.
I find it is common for people to mistake limits placed on a study with a
bias in the study. Let me give another example that might make this
clearer. If a study concerns left handed people (one of the most commonly
studied groups) then failing to include non-left handed people is not a
bias in the study, it is a function of the limits of a study. Similarly
if a study wanted only left handed US residents then the study would be
about left handed US residents. This does not imply any bias in the
study. Any study worthy of the name will go in to great detail when it
comes to methodology of subject selection and any subsequent testing that
is done.
It will be great when smaller WP communities are studied too but this
study clearly isn't doing that.
Cheers,
Rob
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