Research:Committee/Areas of interest/Subject recruitment

How to submit a request for subject recruitment

Please refer to these instructions

Medium

How will researchers reach potential subjects? So far, we've discussed:

• Talk page: good for researching experienced editors since it fits within community norms. Not as good for researching new editors as new editors may not be aware that they even have talk pages. Aaron's SubjectRecruitmentBot
• Email: good for researching novice editors, probably not as good for researching experienced editors. Used for Former Contributors Survey. Open question (as described in Mani's mail) is what percentage of registered users actually have email addresses.
• Central message notice (or something similar): good for reaching a broad base of users (including readers), though UNU-Merit survey had a disproportionately high percentage of users from Russia

Each method should have a way for users to opt-out of receiving future communications

Targeting

How do we target users to ensure:

• Researchers reach the right users for the study (e.g., to minimize bias that would be detrimental to the research)
• Editors don't get bombarded with survey requests

Approvals

How will approvals be granted for survey projects? Aaron has been working on SRAG, a community-involved approvals group approach. This group would have purview over not only activities of the SubjectRecruitmentBot, but also other methods of contacting users.

Survey Software

What software would researchers use to conduct surveys? Currently, the following two options are being used (though others should be considered):

• Mediawiki Survey System: See the next version of the survey system.
• Limesurvey

English Wikipedia Attempt

en:WP:Research and en:WP:SRAG are the product of the efforts the some of the research community to draft policy with the English Wikipedia community that simultaneously satisfied two goals:

• Create an official mechanism for mass subject recruitment to take place
• Protect the community (and individuals) from the disruption that mass recruitment could cause

Along with these two official documents, a few essays were drafted with the intention that they be used as tool for educating Wikipedians:

• en:WP:What are these researchers doing in my Wikipedia
• en:WP:Don't bite the researchers
• en:User:PiperNigrum/Research_study_recruitment_of_Wikipedians (in progress)

Timeline

• Oct., 2009: PiperNigrum, EpochFail, Staeiou, Phoebe, et al. meet to discuss subject recruitment @ WikiSym
• Nov., 2009: work begins on what will be en:WP:Research and en:WP:SRAG
• Mar., 2010: an RFC is started by EpochFail to upgrade en:WP:Research to policy and en:WP:SRAG to guideline status
  • User_talk postings made to all previous editors or relevant pages
  • canvass to en:WP:VPP
  • posting to wiki-research-l
• Apr. 7, 2010: RFC to upgrade en:WP:Research to policy and en:WP:SRAG to guideline supported (consensus determined by uninvolved editor)
• Apr. 8, 2010: Both pages nominated for deletion, but kept.
• May, 2010: Downgraded to draft proposal after lengthy discussion and disputed policy status.