Research talk:Wikimedia Research Best Practices Around Privacy Whitepaper

Comments from User:Hexatekin

Thanks for this work and opening it up for community review. I'm glad the WMF is committing resources to providing additional ethical recommendations for researchers.

• Why not cite more existing papers that discuss ethics in Wikipedia research? If you haven't read our paper already, I recommend you check it out. I was the first author to this paper that focuses on being a Wikipedia community contributor, as well as being a research subject of Wikipedia research, and being a Wikipedia researcher myself. I also may specifically suggest that Wikipedia researchers doing interviews or surveys ask participants if they have participated in research about Wikipedia before. Some of us have participated in dozens of studies and get asked over and over again, especially when we are doing gender advocacy work, for example.

Dorothy Howard & Lilly Irani. 2019. Ways of Knowing When Research Subjects Care. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ‘19).

• Section 2.8 title seems like a fragment, "To support Wikipedians in understanding researchers". What about just "Supporting"
• On page one only the U.S. IRB process is mentioned with the idea that "Other countries might have similar ethical review committees" being vague without citations. Is this U.S. centric because of the headquarters of the Wikimedia Foundation? We know we have many global researchers that need specifics too. What about GDPR? I would recommend identifying a resource or paper where processes similar to IRBs in other countries are detailed, e.g. for GDPR, EU (2022). "What is considered personal data under the EU GDPR?” Also, has Wikimedia Research required that grant recipients do ethical review for human subjects research? If so, this could be stated.

Best wishes, Hexatekin (talk) 20:32, 21 March 2025 (UTC)

Hi @Hexatekin, thanks for reviewing the paper and providing feedback. To your first point about existing literature, could you please point me to the specific papers that you have in mind, including the one you helped write, I'd like to make sure we review them. Finally, just acknolweding your comments also included a few other points - thanks for this feedback, and we'll be sure to review it when we begin working on revisions.

Best, EAsikingarmager (WMF) (talk) 14:44, 2 April 2025 (UTC)

I posted the citation to our paper above. I want to clarify that I am recommending that researchers ask potential survey participants and/or qualitative interview participants "How many times have you volunteered to participate in Wikipedia/Wikimedia research before?" - as the community of Wikipedians and organizers who are public enough to be recruited is relatively small actually and many of us community members are asked dozens and dozens of times to do surveys, interviews, provide quotes to journalists, appear on documentaries, etc., often without compensation. These issues are discussed in our paper. Thanks. Hexatekin (talk) 21:01, 5 April 2025 (UTC)

Comments from User:Piotrus

First, I think this request for feedback should be better advertised (on English Wikipedia in particular). I've posted a note about it at en:Wikipedia_talk:Arbitration/Requests/Case/World_War_II_and_the_history_of_Jews_in_Poland#Draft_of_white_paper_published, since, correct me if I am wrong, the very reason for this paper to be created is a result of a motion there (en:Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/World_War_II_and_the_history_of_Jews_in_Poland#Formal_request_to_the_Wikimedia_Foundation_for_a_white_paper_on_research_best_practices). I think that should be mentioned somewhere in the paper, perhaps in a footnote?

Regarding the content itself, in the context of that request, speaking as someone directly affected by some of the issues in question (as an individual identified and named in an academic paper), here are my thoughts. The draft explicitly addresses the importance of protecting privacy and anonymity, which is good. Still, it does not directly state whether and when individual Wikipedia volunteers can be named or identified, and puts too little emphasis on the recommendation that generally they should not be. I believe the paper should explicitly state something like this: "Researchers should exercise utmost caution when deciding whether to name or identify Wikipedia contributors, particularly in cases when these individuals have disclosed their real life identities within the project. Explicit consent should generally be obtained, and careful consideration of potential risks or harms associated with identification is essential, aligning with established ethical guidelines on privacy and protection of research participants." This is tied to Section 2.1 which rightly cautions that "Any privacy violation or breach of confidentiality creates risk for participants, including the potential exposure of personal or sensitive information, disclosure of embarrassing or unlawful behavior, or the release of legally protected data". But we need to make it clear what is "privacy violation or breach of confidentiality" - i.e. naming or identifying particular editors. --Piotrus (talk) 06:08, 30 April 2025 (UTC)

PS. Also, from Wikimedia Foundation Universal Code of Conduct - Wikimedia Foundation Governance Wiki, from the section on Unacceptable behaviour: "Disclosure of personal data (Doxing): sharing other contributors' private information, such as name, place of employment, physical or email address without their explicit consent either on the Wikimedia projects or elsewhere, or sharing information concerning their Wikimedia activity outside the projects." It would be good to be consistent in our recommendations, mhm? Piotrus (talk) 04:20, 1 May 2025 (UTC)