Wikipedia:WikiProject Research

This project, Research, is a space for researchers who are studying Wikipedia to interact with the Wikipedia community to discuss ideas, collaborate with each other and ensure that the methods used for gathering data and recruiting subjects account for the needs and norms of the community.

Related pages include m:Research, and m:Statistics. This page and project are still very preliminary and will benefit from your contributions and insight. If you would like to help, please sign the members list below and introduce yourself on the talk page.

Goals (sorted by importance)

1. Create policy/guidelines
2. Build study recruitment system
   1. Design and implement Wikipedia:recruitment approval group
   2. Build bot and gain approval

Scope

This WikiProject aims primarily to design, implement, discuss, and manage academic research that involves Wikipedia. We seek to ensure that researchers are given access to as much data and users as is possible while ensuring that we remain a productive part of the Wikipedia community.

Key decisions to be made

Guidelines/Policy

• How frequently can individuals be contacted? By the same researchers? By all researchers in total?
• What details of a study must be shared with participants during or after the study?

Recruiting Subjects

• Should it be opt-in (users need to take action to join the volunteer pool) or opt-out (users need to take action to exclude themselves from the volunteer pool)?
• How will requests for samples of subjects be regulated? Should there be a study approval group like the bot approval group?

Coordinating with WP Projects

• Should there be additional policies before contacting editors in a WP:Project that differ from contacting editors or intervening in a WP overall?

Study initiation and oversight

• What is the process by which a study is "approved"
• How is the scope (duration, # users, activities) of a study defined? What if it needs to be changed?
• Enforcement

Giving back to Wikipedia

• How are results reported back to the participants and to Wikipedia as a whole?
• What can be created, besides specific tools or research papers?
• What happens to the collected data?

Members

Please add your name here!

• EpochFail ^{(talk|contribs)} 22:49, 30 October 2009 (UTC)
• PiperNigrum ^(hail|scan) 00:57, 13 November 2009 (UTC)
• Stu ^(aeiou)_{I'm Researching Wikipedia} 17:31, 16 November 2009 (UTC)
• _{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| talk} 20:42, 16 November 2009 (UTC)
• CMUResearcher (talk) 20:35, 19 November 2009 (UTC)
• -- ForteTuba (talk) 20:35, 21 November 2009 (UTC)

Studies

Ongoing

• HAPPI - a user interface modification that allows editors to visualize how content has persisted through an article while they edit them.
• NICE - a user interface modification that adds information about the reverted user and eases communication within Wikipedia's undo interface.

Resources

Guidelines

• Wikipedia:Ethically_researching_Wikipedia
• Staeiou's Research protocol

Mailing Lists

• wiki-research-l - a mailing list for the discussion of research in Wikipedia.

Data

• Wikipedia:Database download - Regular XML and SQL dumps of English Wikipedia's database and resources for interacting with them
• m:Statistics - various Wikipedia statistics
• Wikipedia:Researching_Wikipedia - discusses some ways to measure various aspects of Wikipedia project as well as covers current research.