Wikipedia:Research

Scholarly research in Wikipedia is essential to understanding the encyclopedia's content, editors, history, current state, and future. This work also yields important knowledge applicable to other open content communities. In addition to driving scholarly knowledge of such systems, this work can also give results that can improve the Wikipedia community itself.

Much valuable research cannot take place without interacting with members of the Wikipedia community, but current policies and guidelines do not describe how these interactions ought to take place. The goal of this guideline/policy is to describe policy for how researchers are to interact with members of the community and to provide guidelines for acceptable research methodologies within Wikipedia. In particular, somewhat like how requests for bot approval are handled, this policy proposes the creation of a Study Recruitment Approval Group that helps to ensure that research in Wikipedia accords with norms and manages the use of resources (notably, the attention and time of Wikipedians who might be recruited to participate in such research).

Researchers

Who are they

• Different backgrounds
  • Some are familiar with culture and norms
    • They will have a reputation of work completed
    • Other Wikipedians may trust them and their work more
  • Most are not familiar with culture and norms
    • Need advice about how to interact with Wikipedians/Wikipedia
    • Reputation is based on published work and affiliation with universities/other organizations

What do they do

• User interface studies
  • Determine limitations and strengths of Wikipedia's interface
  • Test new interfaces that support editors and collaboration
• Ethnography (often by participant observation)
• Offline analysis of publicly available data
  • Wikipedia published several database snapshots for researchers to analyze.
  • These snapshots contain only publicly available information
• This research builds understanding of how Wikipedia works, how editors interact with each other, how admins are chosen and how to detect vandalism.

Why are they here

• Popularity
  • Highly used encyclopedia
  • Top three links of most google searches
  • Frequently cited in the mainstream media
• Editors
  • Millions of them
  • Volunteering substantial amount of time/energy
  • Solving disputes through consensus
  • Performing generally non-fun tasks (categorization, vandal fighting, copy editing) voluntarily
• System
  • Millions of articles
  • Decisions through democracy-like consensus
    • Expertise has low value
    • Citations to published work have high value
• Open content
  • Anyone can edit (OMG!)
    • Study vandalism
    • Study/develop new collaboration mechanisms
  • Database snapshots are available for research
  • No permission needed to enter community

Recruitment

• Not simple
  • Many types of interesting research is only possible with the ability to randomly sample subsets of active editors in the system to recruit for studies and surveys.
  • Editors don't want to be contacted an with obnoxious frequency for reasons unrelated to wikiwork.
• To minimize harm, recruitment messages:
  • Need to be approved by the recruitment approval group.
  • Are randomly dispersed among editors who meet the criteria for recruitment (as approved by RAG).

Study Recruitment Approval Group

• Reviews proposals by researchers who require subjects for a study
• Controls random sample recruitment (via talk page postings) to ensure editors are bothered as seldom as possible
• If mass talk page recruitment postings are done without the approval of RAG, there are consequences.
  • First offense
    • If the offense is minor and it does not appear the editor was aware of WP:SRAG or WP:Research, a simple warning is enough.
    • If the offense is gross or continues despite warning more forceful means, such as administrator and steward actions, may be taken.
  • Repeated offense beyond warning should result in administrator and steward actions.