Harvard/Sciences Po study - RCom-l

9 Dec 2011

All,

this is to give everybody the heads up on a CentralNotice campaign that we launched hours
ago to support a research project involving English Wikipedia editors. The project is run
by the Berkman Center and Sciences Po and has been extensively reviewed for about a year
by the research committee, the WMF Legal team, the Community and Tech depts and discussed
in community fora [1]

The banner is going live for a few days (target end of the campaign: Monday night,
conditional on the number of completed responses) and is being displayed only to a subset
of logged-in editors of the English Wikipedia meeting a series of eligibility conditions.
The banner has been designed to minimize disruption to our editors as requested during the
community consultation process.

Since we are getting the first confused reactions from the community via different
channels, I asked the researchers involved in the project (Jérôme Hergueux and RCom member
Mayo Fuster) to set up a FAQ page prominently placed on the project description on Meta
[2] and Jérôme has already started to draft one. This should allow us to have a central
place to address community concerns on why we are doing this and point people to the long
discussion and review process that led to the decision to support this project.

I have been working on this project to support the technical/legal implications longer
than I expected and I'll try and catch up with my RCom backlog as soon as possible.

Dario

[1] http://blog.wikimedia.org/2011/12/08/experiment-decision-making/
[2] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Dynamics_of_Online_Interactions_and…