[Foundation-l] Dynamics of Online Interactions and Behavior

Thu Apr 14 00:15:54 UTC 2011

On Wed, Apr 13, 2011 at 2:39 PM, MZMcBride <z at mzmcbride.com> wrote:

> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Dynamics_of_Online_Interactions_and_Behavior
>
> Does anyone know what this is? There was some discussion on the talk page,
> but that's now apparently been cleared away.
>

It's a joint study by some researchers from Sciences Po (in Paris) and
Harvard's Berkman Center. Like most other projects, you can see other
details at the list of research projects on Meta.[1]

The basic gist is that they're going to be running a survey for Wikipedians
as part of their study. Participants will be paid (by the researchers, not
the WMF) since it's quite a long survey, and there will be an option to
donate your funds to the Foundation if you like.

Myself and the Community Dept. are helping them with some logistics, but
it's not ready to run in any form yet. They initially went to English
Wikipedia's Administrators Noticeboard with the idea of sending user talk
page messages via bot to invite people to participate in the survey, but the
community quite correctly told them that it was not a good idea, especially
at the scale of thousands of users. Eventually we will help them run a small
sitenotice or watchlist notice for no more than a week to advertise the
study, but it's not ready and there are other such messages going out in the
near future anyway, such for Wikimania and the Foundation's own editor
survey. Obviously running multiple banner or watchlist notice requests for
survey participation concurrently or in short succession is a bad idea.

I'll make sure either someone from the Foundation or from their research
group sends out mailing list messages when there is new plans to get
feedback on. Apologies if it was confusing so far.

1. https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/meta/wiki/Research/Projects

Steven