On Wed, Nov 19, 2008 at 11:54 AM, Piotr Konieczny <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > phoebe ayers wrote: > >> * The researcher has done the standard things (posted on the mailing >> list, on the village pump) and hasn't gotten any results; or has >> semi-randomly posted on people's talk pages, potentially getting a >> warning about spamming in the process >> >> As a result: >> * many of the same people (i.e. very visible contributors) keep >> getting asked to participate in different studies; or >> * the researcher is left with a self-selected group of people from the >> mailing lists or other places, which may in no way represent 'the >> community' (my hypothesis is that we have many small communities, >> working under the greater umbrella of Wikipedia); and who may be >> people who are particularly outspoken or disgruntled; or > > There is an interesting tool: > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random/User > If anybody wants a truly random sample of Wikipedia users, that's a good > way to do it. > > Is asking for a survey spamming? That's a good question. If we could > raise it on a community page and get a consensus that it is not, than we > could potentially create a bot that could be fed a survey and would > deliver it to x random users via the above page.
This seems like an interesting idea for random studies. Many of the studies I have encountered are looking for "some experienced wikipedians" to participate, and that seems like a much harder thing to pull off. The chances of getting an "experienced" user who is willing to talk to you out of the 8 million registered accounts on en:wp seems low if you go about it by trying to randomly poll users. I think a lot of researchers want people who are 'experienced' by some metric so they can give informed feedback on processes, policies, social dynamics, interfaces... but it's also pretty common that most contributors focus in on only a few areas. So how to get experienced people who can speak to the questions you are interested in, particularly if you're not a wikipedian yourself? -- phoebe p.s. This message is not a comment on Avanidhar's study or Stuart's study or any other particular studies... rather, it's something I've been thinking about for a long time as an issue for everyone studying Wikipedia. _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
