Research:Subject recruitment
 | This page is kept for historical interest. Any policies mentioned may be obsolete. If you want to revive the topic, you can use the talk page or start a discussion on the community forum. |
This page describes how to get support for research projects from the Wikimedia Foundation.
For other kinds of support, please refer to the Research FAQ
Scholarly research of Wikipedia is useful for understanding the encyclopedia's content, readers, editors, history, current state, and future. These results also yield 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 Wikipedia itself. Much valuable research cannot be done without Wikimedia community members who volunteer to participate in studies. This page exists to describe a process by which researchers can obtain community approval to recruit research participants for surveys, interviews and experiments.
| WMF support code: |
Until an official policy is approved by the Wikimedia Research Committee regarding subject recruitment, individual requests can be submitted following these instructions.
Submitting a request for subject recruitment
The Research Committee can provide support to researchers seeking to recruit subjects or survey participants from the Wikimedia community. Until an official policy is published by the Committee, subject recruitment requests should be made by creating a project page on this wiki.
Please include the following information:
- a description of the sample of subjects needed for your research as well as the proposed recruitment method
- the motivation for your request
- a short description of your research project (including pointers if applicable)
- the name, affiliation and contact details of the applicant team
- the expected duration and timeline of the project
See this example. Once the page is created, please send the link to: Dario Taraborelli (dtaraborelli@wikimedia.org) and Aaron Halfaker (aaron.halfaker@gmail.com) so your request can be reviewed by the RCom. Requests submitted to the RCom usually take 1-2 weeks to be reviewed.
Requirements
Projects supported by the Wikimedia Research Committee for subject recruitment are expected to meet the following requirements:
| OA (Gold) | OA (Green) | Open licensed output | Open licensed data | Open source code | Reuse rights | Documentation |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Recommended | Required | Recommended | Recommended[1] | n/a | Required | Required |
- ↑ Survey data must be anonymized and cleared of privacy-sensitive information before being released