Research talk:Anonymity and Peer Production

Participant recruitment advice

This study is (1) important to Wikipedia and (2) unlikely to cause disruption because the recruitment methods rely on posts in public forums and snowball sampling. Further, Andicat has a history of running non-disruptive studies in Wikipedia and is known for her work studying our policies. Normally, I'd advise a careful review of studies where editors will be contacted directly or the sample size will be quite large. Neither of these seem to be the case here. I advise Andicat to proceed with making recruitment posts when her team is ready. Please reach out to me or post here if you have any concerns. --EpochFail (talk) 15:11, 11 March 2015 (UTC)

I'm not competent on suitability of recruitment methods and snowball sampling, but I agree that using public or private Wikimedia projects venues to recruit 30 respondents for this study is a worthwhile use of said venues. --Nemo 16:06, 11 March 2015 (UTC)

Interesting

Thanks for working on this. The project description is rather vague, so I'm not sure what you mean to research specifically, but I agree a lot with section 0. When I wrote Stupidity of the reader, Mako suggested me a couple papers which resonate with my interest (see footnotes), but it's disappointing there are so few. I'm sure much more could be found and I'm glad you're starting to fill some holes. :)

As an example of what makes the description generic: I wasn't able to figure out whether "anonymous" is meant as in the wiki jargon for unregistered user or the more generic meaning or something stricter. When it comes to showing that attribution and reputation are not the only ways to ensure value, I think it doesn't matter much how/if one manages to keep their identity unknown, but rather the intention; in Talk:Musings about unregistered contributors I speculated that «the very concept of unregistered/anonymous user as we know it [is the] lack of a stable identity with clear boundaries».

I know "groups" it would be fun to contact, or phenomena it would be nice to understand:

• Association of Good Faith Wikipedians Who Remain Unregistered on Principle and similar users.
• Users who upload non-software files to Wikimedia Commons under CC-0 (formerly "PD-Self"), or declare such a (non)copyright status for their textual contributions (via a user page template; might be hard to generalise).
• Japanese Wikipedia, which for some reason has a very high proportion of unregistered edits. It's also a very closed community: make sure to have your messages reviewed, translated and if possible delivered by a "local" Japanese user if you try to contact them.

--Nemo 16:06, 11 March 2015 (UTC)

Thanks for the suggestions, this is great! The use of the term "anonymity" here is intentionally ambiguous because part of our goal is to hear about how editors think about and use the term rather than prescribe what it means. --Andicat (talk) 20:19, 11 March 2015 (UTC)

I thought so. :) Hence I took the liberty of writing a bit about it. Thanks, Nemo 21:05, 11 March 2015 (UTC)