Research talk:Studying Wikimedia Commons

Questions from HLHJ

Hi, and thank you for doing this research. I look forward to seeing the results. I had a few questions:

1. Could you include information on interview confidentiality on this page, please? For instance, are the interviews anonymous, or published pseudoanonymously?
2. Do you have a COI statement for this study? Could you post it here, too, please? Something short like "The authors declare no conflicts of interest, funding is provided by...", or an external link, is fine.
3. You seem to be scheduling interviews via whenisgood.net, which has an insanely long TOC and Privacy policy; it obviously sells premium services, but I don't know how else it gets revenue. Could the University of Washington can host its own appointment-polling software? Open-source selfhostable options include Framadate, Dudle (both of which host nonprofit online instances, too), Nuages and many others I can list on request. Or UW IT might prefer to run a larger suite such as Cryptpad or BigBlueButton, both of which include polling features (for all I know they already run one of them). These also give online chat options, with better protection for users' privacy than Skype, Google Meet, or Zoom. It would be reassuring if you used your own platforms; so many free platforms are provided in exchange for use of participants' data.

Apologies for troubling you, and thank you for your time! HLHJ (talk) 02:12, 12 October 2020 (UTC)

We take your questions in good faith. They are reasonable.

1. We have updated the project page to articulate our stance around confidentiality. This is a rephrasing of the interview protocol where we inform the participant of our confidentiality stance.
2. The research is not being funded by an agency or organization -- it is self-funded. COI statements are often required when there are external funding agencies - and many Universities require them when submitting proposals for external funding. As well, most IRB reviews request information on the funding source - but only if it is from some organization or other agency - self-funded work is exempt from that request. Since this is self-funded COI is weird - We have a conflict of interest with ourselves? Explicitly yes and no. The philosophical aspects of clearly answering that question are rather daunting. Which is probably why self-funded or unfunded research is not required to file COI statements at most Universities.
3. For scheduling, yeah, UW has an institutionally supported system PollEverywhere that UW claims is FERPA compliant. We can easily switch to that. Your suggestion is very reasonable for scheduling. We have specific constraints with regard to which video system we can use. UW has settled on Zoom - that's the official platform for all courses. Google's systems have also been institutionally vetted, (e.g., Google Meet) as have Microsoft's offering (i.e., Teams and Skype - although Skype is supposedly going away). Some platforms do not provide an option that allows us to extract the audio from a recording so that we can get a transcript produced. If you want to participate and want a specific teleconference or chat system - we'll do our best to try and accommodate that. Obviously, having audio that can be transcribed is more accurate than when we take notes.

We hope that appropriately answers the questions you've raised. dwmc (talk) 23:53, 22 October 2020 (UTC)

EN Wikipedia

Hi,

You day that you want a better understanding of the relationship between Commons and other WMF projects (focused through the lens of EN Wikipedia).

Why the choice of EN Wikipedia specifically? --Amir E. Aharoni (talk) 06:58, 22 October 2020 (UTC)

We know EN better than any of the other language editions. The choice of using EN as the starting point for understanding how Commons is being used by WMF projects is simply one of pragmatics at this time. The basic idea is one starts a research project *somewhere* first - and then follow-up research can extend to other platforms, other theories, other methods. In the case of the relationship between language editions and Commons could certainly vary as a function of language edition. It's just too hard to do all variants at once. dwmc (talk) 23:16, 22 October 2020 (UTC)

Review by the Wikimedia Foundation

Was this research project reviewed by the Wikimedia Foundation in any way? Did you notify the research team about it? --Amir E. Aharoni (talk) 21:30, 22 October 2020 (UTC)

The Wikimedia Foundation does not perform formal review of proposed research. There is a preferred process for create a research project page on Meta. We followed that process and you can see the results of that with the project page associated with this Discussion page. We have talked with WMF researchers about this project, so there are some WMF research staff who know of it. dwmc (talk) 23:10, 22 October 2020 (UTC)