Research talk:Understanding Wikipedia Moderation Policies

Open access

I see that doi:10.1109/SP40000.2020.00053 is accessible at https://arxiv.org/abs/1904.04324 , good. Just to be clear, will this other work be open access (and published with a free license too)? It's important to tell people when asking to participate, even if it sounds obvious. Thanks, Nemo 06:38, 19 April 2022 (UTC)

Thank you for your suggestion! We intend to publish all of our work on arxiv, as well as other open access sites. I have updated the references to include only open access links. Chautrannyu (talk) 15:13, 19 April 2022 (UTC)

Great! Thank you, Nemo 06:56, 22 April 2022 (UTC)

E-mail address

@Chautrannyu: I received your e-mail with the invitation to your survey. I notice that the survey requires entering an e-mail address and this can't be skipped. As you probably know, a great many Wikimedia contributors (especially from Europe) are very much privacy-minded and reluctant to divulge their e-mail address. Though personally, I have an address specifically created for Wikimedia projects, I'm also not handing it out to everyone and am reluctant to do so for a research project I know not much about and which isn't really important to me. On the other hand, I'm all for supporting researchers. So, I would suggest that you make providing the e-mail address optional. It is likely that you will receive more replies from people with privacy concerns that way. Gestumblindi (talk) 09:58, 19 April 2022 (UTC)

PS: I see now that your approach is to first conduct this "screening survey" and then contact people for more in-depth interviews. I think you should consider a way to interview people anonymously, or create a survey that contains all your relevant question with free text reply fields, so people can participate anonymously. Otherwise, the selection of community members that will reply will not be a really good representation of the community. Gestumblindi (talk) 10:03, 19 April 2022 (UTC)

Thank you for the suggestions regarding users' privacy! I will bring up your input with the team and try to accommodate them as much as we can! After all, some of us are privacy researchers and taking participants' privacy is one of our highest priorities.

Regarding the email in the survey form, we collect it solely to schedule interviews and forward the giftcards. After the interview is conducted we will delete the email, in accordance with the approved protocol by our university Institutional Review Board (NYU IRB). However, prior to the interview, we are open to communicating with Wikipedia members via their preferred channel, and interview candidates will receive a consent form as well as the GDPR compliance form to review and choose whether to move forward with the study.

Regarding the suggestion to extend the survey to include open ended answers, members of our team who have worked in similar studies, have noticed that open ended answers tend to receive a lot of spam and very few good answers, in addition to hundreds of answers filled by automatic bots hoping to make a quick buck. However, we are considering the possibility of conducting anonymous interviews as you suggest. We will consult with our university IRB before making any official change. Chautrannyu (talk) 15:19, 19 April 2022 (UTC)