Wikipedia:Ethically researching Wikipedia
 | The following is a proposed Wikipedia policy, guideline, or process. The proposal may still be in development, under discussion, or in the process of gathering consensus for adoption. |
In social science research, issues of research ethics, informed consent, and research protocols often arise, and research of Wikipedia is no exception. Rules and laws established after controversial studies like the Milgram experiment and Stanford prison experiment require researchers to design their studies such that they do no harm to participants. In the United States, for example, any research into human subjects that receives federal funding must be approved as ethically responsible by an Institutional Review Board in order to protect both researchers and participants.
Content Analysis and Surveys
Most research of Wikipedia does not involve ethical issues of informed consent. Because all contributions to Wikipedia are publicly released under the GNU Free Documentation License (see Wikipedia:Copyright), the analysis of publicly-available pages, archives, or logs is generally considered exempt from such requirements. Similarly, if researchers distribute surveys or privately interview Wikipedians, it is both easy and standard to inform the participant that their responses will be made public in certain ways and kept confidential in other ways.
Ethnographic Research
When ethnographers enter Wikipedia and interact with editors in real time, issues of informed consent emerge. Ethnographic interactions may be considered "interventions" and therefore require getting the informed consent of participants beforehand. The fact that many Wikipedians are under the age of 18 and are therefore defined as "children" in certain jurisdictions makes such research problematic as well. It would be difficult to have each participant in, say, a deletion debate sign a digital form before the ethnographer began participating. However, there must still be a way of respecting editors as they interact with the ethnographers.
It is customary for Institutional Review Boards to waive the requirement for direct informed consent if the ethnographer works with the community to develop a commonly agreed-upon research protocol that establishes an alternative way of informing participants that they are the subject of research. This page is an attempt to establish such a research protocol. It takes the form of a pledge or agreement between the ethnographer and the Wikipedian community. It is not the only possible research protocol, but it can be used by any researcher who wishes to ethically research Wikipedia by actively interacting with the community. Feel free to change any of these requirements or add another distinct set of your own.
Staeiou's Ethnographic Research Protocol
- I will recognize that as an ethnographer, I am a guest of the Wikipedian community and the Wikimedia Foundation. As such, I will respect any decisions made by the community, the Arbitration Committee, or the Wikimedia Foundation regarding the way in which I participate in the project and collect data about my experiences.
- I will fully disclose myself as a researcher of Wikipedia on my account's userpage and user talk page. Here, I will explain who I am, what I am doing and why, my research protocols, ways to opt-out of research, and University administrators or faculty members who can be contacted if concerns arise with my research.
- I will have a signature that shows my status as a researcher of Wikipedia to let editors know that I am interacting with them in such a role. This will include a link to the above research description and my talk page. For example: St(aeio)u I'm researching WikipediaQuestions, concerns, comments?. I will sign every contribution I make to talk or process pages.
- I will let editors opt-out of my research. Any editor will be free to tell me that he or she does not wish to be a subject in my research. If this happens, I will not communicate with him or her further, and I will exclude from my research any existing data specifically based on my interactions with him or her.
- If my research leads me to communicate with Wikipedians off-wiki – whether via e-mail, chat, in person, or other medium outside of the public wikispace – I will use established interview-based research protocols to establish informed consent. This means that those who communicate with me off-wiki will be initially informed of my research project and asked to digitally consent to such communication being used for research purposes. I will work to mutually establish the privacy of data collected in each situation: if the conversation can be quoted, paraphrased, or alluded to; if the author can be attributed by name or username; or if the entire conversation is off-the-record.
- I will work to minimize risks to subjects by focusing on topics directly or indirectly related to Wikipedia, encyclopedia-building, and the community. To protect subjects, I will not discuss personally sensitive topics, such as editors' past or current illegal behavior, sexual behavior, medical or psychological care, and drug or alcohol use. If editors express these or other personally sensitive topics, I will not include them in my research.