If you are thinking of doing research on Wikipedia’s editor community, please read this. It is easy for researchers to harm Wikipedia’s editing community by disturbing our projects, so please be mindful that your project can cause trouble if you do not take precaution and show compassion to the volunteers who are in this space. Researchers tend to greatly overestimate the number of Wikipedia contributors available to participate in their research. In doing this, they take the very scarce resource of volunteer time from our community causing harm to this volunteer project. By overestimating a research pool size by orders of magnitude (imagining hundreds or thousands of candidates for their surveys or interviews, when the number is actually tens) the research conclusions are often nonsense or otherwise not usable. When one of our community members has a bad experience with a researcher that encourages them to avoid future calls to participate in research. Because every university in the world every year has people in it who think to do Wikipedia research, and because all of them imagine that they are the first to have this idea, Wikipedians get a lot of pressure from researchers and moreso if they stand out for being a minority population of interest for having a special skill or being of a certain social demographic.
Please also do not say that volunteers participate only of their own choice. Wikipedia makes a safe community space where people trust the good will of others, and when researchers come into this community space for Wikipedia participants without themselves being part of the community, they are misrepresenting themselves as community members as having some amount of esteem. While Wikipedia forums and spaces are public, it can still be invasive if outsiders go into some public spaces and begin recruiting research subjects in a small community’s intimate space. Please avoid disrupting Wikipedia spaces with calls for research. Please also know that when you recruit for research, so many people at so many universities for many years before have had the same idea to do research on the same Wikipedians, and there simply is not time for the small community to talk to every outsider. Consider becoming an insider or making friends with an insider before asking for the scarce time and attention of Wikipedia, which is not a big project.
If you are a researcher and you want to do research on the Wikipedia community, and you want to minimize the potential your research has for harm, please consider doing the following:
- Have someone on your team (or you yourself if you are alone) spend at least 10-40 hours yourself contributing content to Wikipedia. People with no personal experience participating in Wikipedia will have extreme difficulty doing research as outsiders.
- Before starting your research, have conversations with active Wikipedia contributors about the utility and validity of your research. Most researchers ask questions which make no sense in the context of basic understanding of the Wikipedia community. If you do not know the language and something about cultural norms of this community, then your research will be as awkward here as if you studied any other minority community knowing nothing about it.
- If you wish to recruit Wikipedia contributors as human subject research participants then please first in your own mind estimate the following:
- How many people you would like to recruit (do not say as many as possible – have a goal in mind and plans to stop when you have enough)
- Estimate how many candidates you think there are in the Wikipedia community who would fulfill your recruitment criteria. The problem here is that researchers often imagine thousands of people or more being available, when actually the number of available people is 50-150.
- Estimate how much time you intend to take away from the Wikipedia community to do your research by assuming that time spent participating in your research is time taken away from typical Wikipedia volunteering.
A researcher who is more conscious of their power to take away the Wikipedia community’s already scarce resources is less likely to be cavalier about taking too much without considering the community.