phoebe ayers wrote: > * The researcher has done the standard things (posted on the mailing > list, on the village pump) and hasn't gotten any results; or has > semi-randomly posted on people's talk pages, potentially getting a > warning about spamming in the process > > As a result: > * many of the same people (i.e. very visible contributors) keep > getting asked to participate in different studies; or > * the researcher is left with a self-selected group of people from the > mailing lists or other places, which may in no way represent 'the > community' (my hypothesis is that we have many small communities, > working under the greater umbrella of Wikipedia); and who may be > people who are particularly outspoken or disgruntled; or
There is an interesting tool: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random/User If anybody wants a truly random sample of Wikipedia users, that's a good way to do it. Is asking for a survey spamming? That's a good question. If we could raise it on a community page and get a consensus that it is not, than we could potentially create a bot that could be fed a survey and would deliver it to x random users via the above page. -- Piotr Konieczny "The problem about Wikipedia is, that it just works in reality, not in theory." _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
