[rant - tl;dr]
Ugh, another new instruction creep with an anti-research bent to boot.
Thanks, Aaron, for linking it here, as this is the first time I've heard
of this - now I actually get to oppose this on record before this is
archived :>
That was first third of the problem with RCOM in the first place: next
to nobody knew (or knows) about it. When we still get many studies about
Wikipedia who clearly display the fact that the researchers fail at
basic lit review not citing any prior studies, to expect that most would
try to (and be able to) find such pages is nothing but an exercise in
bureaucratizing the project. The second third of the problem is that all
such policies, if implemented, would make research much more difficult;
anytime you add some reviewers to the mix, you add the risk of having
good project rejected because of reviewers IDONTLIKEIT, and with the new
proposal idea of letting complete amateurs be the reviewers...
Fortunately, this doesn't fix the third compound problem of RCOM, which
is that a) it had no real power to enforce anything it required and b)
next to nobody wanted to invest time into doing the work, because it's a
waste of time: non-productive work (not contributing to building an
encyclopedia) that very, very few people in our community care about.,
and that adds an unimportant line to one's professional CV. RCOM is
dying of inactivity and of being not needed, we should officially retire
it instead of trying to clone it on Wikipedia.
[/rant]
Don't get me wrong, at first RCOM was a nice and noble idea. A guideline
page for researchers is helpful, I do like the idea of trying to list
and categorize ongoing research
(https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Projects), it provides some
useful links to data, FAQ and such. However, as in many other places on
Wikipedia, this turned into an unnecessary instruction creep, which I
very strongly oppose .
A while ago I've contributed to
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Ethically_researching_Wikipedia
It's a simple page, the gist of which is that any professional scholar
who is researching Wikipedia should already be familiar with their
professional codes of ethics, which in turn are perfectly sufficient to
protect Wikipedia and its volunteers and users from any abuses. It also
doesn't require any policing from the community outside normal scope.
Any (extremely rare - can anyone even cite one?) disruptive experiments
which breach the professional codes of ethics in the first place should
result in bans and WMF official complains. Outside that, Wikipedians can
deal with survey/interview requests like everyone else - ignore them if
they don't like them. No special body to police researchers is needed.
No approval body is needed for anything outside WMF grants, which WMF
and/or the existing grant structure can handle.
What we need is for someone to review all research-related pages on
Wikipedia and meta, merge any similar ones, and that's it. In other
words, we need to condolence and organize the sprawl mess that research
pages have become, not to add to them.
--
Piotr Konieczny, PhD
http://hanyang.academia.edu/PiotrKonieczny
http://scholar.google.com/citations?user=gdV8_AEAAAAJ
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Piotrus
On 7/17/2014 05:58, Aaron Halfaker wrote:
RCOM review is still alive and looking for new reviewers (really,
coordinators). Researchers can be directed to me or Dario
(dtarabore...@wikimedia.org <mailto:dtarabore...@wikimedia.org>) to be
assigned a reviewer. There is also a proposed policy on enwiki that
could use some eyeballs:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Research_recruitment
On Wed, Jul 16, 2014 at 11:16 AM, Federico Leva (Nemo)
<nemow...@gmail.com <mailto:nemow...@gmail.com>> wrote:
phoebe ayers, 16/07/2014 19:21:
> (Personally, I think the answer should be to resuscitate RCOM, but
> that's easy to say and harder to do!)
IMHO in the meanwhile the most useful thing folks can do is
subscribing
to the feed of new research pages:
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:NewPages&feed=atom&hidebots=1&hideredirs=1&limit=500&offset=&namespace=202>
It's easier to build a functioning RCOM out of an active community of
"reviewers", than the other way round.
Nemo
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