User:Staeiou/Research Protocol

I am a Ph.D student at UC-Berkeley in the School of Information, and am writing my dissertation on Wikipedia. You can see more about me at User:Staeiou. Because I am gathering data by participating in the community, various laws require me to take certain precautions to ensure that my research is ethical. It takes the form of a pledge to the community.

1. 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.
2. 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, this research protocol, ways to opt-out of research, and University administrators or faculty members who can be contacted if concerns arise with my research.
3. 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 research description described in #2, as well as my talk page. For example: Stu ^(aeiou)_{I'm Researching Wikipedia}. I will sign every contribution I make to talk or process pages.
4. When collecting public, on-wiki data and publishing results, I can refer to the specific actions of editors or quote them using their username. I can also refer to or quote information they have made public on userpage, their edit/log history, and the results of various programs that analyze publicly available data like Interiot's edit counter.
5. I will let editors opt-out of my research. Any editor will be free to tell me in public or private 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 interventions with him or her.
6. 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 standard 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.
   1. In each case, I will work to mutually establish the privacy level of the conversation - that is, under what conditions can such conversations be used for research purposes. Unless I am explicitly told otherwise, I will assume that all off-wiki conversations are off-the-record and cannot be quoted in full or in part, attributed, or alluded to either on-wiki or in published works.
   2. When archiving these off-wiki conversations, I will include the level of privacy agreed to by the participant and their statement consenting to be the subject of research. If for any reason a level of privacy or statement of consent is not attached to an archived conversation, I will assume it is off-the-record and cannot be used for research purposes.
   3. I will archive off-wiki conversations in a password-protected, PGP/GPG encrypted file which only I can decrypt.
   4. I will maintain a PGP/GPG encryption key pair so that subjects can electronically communicate with me in a private, secure manner if they desire.
7. 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.