Wikiversity:Research ethics/En
From Wikiversity
Wikiversity:Research ethics – English ·
This page is for information about research ethics.
Contents |
[edit] Research on wiki communities
What are research ethics issues that arise from research projects that involve participants in wiki communities?
[edit] Ethical issues of informed consent
Is the following statement a valid formulation that applies to the kind of research in the Ethical Management of the English Language Wikipedia research project?
"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." (source)
[edit] Is action research a conventional and integral part of Wikimedia projects?
According to Wikipedia, action research is a reflective process of progressive problem solving led by individuals working with others in teams or as part of a "community of practice" to improve the way they address issues and solve problems.
Does the above description of action research describe the normal process by which wiki participants examine the history of edits, identify problems and work together to solve problems?
[edit] Was the "Ethical Management of the English Language Wikipedia" research project an example of action research?
Does the Ethical Management of the English Language Wikipedia research project have all the features of action research? Was it significantly different from normal activities that characterize conventional community practices by which wiki communities learn from experience and change so as to accomplish community goals?
In Action Research, the subjects of the review are willing and cooperative partners in the review process, for the purpose of devising better practices, going forward. This was not the case for some of the subjects of the case studies, nor is it typically the case for RfCs and RfArs on Wikipedia. The latter are a summons which a named party ignores at their peril. The case studies at Wikiversity were not a summons that contemplated any act of judgment to be answered by some prescribed administrative sanction. Rather the purpose of those case studies was to explore the kind of ethical conundrum that perplexes those who seek to adopt ethical best practices when faced with unethical acts by those in power.
[edit] Questions about anonymous researchers
Is it ethical for participants in Wikiversity research projects to edit the project pages anonymously?
It has been suggested that Wikiversity research projects which involve analysis of wiki website editing bring with them the risk of producing attack pages. A page "that exists primarily to disparage its subject" might contain libelous statements. Would the best protection against this be to force researchers to first make their real world identities known before discussing specific editors? Is it a general ethical principle that researchers involved with human subjects take responsibility for their research by working and publishing under their real world identity?
[edit] See also
[edit] Reading list
- ETHICAL AND LEGAL ASPECTS OF HUMAN SUBJECTS RESEARCH ON THE INTERNET, workshop on conducting Internet research involving human subjects
- "A re-examination of the relationship between action research and human subjects review processes" by Mary Brydon-Miller and Davydd J. Greenwood Action Research, Vol. 4, No. 1, 117-128 (2006)
- INVESTIGATING INFORMATION SYSTEMS WITH ACTION RESEARCH by Richard L. Baskerville in Communications of the Association for Information Systems (1999) Volume 2, Issue 3es, Article No. 4
