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This is the talk page for discussing improvements to the Research page.

Put new text under old text. Click here to start a new topic. New to Misplaced Pages? Welcome! Learn to edit; get help. Assume good faith Be polite and avoid personal attacks Be welcoming to newcomers Seek dispute resolution if needed

Archives: 1, 2Auto-archiving period: 14 days

The status of this page was disputed, and the consensus was to mark it as disputed.

RFC: Researcher permission

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Input is requested on developing a community-based procedure for assigning the 'researcher' userright.

Hello all,

we (the Wikimedia Foundation) recently added a new user group, "Researcher", on the English Misplaced Pages to be able to convey some additional data access to researchers. The group currently has the following permissions:

• Search deleted pages (browsearchive)
• Use higher limits in API queries (apihighlimits)
• View deleted history entries, without their associated text (deletedhistory)

The motivation was a specific request from Dario Taraborelli, a Research Fellow at the Centre for Research in Social Simulation, University of Surrey, and he's currently the only member of the group. We granted the request after having a brief internal discussion about what a reasonable set of rights would be, weighing the Foundation's privacy policy as well as other considerations such as potentially problematic revision text contents. We think the researcher group as currently devised meets many common needs, but it probably can use further refinement.

My intent in posting here is to motivate the English Misplaced Pages community to take ownership of the process for granting this permission, in the context of the ongoing discussions here and elsewhere about how to work together with the world-wide research community. I would suggest that this new group be assigned through some Misplaced Pages:Request for researcher permissions process, similar to other permission-granting processes. I will note that there's an existing request by User:West.andrew.g that I've put on hold for now, and it would be great if it could be handled through a community process.

It may be appropriate to have this conversation at the cross-language meta level as well, but I figure it might be easiest to start by piloting here before we go ahead and create researcher groups everywhere.--Eloquence* 02:22, 9 June 2010 (UTC)

1. ^ See the site configuration settings, search for "researcher".

• Comment - Can we get further clarification of exactly what this means? What does "view deleted history entries, without their associated text (deletedhistory)" mean? What does that page look like? It appears to mean that they can see when a history entry was deleted, but not see what it contained - is that correct? Can they still see the edit summaries? Basically, is this simply a higher level of searchability, in which case the process should probably be similar to Rollbacker rights, or is there a danger of them uncovering personal information which had been deleted to protect privacy, in which case it should be similar to Checkuser? - DustFormsWords (talk) 02:39, 9 June 2010 (UTC)

Yes, it means seeing the version history including edit summaries, but not actual revision text. There's currently no separate permission to manage edit summary visibility.--Eloquence* 02:48, 9 June 2010 (UTC)

• Well, if there's a potential to uncover information that was deleted on the grounds that it violates a user's privacy and anonymity, then it seems to me that it should be a similar process to Checkuser. Although I'm sure more experienced (and administrative) minds will weigh in shortly and I'd yield to their insight. - DustFormsWords (talk) 02:57, 9 June 2010 (UTC)

My two cents are that valid requests will be sufficiently rare that a community discussion like RFA/Edit Filter Manager followed by a Steward flicking the switch should provide an effective safeguard. MBisanz 04:44, 9 June 2010 (UTC)

• Could we get the researcher permission added to the testwiki:? I would like to experience it first-hand before commenting. –xeno 13:00, 9 June 2010 (UTC)
  • Can you file a quick bug for that?--Eloquence* 22:05, 9 June 2010 (UTC)
    • bugzilla:23918. –xeno 18:04, 11 June 2010 (UTC)
      • With this userright, I can view a user's entire deleted contribution history with edit summaries only; I can use Special:Undelete to do a prefix search for deleted pages, and I can look at the deleted history (edit summaries) of any page, including those hidden with revision delete which can be easily picked out of the deletion log. While none of the revision text is available, there is still a lot of things that administrators have deleted on the belief that only individuals with at least admin-level clearance would be seeing. I share the hesitation expressed in many of the earlier comments below, and I'm not even sure the community is comfortable seeing this userright granted in the first place. Keep in mind that for any researcher that just needs the 'apihighlimits' without the deleted content, we can give them a bot-flagged account not used for editing. –xeno 02:27, 17 June 2010 (UTC)
        • I am not sure I like this idea at all. Having someone who is not even a trusted member of the community poke over my contributions systematically in order to draw conclusions while treating this project and its participants like a scientific lab from which to mine sociologic interaction data and other forms of data is not one of the things I signed up for when I first came here. I find this whole idea objectionable. In fact a user in the past was banned from the project in part for treating Misplaced Pages as a social experiment. I really do not think this is a good idea at all, never mind the giant privacy issues that can ensue from these research activities. In fact I think this page is not named properly. Its current title is misleading because it is too general. Research is something we all do in the process of building this encyclopedia. But the research this page refers to is research on Wikipedians. Therefore it should be renamed to "Research involving activities of Wikipedians" Dr.K.  18:55, 19 June 2010 (UTC)
• Even through I strongly opposed it, it would be neglectful to not point out the recently failed Misplaced Pages:Research and Misplaced Pages:Subject_Recruitment_Approvals_Group. Gigs (talk) 14:18, 9 June 2010 (UTC)
  • It's inaccurate to label WP:Research and WP:SRAG as failed. They both passed the RFC and SRAG is currently being given a trial run. On that note, any (non-inflammatory) input is welcome. --EpochFail 22:15, 9 June 2010 (UTC)
    • Of course it's failed. There was very significant objection to the entire idea. Pretty much every non-researcher that came here after the invalid RfC opposed it. Gigs (talk) 00:35, 12 June 2010 (UTC)
• A question I have would be who would have the ability to assign this permission? I'm not sure I'm comfortable with administrators assigning this, perhaps bureaucrats or stewards are more trusted to assign this bit to those who have a genuine interest in research. –MuZemike 19:51, 9 June 2010 (UTC)
  • It's up to y'all to figure out - I agree that it's probably sufficiently rate that it could be handled by bureaucrats or stewards without causing undue additional workload.--Eloquence* 22:05, 9 June 2010 (UTC)
    • So this would be handled like a application for rollback/edit filter access and not like an RfA? Judging from the name of the user group, I'm assuming that it would be given to researchers. How can we easily verify credentials (and make them public?) Netalarm 07:03, 10 June 2010 (UTC)
      • I would say OTRS would be the best venue in which to verify credentials and authenticate the need for the bit. –MuZemike 21:17, 13 June 2010 (UTC)
• I'd like to have a fuller explanation of what a researcher would be doing with material that we have purposefully suppressed from public view. How would the material be represented in a researcher's publication? Would we need to impose restrictions on researchers not to republish such material? How would we be able to enforce such restrictions? Would the researchers be restricted to only viewing material that was deleted under standard notability concerns rather than CopyVios or BLP issues?

I think we might need an example to see how (or even if) the community gets involved in this. While I understand the motivation to involve the community, this may be something that is best handled on a case by case basis by the Foundation. The rationale for gaining permission to examine deleted content might be fairly complex and the implications of what is done with that material fairly subtle - perhaps too much to gain sufficent members of the community to examine the application appropriately. Approval may ultimately fall to a small group of interested parties who may be inclined to grant (or deny) permission based on reasons more linked to the researching world than the Misplaced Pages world, and this may be to the detriment of Misplaced Pages.

If I was a researcher I feel my first move if I wanted to request additional access would be to contact the Foundation, so all requests would naturally go to the Foundation via Misplaced Pages:Volunteer response team which contains community members who have the experience and knowledge to better deal with this.

Unless there is a specific reason why the general community get involved in this, I feel it may be best dealt with under the volunteer response team and OTRS. SilkTork * 10:07, 11 June 2010 (UTC)

• My view is that, because this would be useful for only a very select few people, it should be handled via bureaucrat (or steward, if need be), and done through some sort of BAG/RfA-type procedure, with the whole community. It would ideally involve the person applying for the right to write out a summary of what they want to research, how they viewing deleted pages will take a part in that, and they must be able to report back to the community after some period of time about what they have accomplished. I particularly want this latter bit in the proposal because if we become too lenient, someone could feasibly create a false request and misuse or abuse the researcher flag. Community oversight is needed, especially as some of the people applying for this may be fairly new to Misplaced Pages, and the community may not have interacted with them as much as one would expect in, say, and RfA. —fetch·comms 15:14, 11 June 2010 (UTC)
• I would prefer if the WMF were to handle this, because for example we can't as a community verify credits, I personally wouldn't like to. Cenarium (talk) 17:51, 11 June 2010 (UTC)
• I'm not at all interested in having a bureaucratic process created solely because the WMF decided to give someone some extra read-only options. Let the Foundation handle it; they can be a liaison for anyone interested in projects other than en.wikipedia as well. Nifboy (talk) 22:42, 11 June 2010 (UTC)

• i deal regularly with scientific requests on the english (here i need support to have access and I'm gratefull for the service of local adminstrators) as well as on the german Misplaced Pages (where i have access as local adminstrator). as long as i can see - based on my correspondences with universities in europe and north america - there is a permanent need. therefore, many thanks to Erik for this initiative. one point: sometimes it's necessary to review the proposed projects from the point of our copyright and privacy policy guidelines (generel as well as the local project ones), best regards --Jan eissfeldt (talk) 15:36, 13 June 2010 (UTC)

• As a researcher and active en.wikipedia editor, I agree with some of the comments above asserting that the foundation or its appointed representatives should handle this. Each request for extraordinary access should handled on a case-by-case basis by those qualified to make the necessary judgments. Beyond questions of competence, there is a chilling aspect to having research subject to approval by the entire community. The Foundation probably gets enough requests of this nature to warrant standardizing its processes but this is a step in the wrong, direction, IMHO. ElKevbo (talk) 07:08, 14 June 2010 (UTC)

It looks like consensus here is (surprisingly) biasing towards a WMF-blessed process, rather than a community process. What we might end up doing for now is bless a small selected cadre of qualified volunteers to review and approve these kinds of requests.--Eloquence* 02:32, 18 June 2010 (UTC)

I'd be ok with that, or any way where the WMF is handling it. If we handle it there will be people applying just for the sake of having the ability to see these things, which wouldn't be very productive and isn't the idea of the right. Prodego 19:46, 19 June 2010 (UTC)

No thanks, Erik. This is something that the WMF should be doing. If you want to have an advisory group to the WMF on what research should and should not be approved, go for it, but it shouldn't be linked directly to any specific project. I would also urge you to look at some of the things that the Toolserver can do, and see if it is something that can be worked out from there. Several Toolserver participants regularly assist researchers in extracting information from WMF databases.

As an aside, you have on your userpage that you will always clearly indicate when you are posting in your role as a WMF staff member; I don't see you clearly declaring that here. Please seriously consider starting an account under your own name or as "Erik WMF" so that it is always clear to all readers when you are posting as a staff member. I would urge all WMF staff who post on any project to have a separate staff account for when they are acting in their staff role. Risker (talk) 22:05, 19 June 2010 (UTC)

Proposal to let BAG handle individual requests

I propose, as previously discussed, that we let the well-established BAG handle each request for messaging/recruitment by researchers, and abandon the idea of SRAG which is too bureaucratic for handling a few requests a year. BAG will decide to approve or not each request, everyone can comment as usual, the nature of the research, potential impact on WP and editors, etc, can all be taken into consideration. If the specific request is approved, the User:SubjectRecruitmentBot or a similar bot will send the messages. Each such request should be advertized in the appropriate places like Misplaced Pages talk:WikiProject Research. This page (Misplaced Pages:Research) can then be made into an information page recommending researchers to use this process for recruiting editors. Cenarium (talk) 18:19, 11 June 2010 (UTC)

Can you chill out for a while so we can finish our work plan and trial run before you ask for consensus about what should be done with WP:Research and WP:SRAG? This discussion should be postponed until the WP:Research is ready for another RFC. --EpochFail 18:41, 11 June 2010 (UTC)

This didn't kick in, there's been very little outside input. Cenarium (talk) 19:31, 11 June 2010 (UTC)

• BAG would have to approve this kind of bot anyway, so this proposal is essentially a call to forcibly "shut down" SRAG without changing anything. So in that sense I oppose this proposal even though I think it's the right way to proceed with respect to our relationship with researchers, i.e. baby steps. Nifboy (talk) 22:30, 11 June 2010 (UTC)
• Yes, forcibly shut down the SRAG which failed to gain consensus in a reasonable amount of time. Gigs (talk) 00:50, 12 June 2010 (UTC)
  • Misplaced Pages:There is no deadline. --EpochFail 15:00, 14 June 2010 (UTC)

Research related request for bot approval

I have submitted a bot request for approval to use SuggestBot in a research project, and would like to invite anyone interested to participate in the discussion on Misplaced Pages:Bots/Requests for approval/SuggestBot 3. Nettrom (talk) 01:31, 12 June 2010 (UTC)

• Misplaced Pages requests for comment