User:Sbelza/virtual ethnography

It's about fulfilling a virtual ethnography analysis on the sysops and "power users" of the English Wikipedia. The study is part of my master in research driven by the UOC (Barcelona, Spain). This study is already being fulfilled in the Wikipedia in Spanish, and if the results are good enough, I plan to extend it to other WIkipedias in other languages as well. Under no circumstances will I reveal personal data neither of the real world nor the virtual world (Wikipedia nicks for example or any other thing that could identify a participant). It's not necessary to provide personal data like age, sex or place of residence, even though this data may be useful for the study.

Objective
I want to draw an ethnographic profile of sysops and power users of the Wikipedia with the objective of increasing the knowledge about the challenges of collaborative work in virtual environments where collaborators come form different places in the world and belong to different cultures (and maybe other differences that might be revelaed by this study). The results of the study will be shared with the community so that it takes advantage of an increased knowledge on how Wikipedia is organized. The primary objective is to learn how conflicts are handled in the wikipedia and to draw conclusions that may help in further improving this project.

Requirements
Participants are required to fulfill at least one of the following requisites:


 * To be a sysop
 * To have more than 3000 editions and at least 3 excellent articles.
 * To be an elected member of a management organ within Wikipedia.

Note: retired users are also welcome if they used to fulfill one of the above requisites before they decided to take a break.

Methodology
I will send you a short questionary via email (more privacy, more recommendable) or if you prefer not to give your email, directly on my discussion page, but everyone will be able to read your answers.

The questionary is a list of 13 short questions on subjects like


 * motivation for working in this project
 * sex, age, place of residence (not mandatory)
 * studies and occupation
 * conflicts in which you have been involved and how they were resolved
 * What do you think is most important to be a good sysop?
 * how many hours a week do you devote to Wikipedia
 * suggestions for improvements
 * etc.

The list of questions will vary at the same time that we learn more and more about unknown areas. There isn't much knowledge about this kind of collaborative environments, so the design of this qualitative research project must be flexible by necessity. I will try to throw some lights on the most unknown subjects of conflict resolution techniques in Wikipedia :-)

Privacy
No personal data will be ever made public.