Over the past few years, the wiki has become the subject of multiple studies by students at high school, undergrad, and graduate levels. In the past, our policy for allowing these studies to be carried out within our community was minimal. It is time we amend this.
I propose the following will be required of all individuals wishing to perform a study of the SCP English Wiki:
- A clear statement of purpose. An explanation of the study/assignment will do fine.
- A clear illustration of what information on users will be gathered, and how it will be used.
- A clear statement that all information collected for the purposes of the study will be publicly available.
- A clear illustration of risks and or benefits associated with participating. For example, how are you helping advance a study subject's understanding of or engagement with the community?
- A clear statement of what this information will be used for specifically. Is this a paper that only a professor and TA will see? Will raw data be destroyed after the course ends? Etc.
- A clear definition of the tools being used to carry out research. This is essentially to filter out unsafe platforms such as Google Forms.
- A contact for questions, concerns, etc. An email address or professor's name and email address will typically suffice.
None of the above has to be written academically, something that the average person can read and understand what they are signing up for is best. This is a rough approximation of the information we previously required of studies operating in wiki spaces to abide by.
If someone attempts to share links to their study without the aforementioned requisites being fulfilled, a member of staff must ask that it be provided. This can be any member of staff, but will likely end up being a member of IO or Discord due to the online nature of the wiki and these studies. If the study's representative is unable to or unwilling to comply, we as staff reserve the right to remove their study from our platforms.
Additionally, I would like to bring up the topic of staff supported studies, such as the one Pedagon would like to have approved in future.
To specify on what is meant by "staff supported studies", if a study asks that staff do anything in support of the work such as promoting it on IO platforms or allocating any resources to it, we must require an IRB number1 with the appropriate search engine to read the full details so that we can decide before saying yes.
Discussion will go on for a week.