As your subject line implies, I don't think there's one right answer. It depends on the questions, the methods, the unit of analysis. I think there are certain cases where this distinction is fairly clear. When we studied Wikipedia as a community by interviewing Wikipedians about their practices, that was human subjects research. If I were to study the interconnectedness of Wikipedia articles by counting links, I'd say that's NOT human subjects research. I certainly agree that (like in other online communities research) there are fuzzy grey areas. I think that each project needs to be understood on its own merits, though. There's no way to make a statement that covers all Wikipedia research. Andrea On Wed, 15 Feb 2006, Jeremy Hunsinger wrote:
I was reading over some wikipedia policies and related things this morning and once again the perennial question arose... at what point is studying wikipedia... studying humans? granted that wikipedia is much larger than the human content, with both its technical infrastructures and bots. However, this wouldn't be a question for studying the Britannica as a 'book', though it might be a an issue in studying the production of the encyclopedia in situ via ethnography or other workplace studies methods. So where would you mark the difference in wikipedia? When are you studying an object, vs a human subject in wikipedia, or... is the distinction not clear enough to differentiate because of the interaction collapses the distinction? Thoughts?
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