Wikipedia:Research

This is a failed proposal.

Consensus for its implementation was not established within a reasonable period of time. If you want to revive discussion, please use the talk page or initiate a thread at the village pump.

This historic policy proposal was tagged as a Wikipedia policy for a single day during 2010, which was disputed, and after editors held a discussion to clarify the status of the page, the proposal did not become policy.

Scholarly research of Wikipedia is useful for understanding the encyclopedia's content, readers, editors, history, current state, and future. These results also yield important knowledge applicable to other open content communities. In addition to driving scholarly knowledge of such systems, this work can also give results that can improve Wikipedia itself. Much valuable research cannot be done without Wikipedia community members who volunteer to participate in studies. This process exists to further three goals:

To allow important research of Wikipedia and its users to take place.
To ensure that individual community members' preferences on whether and how frequently they are invited to participate in research studies are respected.
To ensure that research studies are respectful of participating community members and community norms.

This process describes how researchers can recruit members via talk page postings and creates the Subject Recruitment Approvals Group (SRAG), a public discussion group to assist those who wish to make those postings. SRAG receives applications from researchers to recruit editors to participate in research and assists them. If the recruitment is approved, a bot contacts selected community members who have previously opted-in for research and invites them to participate. Each community member contacted would have previously agreed to a research bot contacting them. As of September 2010, this feature is not yet enabled so no users have currently opted-in.