Talk:2019/Grants/Disinformation and Its Miscontents: Narrative Recommendations on Wikipedia's Vulnerabilities and Resilience

Information about interview protocol

Hi Jake, thanks for the submission. Could you say more about your interview protocol, and any information you might gather related to the diversity of the interviewees, as well as how the information will be stored and made available? Thanks much! -connie, 7 April 2020

Hi connie!

• The framework for interviews is "activist research" or "action-based research", most common to education and social movements. It has different goals than a qualitative academic study: 1) There's an ethnographic component to speaking with community members, as a community member--studying a culture while being immersed in that culture. 2) Action-based is qualitative and interested in how people interact with a society and system. 3) Action-based research is more geared towards making a change, to "make the road by walking". Rather than being highly formalized it is highly exploratory and intentionally practical. I will have rich conversations and see where they lead, connecting threads across different people and subjects while trying to create a useful end-product of high-impact recommendations. The conversations are geared towards this and, rather than meandering, are trying to zero in on what interventions can make the most difference.

• https://activistresearchmethods.wordpress.com/about/
• https://items.ssrc.org/from-our-archives/what-is-activist-research/

• I will target active editors who do the most patrolling, editors who work on controversial subjects, editors from the global south, and editors who have experience combating disinformation. Communities that are most successful at addressing disinformation relative to the size of their active editor base, and communities that are less successful at addressing disinformation relative to the size of their active editor base are of particular interest. These are the people most affected by and best positioned to expose and address disinformation. I have a preliminary list of interviewees which is already representative of multiple continents, projects, genders, and languages. Those are the main data points I will collect: region, wiki, gender identification, and language.
• Interview data and notes will be stored in private, password protected online Google spreadsheets and documents.
• I will create a Meta project page about disinformation where I collect research and resources. I will host and publish the landscape review, intervention menu, and actionable recommendations on that page. There will be a place for people to sign up for updates and to contribute to the broader initiative of finding solutions for disinformation. I will leverage social media to disseminate findings widely through blog posts, Facebook groups, mailing list posts, and, safety permitting, attendance at community conferences.

Cheers! -Ocaasi (talk) 15:55, 13 April 2020 (UTC)