User talk:Sooooob

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In regards to your recent email

Thank you for the offer, however I tend not to accept payment wherever possible for my editing as I never started editing Wikipedia for money, and I am not able to comfortably complete the interview. Thank you for the offer though and I’m happy to answer a few questions for you via email if you would like :) Zippybonzo | talk | contribs (they/them) 17:59, 21 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Dear Zippybonzo, thank you for your response! While our research team offers compensation through donations, we fully respect your decision not to relate Wikipedia activity with monetary value. I truly appreciate your interest in our study and your willingness to assist! I will contact you should we need insights beyond the interview :) Sooooob (talk) 02:08, 22 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Violation of the spirit of UCOC in your survey

hi Sooooob, dwmc, aconversationalone: You wrote by email, If you are interested in participating, please complete our Participation Questionnaire!:\n https: // forms. gle / XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX (hash hidden by me).

It defeats the point of doing research on Wikipedia – which is fundamentally based on respect for the community, free software, and open access to knowledge while avoiding as much as possible any violation of people's privacy and computer security – to carry out "research" that requests participants to violate their privacy and computer security for the purposes of selling that data to advertisers. While you personally are unlikely to sell that data, Google is well-known to have the sale of that data as its main practical goal, in line with its legal obligation to maximise the financial gains of its shareholders (i.e. it is more or less legally required to act unethically; but that is its problem, not ours). Requesting Wikipedians to sell their private data is contrary to the spirit of UCOC.

I strongly recommend that you start learning at https://switching.software where there is information on resources (software, servers) that are much less likely to abuse the community that you aim to research. You will find software that can be verified – like Mediawiki that we are using to communicate by here – rather than unverifiable software; and the servers are generally run transparently on behalf of the community, not secretly for maximising the selling of propaganda (a.k.a. advertisements).

To quote from Criticism of Google, ethical concerns about Alphabet/Google include concern for tax avoidance, misuse and manipulation of search results, its use of others' intellectual property, concerns that its compilation of data may violate people's privacy and collaboration with the US military on Google Earth to spy on users, censorship of search results and content, and the energy consumption of its servers as well as concerns over traditional business issues such as monopoly, restraint of trade, antitrust, patent infringement, indexing and presenting false information and propaganda in search results, and being an "Ideological Echo Chamber". I don't understand how you can consider requiring participants to give their private data (IP address, user agent, browser window size, language preferences, HTTP cookies) to Google to be ethically compatible with Wikipedia research. Boud (talk) 14:36, 3 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Dear Boud,

Thank you for raising your concerns regarding our Participation Questionnaire. We note that the University of Washington IRB reviewed and approved our research. The software that we use was part of the approval process and the current software meets both Federal and local UW requirements for security and confidentiality compliance. While we understand your reservations about using tools associated with large tech companies like Google, we also carefully considered safety concerns throughout the selection of tools and the overall methodological process. We do not believe that our research procedures violate any of the WMF or Wikipedia community norms. Nevertheless, we have heard your concern.

Thank you,

Sooooob Sooooob (talk) 00:51, 6 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]

It's rather unclear what you are saying. If you understand [my] reservations, that means that you are aware that your use of Google violates the survey participants' privacy and computer security for the purposes of selling that data to advertisers, but in that case the rest of your statement wouldn't make sense, since you don't apologise at all. You state that a university board and some US-federal and university criteria fail to protect participants' privacy (they allow the use of Google services), which is interesting information; and that the WMF and some parts of the Wikipedia community consider privacy violation and computer security violation to be an acceptable norm, which are credible guesses; but the fact that several people and groups accept unethical behaviour doesn't justify doing the same. The ethical violation is not a vague issue of Google being "a large tech company". The evidence of the violations is overwhelming. Since you say that you carefully considered safety concerns throughout the selection of tools and the overall [method] (I don't see the difference between a "method" and a "methodological process"), I guess we agree to disagree on the evidence. I admit that it's difficult to interpret "we have heard your concern" to mean a proper checking of the evidence. In any case, the evidence is unlikely to disappear. You're welcome to propose Criticism of Google for WP:AFD, though I think you don't stand a snowball's chance in hell of getting it deleted. The good thing about Wikipedia is that this discussion is public and permanently archived; your use of privacy violation as part of your research method is (indirectly, via this discussion) on the public record.

For future projects, I really do recommend that you look through https://switching.software in order to stop violating your survey participants' privacy and instead start contributing to building a healthy community. Ethical tools are available. Boud (talk) 01:05, 7 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you for your input. Sooooob (talk) 00:24, 9 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]

There is currently a discussion at Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents regarding an issue with which you may have been involved. Psychastes (talk) 03:02, 15 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

May 2025

You have been blocked indefinitely from emailing other editors to prevent harassment.

If you think there are good reasons for being unblocked, please review Wikipedia's guide to appealing blocks, then add the following text to the bottom of your talk page: {{unblock|reason=Your reason here ~~~~}}. CambridgeBayWeather (solidly non-human), Uqaqtuq (talk), Huliva 03:10, 15 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

You can respond as to why you should be unblocked.

This user's unblock request has been reviewed by an administrator, who accepted the request.

Sooooob (block log • active blocks • global blocks • contribs • deleted contribs • filter log • creation log • change block settings • unblock • checkuser (log))

Request reason:

Hello,

I was blocked on the accusation that I am a promotional account. You can find the discussion here

We are Wikipedia researchers at the University of Washington, and contacted the accuser using the “Email this user” feature to recruit for our study (Wikimedia research page). I’m sorry they felt violated by our attempt to recruit, but I’m afraid they missed some context, although this was mentioned in both the recruitment email and the Wikimedia research page that was linked in the email.

Again, we are Wikipedia researchers at the University of Washington, with our full names, Wikipedia usernames, and institutional affiliations disclosed in the recruitment email and the Wikimedia research page – Soobin Cho, David McDonald, and Mark Zachry. This is Soobin Cho, this is my personal account, and I use it to recruit because I am the lead researcher of this project.

We have finished one research project (Wikimedia research page) as a preliminary study and are currently conducting another (linked above). So far, we have conducted 19 interviews, including with multiple administrators. Many participants – both administrators and editors – have said our research has the potential to help Wikipedia and encouraged us to continue. The Wikimedia Foundation supports Wikipedia researchers through conferences, workshops, and funding. We are researchers acting in good faith and following all protocols of Wikimedia Foundation for conducting research on Wikipedia.

I hope this addresses the accuser’s claim that "they're also referring to themselves as 'our team'. this is plainly WP:NOTHERE whatever it is."

Also, although we understand the accuser’s feeling of violation, some claims do not appear to be in good faith – "their talk page is full of other people telling them to stop sending out emails, which all apparently relating to some kind of survey/monetary offer." There is only one person who said they would not accept payment for participating in an interview, but were happy to answer a few questions via email. I’m afraid that does not amount to being “full of.”

Also, there is context the accuser has missed again: we do not provide monetary offers. This is stated in the talk page discussion above, the recruitment email, and the Wikimedia research page. We do not pay participants individually; instead, we make donations to either the Wikimedia Foundation, Creative Commons, or Internet Archive in recognition of the participant's time and effort. We aim to follow the spirit of Wikipedia as a volunteer project and want participants to take part voluntarily, while expressing appreciation through donations. In fact, we have refused some requests for individual payment. From now on, we will add an option to not make a donation if the participant requests.

Lastly, to explain our use of the “Email this user” feature for recruitment – to conduct research, we need to reach out to participants under certain criteria, and there are two ways to do this within Wikipedia: posting on their user talk page or emailing them. We chose email to preserve confidentiality for those who choose to participate, since posting on a user page has a higher risk of breaching confidentiality. Also, we do not and have never contacted anyone again after they asked to opt out.

I hope this provides good reasons for being unblocked, and we would appreciate it if the block were removed so we can continue our research that aims to help Wikipedia. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Sooooob (talk • contribs) 19:09, 20 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Accept reason:

This is a procedural acceptance, as you have already been unblocked by CambridgeBayWeather in light of your recent on-wiki disclosures. In response to one of your comments below, although I am not aware of any policy or guideline on English Wikipedia that would require you to disclose your personal information on-wiki when conducting a research study using the email function, on-wiki disclosure such as the information you added to your user page on 20 May improves your credibility with the editing community and can help prevent the kind of suspicion that led to your block.

There are many editors, myself included, who prefer to limit the amount of personal information we disclose about ourselves on Wikipedia for privacy reasons, such as preventing offline harassment. This makes us wary of any solicitation that requests the release of any form of our personal information or identity for any reason, including research. As you have already disclosed your personal information on your Meta-Wiki research page, making the same disclosure on English Wikipedia would improve the transparency of your research project for the community here (without significantly affecting the amount of information you release about yourself), which is important when you are asking us to volunteer our personal information for research. In the future, if anyone conducting research on Wikipedia asks you about whether they should disclose details of themselves and their research project on their user page, I would encourage you to recommend them to do so.

Thank you and welcome back. — Newslinger talk 15:55, 24 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

It looks like anyone can make a page in the Research namespace at metawiki. The talk pages are redlinks, so I can't see any discussion about emailing people Google forms links, let alone approval. meta:Research:Projects says Ethical considerations around research in social spaces are complex. Researchers are expected to follow appropriate policies and guidelines in the Wikis they study. which seems to have been ignored. I notice you only added an explanation to your user page after this unblock request. REAL_MOUSE_IRL talk 10:53, 21 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you for your reply. To respond point by point:

Yes, anyone can create a Research project page on metawiki. These pages are not meant to serve as spaces for approval, but rather as a place for researchers to ethically disclose their work if they are studying Wikipedia. Strictly speaking, this is an optional step, and not all researchers who study Wikipedia create such a page. We chose to do so because we believe in openly sharing the details of our research with the community.
“The talk pages are redlinks, so I can't see any discussion about emailing people Google Forms links, let alone approval.” If this is referring to my user talk page, and the concern is that no discussion is visible there, I have not hidden or misrepresented anything. I'm happy to share the relevant information in whatever way would be helpful!
Could you kindly clarify which ethical considerations you believe were ignored? This would be enormously helpful not only to me, but to many other Wikipedia researchers that I know, some of whom have been studying Wikipedia for over 20 years, who have offered me advice and mentorship. These mentors also guided me on how to appropriately reach out to Wikipedians and I was following their guidance, so I would greatly appreciate any additional guidance that have been overlooked. In our recruitment email, we included: 1) our team's full name, Wikipedia username, and affiliation, 2) a statement explaining how we are contacting participants (via the "Email this user" feature), 3) the purpose of the research, 4) a summary of research process, 5) a note that a donation will be made in recognition of participation, 6) a link to our Wikimedia research project page, and 7) a Google form link to click if the recipient is interested in participating, which contains all the above information once again. If there is additional information we should disclose, or if there's anything more I should explain, I am more than happy to do so!
And yes, I added explanation to my user page recently. The same information was already clearly included in the recruitment email. None of my fellow Wikipedia researchers typically add such explanations to their user pages, nor have I been advised to do so by experienced researchers or Wikimedia staff that I have met. I chose to add it now in light of the current situation, to further clarify our intentions. If adding this kind of information to the user page is considered problematic, or conversely, if it’s something all Wikipedia researchers should be doing, it would be very helpful to receive clear guidance on this point!

Sooooob (talk) 12:33, 21 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Hi CambridgeBayWeather, after reviewing the discussion at Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/IncidentArchive1187 § User:Sooooob WP:NOTHERE, some kind of promotional account and Sooooob's responses above, I'm having a hard time seeing how Sooooob's actions violated the policy against harassment. Sooooob appears to have missed the ANI discussion before it was archived, but recently added on-wiki information about themselves on their user page, including a link to a description of their research project for which the emails are used. In light of this newly disclosed information, do you have any objection to unblocking Sooooob? — Newslinger talk 15:28, 24 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

No problem whatsoever. And they should be unlocked now. CambridgeBayWeather (solidly non-human), Uqaqtuq (talk), Huliva 15:31, 24 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you! — Newslinger talk 15:34, 24 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you for lifting the block. I will encourage other Wikipedia researchers to disclose at least their researcher identity and research context on their user pages. Thank you! Sooooob (talk) 18:33, 24 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]