Wikiversity:Wikimedia research guidelines

This guideline deals with specific issues related to researching Wikimedia projects and contributors.

Wikimedia projects
Wikimedia projects may be the subject of Wikiversity research projects. Research should be based on information that is publicly available from the original source. When only some people have access to the original source of information, that information may not be used. This helps to make research verifiable by anyone, and keeps research transparent and honest.

Wikimedia contributors
Wikiversity participants may do research on Wikimedia contributors. Research should be limited to publicly available data that anyone can access. Any information that requires specific privileges to access may not be used as a bases for research. As an exception Wikimedia contributors can grant permission to use information about themselves for research purposes. If there is some doubt about the public availability of data used, the data in question should be removed until explicit permission can be obtained.

Wikiversity participants are encouraged to focus there research efforts on sampling data from a group of contributors, rather than focusing solely on the contributions of one Wikimedia contributor. The educational benefit of focusing on one Wikimedia contributor may be hard to prove or demonstrate.