From TeamWeaverWiki
Woogle4Media can optionally equipped with an addon for scientifc instrumentation. The purpose of this addon is to log user activities within the Wiki during scientific studies. The extension allows to modify certain Woogle (UI) settings for different groups of users and provides a confirmation screen that allows to gain user's explicit consent for logging data.
Features
The instrumentation addon has four core features:
- Configuring different runtime behaviour of the Woogle extension for different user groups (all variables in WoogleConfig can be used for this)
- Automatically generating an anonymous user id and randomly assigning an experimental group for users
- Transparent evaluation for users (initial participation dialog for informed consent; watching and changing evaluation settings in MediaWiki preferences)
- Powerful logging of user behaviour in the Wiki resulting in a CSV log file (see below for details)
While the instrumentation addon was designed for evaluating Woogle, it should be easy to adapt the concept and the code for other evaluation tasks.
Privacy
Note that the addon was designed to protect user's privacy as much as possible:
- The instrumentation addon is disabled by default and needs to be explicitly configured by the Wiki adminstrator
- Once enabled, each Wiki user will be shown an information dialog before the next search. This dialog contains information about the scientific study and offers the user to either accept or to decline the participation by clicking a button.
- Only if the user explicitly accepts, data will be logged
- If the user declines participation, only the fact that "a user declined paticipation" will be logged. No further log data will be collected for such users.
- See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Informed_consent#Research
- At any time, users may visit the "Woogle"-Tab in MediaWiki Special:Preferences to see or modify his or her evaluation status
- Evaluation logs do not contain a MediaWiki UserId or User name. Instead, Woogle automatically generates an anonymous user id for each user. No one except of your Wiki adminstrator knows which anonymous user id maps to which user. The anonymous user id can be modifyed in Special:Preferences ("Woogle"-Tab).
See also