As the Internet has changed communication, commerce, and the distribution of information, so too it is changing psychological research. Psychologists can observe new or rare phenomena online and can do research on traditional psychological topics more efficiently, enabling them to expand the scale and scope of their research. Yet these opportunities entail risk both to research quality and to human subjects. Internet research is inherently no more risky than traditional observational, survey, or experimental methods. Yet the risks and safeguards against them will differ from those characterizing traditional research and will themselves change over time. This article describes some benefits and challenges of conducting psychological research via the Internet and offers recommendations to both researchers and institutional review boards for dealing with them. ((c) 2004 APA, all rights reserved)

AndreA Forte is a Ph.D. candidate in Human-centered computing in the School of Interactive computing at the Georgia Institute of technology. She holds an MLIS from the university of texas at Austin. Her research examines how social technologies support knowledge production and information sharing. Her work has been published in the areas of computer-supported cooperative work, online communities, and the learning sciences.VAnessA LArco is a Program Manager on the Microsoft Surface team, where she works on designing and developing software for multitouch vision-based systems. She holds a B.S. in computer science from the Georgia Institute of technology. She has an interest in understanding how productive groups organize themselves in technologically mediated spaces.Amy BruckmAn is an Associate Professor in the School of Interactive computing at the Georgia Institute of technology. Dr. Bruckman received her Ph.D. from the MIt Media Lab's Epistemology and Learning group in 1997, her MSVS from the Media Lab's Interactive cinema Group in 1991, and her B.A. in physics from Harvard university in 1987. In 1999, she was named one of the 100 top young innovators in science and technology in the world (tr100) by Technology Review magazine. In 2002, she was awarded the Jan Hawkins Award for Early career contributions to Humanistic research and Scholarship in Learning technologies. ABstrAct: How does "self-governance" happen in Wikipedia? through in-depth interviews with 20 individuals who have held a variety of responsibilities in the Englishlanguage Wikipedia, we obtained rich descriptions of how various forces produce and regulate social structures on the site. Although Wikipedia is sometimes portrayed as lacking oversight, our analysis describes Wikipedia as an organization with highly refined policies, norms, and a technological architecture that supports organizational ideals of consensus building and discussion. We describe how governance on the site is becoming increasingly decentralized as the community grows and how this is predicted by theories of commons-based governance developed in offline contexts. We also briefly examine local governance structures called WikiProjects through the example of WikiProject Military History, one of the oldest and most prolific projects on the site.

What one may say on the internet is increasingly controlled by a mix of automated programs, and decisions made by paid and volunteer human moderators. On the popular social media site Reddit, moderators heavily rely on a configurable, automated program called "Automoderator" (or "Automod"). How do moderators use Automod? What advantages and challenges does the use of Automod present? We participated as Reddit moderators for over a year, and conducted interviews with 16 moderators to understand the use of Automod in the context of the sociotechnical system of Reddit. Our findings suggest a need for audit tools to help tune the performance of automated mechanisms, a repository for sharing tools, and improving the division of labor between human and machine decision making. We offer insights that are relevant to multiple stakeholders-creators of platforms, designers of automated regulation systems, scholars of platform governance, and content moderators.

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In this article we present an empirical study aimed at better understanding the potential for harm when conducting research in chatrooms. For this study, we entered IRC chatrooms on the ICQ network and posted one of three messages to tell participants that we were recording them: a recording message, an opt-in message, or an opt-out message. In the fourth condition, we entered the chatroom but did not post a message. We recorded and analyzed how subjects responded to being studied. Results of a regression analysis indicate significantly more hostility in the three conditions where we said something than in the control condition. We were kicked out of 63.3% of the chatrooms we entered in the three message conditions compared with 29% of the chatrooms in the control condition. There were no significant differences between any of these three conditions. Notably, when given a chance to opt in, only 4 of 766 potential subjects chose to do so. Results also indicate significant effects for both size and the number of moderators. For every 13 additional people in a chatroom, the likelihood getting kicked out was cut in half. While legal and ethical concerns are distinct, we conclude by arguing that studying chatrooms constitutes human subjects research under U.S. law, but that a waiver of consent is appropriate in most cases as obtaining consent is impracticable.