On 12 Aug 2016, at 6:03 PM, Kerry Raymond
<kerry.raymond(a)gmail.com> wrote:
I am asking you to share the documentation of the ethical clearance or exemption your
institution would have required, not what people did or didn't say to you as part of
conference reviewing or at conferences. Ethical clearance is a process that should have
been undertaken before your research commenced, not when you are writing the paper or
attending a conference. Are you saying you undertook the research without any
consideration of the ethics? Does your university have no guidelines about this?
The Wikipedia guidelines about content analysis are not particularly relevant here. You
were not analysing existing Wikipedia articles but injecting new articles of dubious
quality into Wikipedia.
Nor is the data about individuals my point. If you wasted people's time reacting to
the articles created, you did them harm. If people derived incorrect information from
reading your articles, you did them harm. None of those people were aware they were part
of your research experiment; that means they did not have informed consent in relation to
choosing to participate in your experiment. You could have generated the articles and
sought the opinions of readers and editors of Wikipedia on those articles without placing
them into Wikipedia itself. That way would have enabled informed consent; others not
wishing to take part would not be mislead into doing so.
Sent from my iPad
> On 12 Aug 2016, at 3:24 PM, siddhartha banerjee <sidd2006(a)gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I thought I should add this too as I missed it in the previous email.
> This link:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Ethically_researching_Wikipedia
> talks about the Content Analysis (seeing number of references removed, or content
removed)-- which we did (with the few articles) and that is what we followed as it says
"generally considered exempt from such requirements and does not require an IRB
approval.".
> My advisor should be able to add more thoughts on it (I have requested him to reply
on this thread).
>
> Thanks,
> Sidd
>
>
>
>
>> On Thu, Aug 11, 2016 at 9:36 PM, siddhartha banerjee <sidd2006(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
>> As I have mentioned earlier, this is not the first work on article generation.
This is one of the first work we know:
https://people.csail.mit.edu/csauper/pubs/sauper-sm-thesis.pdf
>>
https://people.csail.mit.edu/regina/my_papers/wiki.pdf
>> All these did not mention anything about human subjects as finally no personal
information is used (about the person, who is deleting, etc). Nor did any
reviewers/attendees in the conferences in this area question on this aspect.
>> Also,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2015-01-28/Recen… is
relevant here as it talks about our previous work.
>>
>> if "record of someone doing something" is relevant from human subjects
point of view, any data on Wikipedia can be used to find the editors (if not the real
person). For example:
>>
https://www.aaai.org/ocs/index.php/AAAI/AAAI11/paper/viewFile/3505/3968
>>
https://alchemy.cs.washington.edu/papers/wu08/wu08.pdf
>> I have met several researchers who work using data (revisions from Wikipedia) and
nothin on IRB ever came up.
>>
>> Nevertheless, as I said, if there are concrete rules, I think it would help the
research community as a whole to know what can or cannot be done and also ask for
permissions.
>> I appreciate the suggestions that Stuart mentioned in a previous email abut
experimenting on would be deleted or articles lacking sources. But, as of now we are not
planning anything and if we do, we would for sure get in touch with Denny (who had a video
chat with me before starting this thread) and would try to know the best ways of doing
it.
>>
>> I have asked my PhD advisor (other author on the paper) to check this thread and
he will be able to give more inputs as I am not very qualified to comment on these
aspects.
>>
>> Thanks,
>> Sidd
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>
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