[RCom-l] Quick notice on a cross-wiki research issue

[Steven Walling]

Hi everyone,

While Dario is out (on vacation I believe) on his behalf I wanted to forward
on an something RCom should be aware of.

You may have heard that in the past Wikiversity community members have used
the project as a platform to study Wikimedia projects. It came to our
attention that this issue may have cropped up again through an English
Wikiversity community member performing some kind of experiment on English
Wikipedia.

In their discussion<http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Administrators%27_noticeboard/Incidents&oldid=450061202#User:Marshallsumter_disrupting_Wikipedia_for_.22research.22_purposes.>,
the English Wikipedia community has concluded that a good bit of his work is
nonsense and problematic from a copyright standpoint. He’s indefinitely
blocked on Wikipedia and they are evaluating whether best to delete
everything he’s ever done or check each article edit individually. There is
also some productive
discussion<http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/User_talk:Marshallsumter>between
the user and English Wikiversity community members.

My understanding is that there isn't anything which necessarily needs to be
taken action on by RCom members immediately, but we felt it was important
you should be aware of this, since it's the not the first time we've
encountered issues with contentious research projects conducted cross-wiki.
If there are further developments we'll keep RCom updated.

Thank you,

-- 
Steven Walling
Fellow at Wikimedia Foundation
wikimediafoundation.org
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