I can understand the hypothesis whether longer school articles would attract more enrolments, but I am a bit bemused about the medical hypothesis whether longer articles about a disease would cause more people to have it or at least be diagnosed with it. What exactly is the medical hypothesis here? Is it relating to treatment articles or drug articles?
As for the ethics, if the information added to an article (school or medical) seeks to be accurate and satisfies the normal requirements (citations, NPOV, NOR, COI, etc), so what? Does it matter if it's done by a research project or done by anybody else? Do we know who did every edit on those articles currently or why?
It's pretty clearly an ethical problem to add incorrect information. I can see a possible ethical issue if one article was updated with good quality contributions and another was done in a deliberately sloppy way, to test a difference.
Kerry
Sent from my iPad
On 29 May 2017, at 6:00 pm, Leila Zia leila@wikimedia.org wrote:
On Mon, May 29, 2017 at 12:52 AM, James Salsman jsalsman@gmail.com wrote:
Are there any ethical guidelines concerning whether this is reasonable? Should there be?
How about contacting the authors directly and asking them if they have considered the potential ethical challenges of extending the research to the two areas they've mentioned in the paper? Their response may be as simple as: sure, and we are aware of it. If they're not aware of it, your note can help them think about it.
Best, Leila
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