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
I thought I should add this too as I missed it in the previous email.
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