A followup by the same authors reviewed in today's Signpost reverses their opinion on causality, asserting that I improvements to articles about places increases tourism:
http://marit.hinnosaar.net/wikipediamatters.pdf
On Mon, May 29, 2017 at 3:52 PM, James Salsman jsalsman@gmail.com wrote:
This was in the recent Research Newsletter:
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/127472/1/847290360.pdf
They found a correlation between the length of articles about tourist destinations and the number of tourists visiting them. They tried to influence other destinations by adding content and did not find a correlation in the subsequent number of tourists, suggesting that the causation flows from tourism to article length instead.
But I was taken aback by the last line of their paper, "using the suggested research design to study other areas of information acquisition, such as medicine or school choices could be fruitful directions."
Are there any ethical guidelines concerning whether this is reasonable? Should there be?