Dear Sidd,

Thank you for your multiple replies to this list. I am happy to see the commitment to find the balance between research needs and the needs and ethics for a complicated website/community as Wikipedia is.

I hope that the comments on this list don't shock you, even if they appear sometimes to be a little harsh. But this comes from the long time dedication of people who are involved in Wikipedia in several ways.

And honestly, the Wikimedia movement, the WMF, the community etc. still don't have a thorough and coherent concept about Wikipedia related research. We don't want to forbid it in general, but we had some very unpleasant experiences in the past. Anybody but the "community" can only recommend on good practices, and getting a clear opinion from the community can be difficult.

My impression is that researchers sometimes want to test the social system of Wikipedia, to see it as a kind of social instrument in which the "crowd intelligence" evaluates content and rejects or accepts it. The quality assessment of the content produced is passed on to the "crowd inteligence".

Actually, in a certain way I do the same when I write a Wikipedia article: it can be refused by the community or not. The difference is in the motive: I want to improve Wikipedia, not to test a social system. Therefore, I carefully read and reread my texts before putting them on Wikipedia. But someone who wants to create articles automatically and then have the social system tests them, puts them unedited on Wikipedia in order not to "spoil" the results.

I can fully understand when Wikipedians and others regard this behavior as an abuse of Wikipedia. And for any researcher, the final problem will always be that "Wikipedia" cannot be a partner for the researcher. The Wikipedia community wouldn't agree to have researchers contribute questionable content for the purpose of testing the social system / the quality of content. They tend to regard this behavior of researchers as a kind of vandalism.

We have seen this in all varieties, e.g. when someone gives a presentation about Wikipedia and deliberately vandalises an article in order to demonstrate how quickly the social system responds to vandalism. I find it also questionable when a teacher lets students contribute articles and attributes credit points depending on wether the article is deleted or not, or becomes a featured article. That is in my view a kind of outsourcing of the evaluation that should be done by the teacher himself - based on his own, pedagogical criteria, not on the encyclopedical and sometimes strange decisions of the Wikipedia community.

As others have noted, there are several ethical problems that can occur, e.g. with regard to multiple accounts.

Sorry for the long mail.

Kind regards Ziko

Am Montag, 15. August 2016 schrieb siddhartha banerjee :

Agreed about the people issue. Editors were made to edit/delete without consent. IRB application also will be added to this list.

• Sidd