Wikimedia Ethics/Ethical Breaching Experiments

From Wikiversity

this area is brand new, and under development in January 2010

On this page we discuss, brainstorm, and possibly execute ethical breaching experiments - in particular whether or not such things are possible, and if so, how they might be designed and executed to best inform policy and practice on WMF projects.

Participants [edit]

please do sign up below

• Privatemusings 00:47, 18 January 2010 (UTC)

Definitions [edit]

Please have a go at your own definition below;

1. ethical breaching experiment: An experiment which causes no harm in its execution, whilst yielding results useful for the greater good, or which inspire positive change, but which uses methods which may violate the letter or spirit of the guildeline 'Do not disrupt Wikipedia to illustrate a point' Privatemusings 00:57, 18 January 2010 (UTC)

examples of breaching experiments from wikimedia projects [edit]

• 'WP:NEWT'
• Provision of a list of unwatched biographical articles with the intention of some sort of experiment occurring see here for list of biographies, many of which feature 'breaching' edits in their history. The project appears to have been halted by admin. and arbcom involvement.

Report from Limey (link) [edit]

I have two lovely fake biographies on Wikipedia that have been there over 6 months. They've both been edited by other people, and contain fairly outlandish statements that anyone with an internet connection should know to be false. If they ever get removed, I'll write it all up at On Wikipedia, but they may perhaps remain forever and gradually become a part of history.

Report from Herschelkrustofsky (link) [edit]

Plausible-sounding but fictitious references exist in Little Roger and the Goosebumps, but no effort has been made to remove them

Report from Tarantino (link) [edit]

This article on the Himalayan Panda was created on April Fools Day and lasted nearly 6 months before it was deleted. The reference and external link seemed to support it if you didn't read them carefully.

It still lives on in a similar form on Persianne's user page.

Hoaxes not apparently related to 'breaching experiments' [edit]

• The Lee Dennison story

Suggestions / Ideas from others [edit]

Suggestions from Gomi (link) [edit]

1. Add citations to plausible-sounding but fictitious references to BLPs and/or health/medical articles. Inserting no actual defamation or misinformation, but supporting statements with fake references will show how open to abuse the Wiki model is;
2. Create articles on non-existent people and companies. This will be difficult, but if carefully checked to be non-existent, the harm done here is minimal;
3. Create fake articles on (non-existent) latin-named plants and animals, similar to #2, above;

related studies, non 'breaching' [edit]

• Wikipedia Vandalism Study - concerning US Senator articles on the english wikipedia.

Possible areas of useful experimentation [edit]

• Comparing classes of articles - eg. how is unsourced information treated when added by editors of similar reputation in different classes of articles
• Copyright concerns
• Academic honesty / plagiarism
• "Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent." -Isaac Asimov
  • from Larry Sanger to Moulton: Wikimedia's war against academic scholars
  • the destruction of content by Wikimedia's deletionists
  • censorship, bad blocks and bad bans imposed by Wikimedia's abusive administrators

Questions [edit]

If an organization is so dysfunctional in correcting its defects that people are driven to perform "breaching experiments", then is there really any reason to hope that "breaching experiments" could lead to positive outcomes? If an organization cannot correct its problems through conventional means, then won't attempts to use unconventional means simply be crushed/ignored by the people in the organization who already prevent conventional methods from correcting existing problems?

Reactions [edit]

• <placeholder for NY Brad comment over on en/wiki>
• The Dept of Fatherland Security runs deliberate tests of the airport security system, by having agents see if they can get stuff past the screeners, who are (supposedly) left out of the loop. It's very important QC instrument. But suppose they were total doofuses who weren't doing this AT ALL. And suppose some citizens decided to take it upon themselves, using harmless toy mockups and so forth. Can you imagine the shitstorm? That's rather what we have at Wikipedia. They won't do it themselves, and they won't let anybody else do it, either. - 'Milton Roe' (link)