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Comment by detaro | Hacker News Reader

first statement + commentary from their associate department head: https://twitter.com/lorenterveen/status/1384954220705722369

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Wow. Total sleazeball. This appears to not be his first time with using unintentional research subjects.

Source:

https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C22&q=Lor...

This is quite literally the first point of the Nuremberg code research ethics are based on:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuremberg_Code#The_ten_points_...

This isn't an individual failing. This is an institutional failing. This is the sort of thing which someone ought to raise with OMB.

He literally points to how Wikipedia needed to respond when he broke the rules:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:What_Wikipedia_is_no...

I didn't see any unethical work in a quick scan of the Google Scholar listing. I saw various works on collaboration in Wikipedia.

What did you see that offended you?

You realise that the GP went through the trouble to point out that research on people should involve consent, and that they [wikipedia] needed to release a statement saying this. What does that tell you about the situation that gave rise to that statement?

Got it, and @Tobu's comment describes the issue perfectly. Thanks!

As far as I can tell, the papers he co-authored on Wikipedia were unlike the abuse of the kernel contribution process that started last year in that they did not involve active experiment, but passive analysis of contribution history.

Doesn't mean there aren't ethical issues related to editors being human subjects, but you may want to be more specific.

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