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For guidelines for researchers interacting with Wikipedia for research purposes, see Wikipedia:Ethically researching Wikipedia#Best practices. For advice for Wikipedia editors on interacting with researchers, see Wikipedia:Don't bite the researchers and Wikipedia:What are these researchers doing in my Wikipedia?.
 | This page in a nutshell: This page documents lessons learned from past research on Wikipedia. |
We learn a lot from the mistakes of others, but even more from our own. — Fausto Cercignani
This study could have been done within Wikipedia's rules, to mutual benefit.
The study generated over a hundred articles, most of them unusable due to repeated basic problems. It is expected that new Wikipedia editors will make basic errors. But the way in which the researchers worked cut all of the channels for constructive feedback. Helpful advice fell on deaf ears and the editing did not improve. Other editors spent a lot of time trying to figure out what was going wrong. The same amount of human effort could have generated a lot of useful content.
The researchers involved in this study began by approaching two employees of the Wikimedia Foundation. User:Dario later described his contact with them. User:Halfek also described losing touch with them.
The researchers then posted a research plan in the Wikimedia:Research space, presumably on Dario and Halfek's advice. They did not respond to comments made on the talk page of the research plan. Since they used an IP address to post the plan, it was not immediately clear that the user account they later registered was in any way connected to the research plan.
The editing account User:Carolineneil was created. It was apparently run by two people, in violation of the policy on shared accounts. Carolineneil uploaded articles written by hired students. These students should each have had their own account. Since they were paid for their work, they were also required to say so on their user page. Not disclosing paid editing is a serious ethics breach which will get offenders banned from Wikipedia.
Bizarrely, Carolineneil did not directly create articles, but submitted them to wp:Articles for creation for other editors to accept or reject.
From October 2015 to October 2017, a large number of Wikipedia editors attempted unsuccessfully to communicate with Carolineneil. Unadvised, Carolineneil made the same mistakes over and over, and other editors corrected them over and over. Other editors were perplexed, and put a lot of effort into determining that Carolineneil wasn't a bot, just... behaving very strangely. No-one connected the account with the research plan. Carolineneil's editing was sufficiently disruptive that it was reported to Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents (ANI), three times. Banning the account was suggested, but editors were reluctant to do this without understanding the situation.
It wasn't until the research was published (article,Youtube presentation), and discussed on Wikipedia, that the penny dropped. The user was belatedly banned for undisclosed paid editing.
