Wikiversity:Community Review/Wikimedia Ethics:Ethical Breaching Experiments/Real World

Breaching ethics in a real world and digging holes in the garden
Breaching ethics is a break in the rules. You do not do that in any university. You are likely to be expelled for such behaviour because it is not a matter of how ethical you see it but a matter of how ethical you didn't see it whilst continuing to act, i.e. the ultimate incompentence, the liability. How about a police psychologist around dropping litter and parking out on the road as an experiment in breaking the law. He is absolutely crazy, with no capacity for the job. You can't think of him as a competent professional any more. I don't know about closing Wikiversity because I have not been studying it and all I know of this project is a few very good pieces of work, above and beyond the scope of this rubbish. But of Jimbo acting like this I can say, it is Jimbos perspective when finding somebody digging holes in the back yard that lends his position some merit. He doesn't interfere with the running of the wikis save for promoting and explaining them, he gave them away to us in fact, but when somebody is digging holes in the back yard and everybody else in the house has been chatting about it for three months, Jimbo is liable to walk out there and say, "Clear off!". The ultimate and obvious findings of ethical breaching experiments: The breacher gets fired. RTG 16:05, 13 March 2010 (UTC)


 * Nobody is condoning or endorsing law breaking. However people do break laws. Social scientists, psychologists, philosophers, engineers, lawyers, law enforcement, and perhaps people in many other fields like to study why people break laws, how they break laws, when do they break the law, etc. -- dark lama  16:18, 13 March 2010 (UTC)


 * As I've said on IRC, this was never simply about passively observing "breaching experiments", aka violating policies to make a point. The description, "On this page we discuss, brainstorm, and possibly execute ethical breaching experiments" on Wikimedia Ethics/Ethical Breaching Experiments, and on Wikimedia Ethics/Ethical Breaching Experiments/planning where it says "make some notes about your intended experiment" make that clear. Unfortunately the idea of studying breaching experiments here has been tainted by the proposal to use Wikiversity as a base for launching attacks on our sister projects so if it ever was an appropriate subject to study here, it certainly isn't now. Adambro 16:24, 13 March 2010 (UTC)


 * N.B. almost certainly an "ethical breaching experiment" is intended to mean carrying out a breaching experiment in an ethical manner. I think you (RTG) have understood it differently to that. Clearly breaching experiments, carried out ethically, can be accepted in academia and are not intrinsically a firing offense. Possibly what you want to argue is that people here are clothing mischievous behaviour in academic language in order to disguise the mischievous nature (I don't necessarily agree with that but it could provide the basis for a reasoned discussion). 87.254.92.101 16:27, 13 March 2010 (UTC)


 * How can you conduct a breech of ethics in an ethical manner? You should be working on cold fusion. Certainly the project in its core invites disruption of the projects. "Experiments" is a very perspective driven word for the title. I have suggested a Hall of Fame on the talk page and elsewhere a set of barnstars. We used to get little stars in our school and we performed quite well. RTG 16:32, 13 March 2010 (UTC)


 * And, yes it does condone and endorse. Alludes to performing breeches of ethics and has suggestions sections. What train are you on? Wake up. RTG 16:33, 13 March 2010 (UTC)

Experiments in breeching fire safety. Let's perform experiments like this in our own home. Who is up for it? No, it's not a very good line of experiments. RTG 16:37, 13 March 2010 (UTC)

I'm having a lot of difficulty following you RTG. Is it your contention that all breaching experiments involve breaches of ethics? Or just that the ones that would be discussed on that particular project would do so? 87.254.92.101 16:45, 13 March 2010 (UTC)

I'm not having difficulty following you, but I think you're making a category mistake. WP:POINT is not an ethical or moral principle, but rather just a guideline agreed to in the hopes of avoiding community strife (since, after all, what is done on a wiki is just as easily undone). The point for Wikiversity is that these breaching experiments have indeed taken place, and have had considerable effect (w:Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Biographies of living people being the obvious example of a political movement within the community in response to the sorts of experiments documented on the page in question). Were the experiments in violation of Wikipedian norms? Yes. Did they do any harm to the "living people" who are the subjects of the articles? No. Does the end justify the means? Well, that's the question being asked on that page. --SB_Johnny talk 19:20, 13 March 2010 (UTC)
 * The kind of experiments given on the page, such as inserting false information or creating false biographies are harmful. Not necessarily to the subject of the article, even less likely if the subject doesn't exist, but potentially harmful to people who are trying to use Wikipedia. I very much doubt anyone could come up with a "breaching experiment" that wasn't harmful but that question is irrelevant if most of these experiemnts would violate policies or guidelines, organising experiments which involve violating a sister project's policies or guidelines is not something to be done at Wikiversity, whatever the community consensus at the time might apparently say. Jimbo has a responsibility to look after the WMF projects and that will at times involve going against what many people may think. It is a credit to him that he isn't afraid to do so. I hope that he will, whilst considering what has been said here, restate that this type of content is inappropriate and that it should be deleted. This isn't the Wikipedia Review wiki. Adambro 19:40, 13 March 2010 (UTC)
 * The false information added was very intentionally constructed to be "non-harmful", and I can confirm that as I've been following it. I'll try to get the diffs for you.
 * That's the whole point of the ethics of the experiment: do no harm. I assume Privatemusings will have something to say on this, but I'll also ask the experimenters to weigh in. --SB_Johnny talk 20:10, 13 March 2010 (UTC)
 * The idea that adding any false information to articles can ever be "non-harmful" is a concept I struggle to understand. Nevertheless, diffs to look at are always appreciated. Adambro 20:16, 13 March 2010 (UTC)
 * This is a good point - SB_Johnny is, I think, considering harm only to the article subjects. But if I write graffiti in chalk (very fixable) on someone's house, and that graffiti is carefully worded so as not to offend anyone, has my act caused any harm? I think you, and many people including me, would say "yes, you caused harm; you put graffiti on that guy's house".


 * One problem here though is that we're discussing exactly the ethical issues that the deleted page apparently existed for. If I were to go so far as to say "ah, but how about a breaching experiment arranged like, that would be completely ethical, right?" then I'd have gone to the next step of actually designing an ethical breaching experiment. Should I then be blocked and this page deleted? 87.254.92.101 20:42, 13 March 2010 (UTC)


 * While an abstract discussion of non-offensive chalk on someone else's house could very well be interesting in a sophomore philosophy class, it has little bearing on the current case. It may be fun to speculate on cases where this sort of thing could be ok, but that should not deter us from recognizing that this should have been deleted and the perpetrator blocked for doing nothing more than annoying and disrupting others.  I encourage this community to quickly grow strong policies to prevent such juvenile nonsense going forward.  Are you a serious effort to generate free OERs that will change the world, or are you a sophomoric place for trolls?  It is within your power to choose.--Jimbo Wales 04:21, 14 March 2010 (UTC)


 * It wasn't intended to be abstract - it's a direct analogy. The question was raised as to whether inserting untrue information into Wikipedia could ever be non-harmful. SB_Johnny made the point that the information inserted was carefully designed to be non-harmful (like the chalk graffiti). I think that deliberately messing someone's work up, even in small ways, is always going to have some element of harm whether in an encyclopedia or on someone's house. Now you might feel that's trite or simplistic but I think it has "bearing on the current case". With regards to "sophomore" I think you were intending to be insulting (if your aggressive manner in this discussion is itself a breaching experiment then I think it very effectively makes a point) but realistically a university or even a wikiversity is a place you should expect to encounter sophomores, materials aimed at them and discussions involving them (though hopefully much more than that too). 87.254.92.101 10:18, 14 March 2010 (UTC)


 * If the rules were designed to be impervious, you'd really be on to something. Imagine hacking for a company or burgling past high tech defenses, like James Bond or something, wow! But, let's consider a similar and non-harmful experiment. Let's have the police ring the fire brigade and time them to see how long they took? "Did anyone get hurt?" you ask the fireman when he arrives expecting a fire. Then, how do we focus study be on the most notable fire brigade ringers of the past? Are they quite ingenious? That's all you've got here, public service phone numbers, Bart, not fort knox vault breaking. The rules are not even designed to prevent harm, they are designed to control the addition and removal of information. There may be a few parts of that which say that information can be harmful. Why don't you study that? "How can information become or be used in ways that are harmful?" There's definitely more scope for that one, it would more than cover your Wikipedia attacks and it would appear that is the topic folk are suggesting. It would also be quite useful in defining ethics. Possible a major point of reference. Or really must you ring the fire brigade too? RTG 16:36, 14 March 2010 (UTC)


 * Some of the other subpages in the project do actually cover how harm can come about from that. Or at least they did... I haven't really had a look in a while. --SB_Johnny talk 17:19, 14 March 2010 (UTC)

On "Breaching Experiments" in Social Psychology and Ethnomethodology
I haven't been able to follow all of this widely scattered discussion, but there appears to be some confusion about the term. Wouldn't it be nice if there were some place we could look it up?


 * http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&as_q=breaching+experiment
 * http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&as_epq=breaching+experiment
 * http://sniggle.net/breaching.php
 * http://www.change.freeuk.com/learning/socthink/garfinkel.html

Not to mention:


 * http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breaching_experiment

Ciao, Jon Awbrey 12:30, 17 March 2010 (UTC)

This link may prove useful to those who are unfamiliar with Jon Awbrey.--Jimbo Wales 14:53, 18 March 2010 (UTC)

Or Breaching experiment? -- Jtneill - Talk - c 12:44, 17 March 2010 (UTC)


 * http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9D05E4DF1130F937A2575AC0A9629C8B63 from the Wikipedia page
 * http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9RU7E_lXWVo&feature=related
 * http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0x4HV4_KBPQ&feature=related
 * http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JYp3EA8Kjrg&feature=related

It would appear that most of these experiments are insane for the experimenters but you can conclude that ethics are usually not suggested. Most of these experiments are about "Breaking the norm" to study reactions, which is understandable because people are animals and you want to see them react to things but ethics are about right and wrong. No class tells you do go and be bad or test how bad you can be. Certainly, the examples here do not apply to violations of BLP policy or anything like that. They apply more to contacting people on their talk pages and asking crazy questions. I would presume that classes given these experiments as a task are given warnings about what they cannot do. But that sort of warning need not apply to WV, right? Well I think it does according to the WV professional standard goals. RTG 19:06, 17 March 2010 (UTC)