Zoe Comnena/Pierce

<Zoe Comnena

Apart from links, the remainder of this section is the actual text of Bureaucratic Fucks admin Zoe's deleted sub-page on Zoe vs. The World.

The following is the text of all communication I have had with Tim Pierce of Northern Illinois University and other offices at the University:

January 20

Z:Have you really issued a class assignment to have your students vandalize Wikipedia? - [1]

Zoe Comnena, Wikipedia system administrator

P:Zoe,

They needed to learn a lesson about how easy it is to find information and how open source information is not the best way to go. This was after I was getting a lot of Wikipedia cites last semester where students were citing really dubious information from there. One way for them to realize that using sources, such as Wikipedia, is to get them to see how simple it is to change the information that is there.

January 21

Z:I think I will forward this information to the president of the university. He or she should know that the faculty of your university advocate public vandalism.

P:It's not that I'm advocating vandalism as I had them print the original page so that, even if it wasn't caught, I could go back and recreate the correct page. The bigger issue, though, is that anybody can do this and have information that is online on your servers until who knows when until the page is discovered and corrected.

Z:And you didn't think that you could have made the point more easily by just making a valid edit to an article and explaining to them that anybody could have made the same edit and put invalid information in? We now, all of a sudden, have a large amount of vandalism from NIU IP addresses, which we as sysops have to deal with, since you apparently have not done so.

P:I do understand that problem and in the past I would say, "please don't use Wikipedia. As much as I like personally like Wikipedia, it is not an academic source and I wouldn't use it as an academic site." Guess what happens? I end up with people using Wikipeida over and over again and I realize that a lot of this comes from high school teachers who really didn't think through the advice that they were giving their students. So, I figured (perhaps a bit too hastily) that giving them something controlled, which I know from looking at the IP logs for myself, there is a backup page available that can be popped in that if they made an obvious change, just in the off chance that it wasn't corrected, they could see for themselves how long it would take before someone would fix it. The point that I want them to walk away with is that you can use Wikipedia if you need to verify something that you think you know to be true but I'd be really cautious of laying my credibility on the line here. The second part of the discussion that I was planning on having with them, regardless, is the ethicality of what they did. In other words, is it really okay to change things or to put information out there that is false knowing that other people may be relying on your information. Unfortunately, most students learn these lessons by doing and my guess is that they have learned a lot about the power of information and, in some cases, the power of disinformation.

The reality is that this is the downside of the wiki environment that even Wikipedia's president has admitted last year is really a problem. There has to be some middle ground, right? I think that Wikipedia can do a lot of good if the model was thought through a lot better than it did. And I think that there has been some good that has come out of it. I know, from reading, that there are a lot of people who go out and delibertly deface Wikipedia pages and because of the randomness of the IP addresses, it's much harder for you or other Sysops to catch and try to keep on top of it. However, if people rethink through the model of how open the open source really ought to be, perhaps Wikipedia won't cause people to shiver when it's being cited in college classrooms. In that sense, it's not just me. Quite a few of my colleagues had a Wikipedia venting session at the beginning of the school year.

So, in the sense that I've caused a lot of work on people's part in what's going on, I'm sorry for that. That really wasn't my intent.

Z:So if you feel that there is something wrong in a newspaper article or in an Encyclopaedia Brittanica article, do you advocate destroying the page it's on and stealing all of the newspapers out of the vendor's box?

P:Obviously no and the analogy is different. Of course, newspapers can be wrong in that something can be misstated but there's an editor that is going to go through and stand behind and issue corrections if need be. A print encyclopedia is very different in that Britannica is going to find an "expert" to write the encyclopedia entry. Can that entry have a bias? Sure. Would I put a lot of stock in that type of source. Not really--I would expect people to dig deeper than that.

Correspondence with the Office of Public Affairs

I forwarded the first conversation I had had with Mr. Pierce to the office of public affairs, with an explanation at the head of it. I also indicated that I had had further communications from Mr. Pierce, which I could forward to them if they were interested. After having been ignored twice, I sent this for the third time, which got a reply:

This is the third time I have attempted to communicate with you or someone in your office. If you do not reply by close of business Friday, January 25, I will be forced to go to the press.

It recently came to our attention that one of NIU's professors, Tim Pierce, made an assignment to the students in one of his classes to vandalize Wikipedia, the online Encyclopedia. I have been in contact with Professor Pierce and can forward our correspondence to you if you wish. He admits to having made the assignment, and believes that his actions were correct.

I don't think we need to discuss the illegalities of defacing a website. Such actions are a federal offense. But we do need to discuss the ethics of such an assignment, and the failure of Professor Pierce to regret his actions or to pledge not to do so in the future.

I would like an official comment from the University on this subject. I have already sent one email to Public Affairs on the subject, and it has been ignored. Please respond to me, or I may find it necessary to take this information to the press, which is always eager to write articles about Wikipedia defacement.

Zoe Comnena, Wikipedia administrator

I finally got a reply, as follows:

Zoe, I am in receipt of your emails on this topic. Given their content, it seems more appropriate for you to address your concerns to the Office of University Legal Services. Within that office, it is most likely that the issues you raise would be addressed by the university's Ethics Officer. You may wish to forward your complaints to that office at the following email address: [email protected] (email address redacted by Zoe)

Correspondence with the Ethics Office

I then sent the same email to the Ethics Office at the email address advised, and am waiting for a reply.

And this is their response:

Here is the position of my office on this: You are probably aware that university teachers have considerable latitude under academic freedom flowing from the First Amendment to express their ideas and impart information to their students in the course of conducting academic courses. NIU would not censor its faculty in the pursuit of their legitimate teaching objectives if conducted in accordance with applicable laws.

You may ask your legal counsel to contact me if you feel your organization has experienced some form of illegal actions by NIU faculty, and I will be happy to make further inquiry and reply to your counsel. If your counsel can cite what laws have allegedly been violated, NIU will look into determining what is actually true. I have reason to understand there is a substantial difference of opinion on the facts you have represented in your message. Your counsel would probably inform you of a need to be cautious about accusing individuals and public academic institutions of illegal actions before there is clear proof that such is the case.

In the meantime, your organization should consider making its website content more secure by assuring it cannot be changed by outsiders if indeed that is a possibility and an interest you want to protect against, as you seem to say our faculty has possibly pointed out to students. It at least preliminarily seems disingenuous to claim 'vandalism' if it is so easily and foreseeably done. I am not hearing you say this site was 'hacked' into. It would be interesting to know how often this occurs.

Your veiled threat of 'going to the media' does not alter how this matter should be addressed on its merits. A one-time teaching demonstration certainly has evoked a strong response from you, and I am interested in knowing why -- given all the circumstances that would likely come out in a public discussion of it. Maybe it would be best to just let it drop.

User:Zoe|(talk) 22:21, 26 January 2007 (UTC)