User:Georgewilliamherbert/PierceLetter

Per requests, the text of the letter I sent to NIU after the Tim Pierce NIU vandalism incident allegations broke.

The letter
To: sralston, gburns, fbryan From: george william herbert Subject: Allegations of NIU professor telling students to vandalize Wikipeda Date: Jan 20, 2007 10:40 PM

Good evening.

After a spate of recent vandalism of the Wikipedia article on Northern Illinois University, a comment was made in that article's talk page that a NIU Instructor in your Communications 100 class had told his students to commit that vandalism:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Northern_Illinois_University&diff=prev&oldid=102129721

The instructor is named there as "Tim Pearce", who would appear to be a misspelling of Tim Pierce, who is listed at: http://www.comm.niu.edu/faculty/coms100.html

...as one of the instructors for the Communications 100 class.

The claim that was made that Mr Pierce is responsible was made by a new Wikipedia account and has no corroborating information in it. However, the unusual spike in vandalism of the article has led to it having to be made one of only a few dozen semi-protected (only experienced Wikipedia editors can edit it) articles out of over 1 million total articles, which is extremely unusual for a university's article. It is likely that some sort of common point of origin related to NIU has resulted in the series of vandalisms. That could easily be a bunch of students acting on their own, or a rival school's students, but the claim has been made pseudonymously that it was your instructor Mr Pierce.

I am not speaking for Wikipedia in any official capacity (I have no organizational official standing) other than as a user and editor. I would like to request that your department investigate and determine whether your instructor did in fact request or instruct his students to vandalize the articles.

While vandalism of Wikipedia articles is in most cases trivially easy (we do, in fact, allow essentially anyone not already identified as a vandal to edit almost all of the articles), that does not mean that doing so as part of an organized or directed campaign is ethical, moral, and perhaps not legal. If Mr Pierce did in fact direct his students to do that, I would hope and expect that your department will take strong actions in response. Doing this as a study to see how fast vandalism is fixed has been done before as legitimate research; asking students to do it informally to demonstrate that it's a potentially flawed information source is at best ethically challenged.

As I said before, I have no more information to go on or give you than the comment made pseudonymously by the new Wikipedia account. I cannot vouch for the accuracy of that information and hope that you do not act until you have ascertained what actually was done. However, I urge you to investigate rapidly and forcefully to determine what, if anything, actually transpired here.

If it turns out that this was an intentional misdirection and that Mr Pierce was uninvolved, I would like to apologize in advance for any pain this request causes. However, the incident is serious and does require proper response. I give you this information and request that you investigate fairly and promptly.

Thank you for your attention in this matter.

-- -george william herbert