I'm genuinely curious how this was positioned to the IRB and if they were clear that what they were actually trying to accomplish was social engineering/manipulation.
Being a public university, I hope at some point they address this publicly as well as list the steps they are (hopefully) taking to ensure something like this doesn't happen again. I'm also not sure how they can continue to employ the prof in question and expect the open source community to ever trust them to act in good faith going forward.
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.
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?
Being a public university, I hope at some point they address this publicly as well as list the steps they are (hopefully) taking to ensure something like this doesn't happen again. I'm also not sure how they can continue to employ the prof in question and expect the open source community to ever trust them to act in good faith going forward.