Most professors warn their students to avoid citing Wikipedia as a source. Others, apparently, have their OAK IDs traced to anonymous Wikipedia edits.
Doug Bolon, associate professor of Health Sciences and last year's chairman of the Intercollegiate Athletics Committee, falls into both categories. Bolon's OAK ID was traced to several edits to Ohio University's Wikipedia page, which had earlier been edited by Save OU Sports, the coalition of student athletes whose teams were cut last year, to include information about the cuts.
For Bolon, or any other university employee, to edit the page would be unethical. Such action borders on censorship.
Granted, a Wikipedia administrator called Save OU Sports' edits slanted and said that they had to be removed. But that job should not have been done by someone connected to the university. Let other Wikipedia users do the policing.
Bolon said that he was not the one who made the edits; rather, it was his son who posted things like Save OU Sports and the rest of his club continue to act like a whiny group of entitled little kids. You lost your sports ... get over it! He also stated, quite paradoxically, that he is completely ignorant of Wikipedia, but warns his students not to use it, and claimed that it is no one's business what his son does.
Aside from the ethical issues and the fact that Bolon's son sounds remarkably like a grumpy old man when he writes that The entitlement of today's college students astounds me at times and makes me worry about who will be leading the world in a few years
there remains an even more worrisome aspect to this situation: Why in the world does Bolon's son have access to his father's OAK account? Presumably, this account includes information like student grades, as well as private correspondence with students through Bolon's e-mail account. This seems like a violation of the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act waiting to happen ' and all OU needs is another instance of mishandling of private information.
When someone outside of the university can potentially gain access to private student information, it is indeed students' business what a professor's son does online. We can only hope Bolon was lying, and that his own edits of OU's Wikipedia page were simply the result of a lapse in ethical judgement.
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Professor sticks to his claim that son had made alleged university page edits
