Dear Community:
The volume of corporate vanity/vandalism which is showing up on Wikipedia is overwhelming. At the office, we are receiving dozens of phone calls *per week* about company, organization, and marketing edits which are reverted, causing the non-notable, but self-aggrandizing authors, to scream bloody murder. This is as it should be. However, I am issuing a call to arms to the community to act in a much more draconian fashion in response to corporate self-editing and vanity page creation. This is simply out of hand, and we need your help.
We are the #14 website in the world. We are a big target. If we are to remain true to our encyclopedic mission, this kind of nonsense cannot be tolerated. This means the administrators and new page patrol need to be clear when they see new usernames and page creation which are blatantly commercial - shoot on sight. There should be no question that someone who claims to have a "famous movie studio" and has exactly 2 Google hits - both their Myspace page - they get nuked. Ban users who promulgate such garbage for a significant period of time. They need to be encouraged to avoid the temptation to recreate their article, thereby raising the level of damage and wasted time they incur.
Some of you might think regular policy and VfD is the way to go. I am here to tell you it is not enough. We are losing the battle for encyclopedic content in favor of people intent on hijacking Wikipedia for their own memes. This scourge is a serious waste of time and energy. We must put a stop to this now.
Thank you for your help.
-Brad Patrick User:BradPatrick Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.
Maybe we need some kind of speedy deletion process for organisations which are not notable, but which do assert notability. Of course, there would need to be safeguards - perhaps allow any established editor (>500 edits for the sake of argument) to remove the tag or have the article undeleted without discussion, like a prod undeletion. This would mean that we could remove many more articles about nn organisations and people without having to go through a five-day AfD, but anything which was notable enough for at least one established editor to support it would still get the benefit of full AfD process and discussion.
On 29/09/06, Brad Patrick bpatrick@wikimedia.org wrote:
Dear Community:
The volume of corporate vanity/vandalism which is showing up on Wikipedia is overwhelming. At the office, we are receiving dozens of phone calls *per week* about company, organization, and marketing edits which are reverted, causing the non-notable, but self-aggrandizing authors, to scream bloody murder. This is as it should be. However, I am issuing a call to arms to the community to act in a much more draconian fashion in response to corporate self-editing and vanity page creation. This is simply out of hand, and we need your help.
We are the #14 website in the world. We are a big target. If we are to remain true to our encyclopedic mission, this kind of nonsense cannot be tolerated. This means the administrators and new page patrol need to be clear when they see new usernames and page creation which are blatantly commercial - shoot on sight. There should be no question that someone who claims to have a "famous movie studio" and has exactly 2 Google hits
- both their Myspace page - they get nuked. Ban users who promulgate
such garbage for a significant period of time. They need to be encouraged to avoid the temptation to recreate their article, thereby raising the level of damage and wasted time they incur.
Some of you might think regular policy and VfD is the way to go. I am here to tell you it is not enough. We are losing the battle for encyclopedic content in favor of people intent on hijacking Wikipedia for their own memes. This scourge is a serious waste of time and energy. We must put a stop to this now.
Thank you for your help.
-Brad Patrick User:BradPatrick Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.
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On Fri, 29 Sep 2006 12:53:02 -0400, Brad Patrick bpatrick@wikimedia.org wrote:
The volume of corporate vanity/vandalism which is showing up on Wikipedia is overwhelming.
I hear you. Perhaps that long discussed speedy criterion for "advertisements masquerading as articles" should be introduced.
Guy (JzG)
On Oct 1, 2006, at 4:50 AM, Guy Chapman aka JzG wrote:
On Fri, 29 Sep 2006 12:53:02 -0400, Brad Patrick bpatrick@wikimedia.org wrote:
The volume of corporate vanity/vandalism which is showing up on Wikipedia is overwhelming.
I hear you. Perhaps that long discussed speedy criterion for "advertisements masquerading as articles" should be introduced.
Oh God, please no.
You have no idea what that would become in the hands of some of our admins.
-Phil
I'd be happy with one that explicitly allows deletion of obviously promotional material written by the owner or an employee of the company. The person who wrote it is often a good indication of the amount of vanity it contains.
Anyway, if we can't get it through on CSD, we should indeed have some company vanity patrol. We have the "Do not write articles about yourself, your business, etc" message, so we shouldn't be afraid of biting newbies. It's out in the open what they are and are not supposed to do. We can always leave a message to the obviously well-intended newbies who tried to write encyclopedically, but who's subject isn't suitable.
Mgm
On 10/1/06, Phil Sandifer Snowspinner@gmail.com wrote:
On Oct 1, 2006, at 4:50 AM, Guy Chapman aka JzG wrote:
On Fri, 29 Sep 2006 12:53:02 -0400, Brad Patrick bpatrick@wikimedia.org wrote:
The volume of corporate vanity/vandalism which is showing up on Wikipedia is overwhelming.
I hear you. Perhaps that long discussed speedy criterion for "advertisements masquerading as articles" should be introduced.
Oh God, please no.
You have no idea what that would become in the hands of some of our admins.
-Phil _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@Wikipedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Phil Sandifer wrote:
On Oct 1, 2006, at 4:50 AM, Guy Chapman aka JzG wrote:
I hear you. Perhaps that long discussed speedy criterion for "advertisements masquerading as articles" should be introduced.
Oh God, please no. You have no idea what that would become in the hands of some of our admins.
Is there anything we can do about *that* problem? If we can't at least document our norms for fear of the documentation being misused, that sounds like a precarious situation.
(In particular, if an argument for not writing down a policy is that people are supposed to be flexible but reasonable and, most of the time, do the same sorts of thing that the hypothetical written-down policy would stipulate, but if the additional fear is that, once the policy got written down, it would be misused by unreasonable people, what does that say about their behavior in the absence of the written-down policy?)
On 01/10/06, Steve Summit scs@eskimo.com wrote:
Phil Sandifer wrote:
On Oct 1, 2006, at 4:50 AM, Guy Chapman aka JzG wrote:
I hear you. Perhaps that long discussed speedy criterion for "advertisements masquerading as articles" should be introduced.
Oh God, please no. You have no idea what that would become in the hands of some of our admins.
Is there anything we can do about *that* problem? If we can't at least document our norms for fear of the documentation being misused, that sounds like a precarious situation.
Write guidelines as guidelines, go out of your way to avoid didactic language? This was an important stylistic consideration in the proposed rewrite of [[Wikipedia:Blocking policy]].
"Convention as at [date] includes ..." might be worth a try.
- d.
Act in a much more draconian fashion
What is it with my username and its various variations?
When they see new usernames and page creation which are blatantly commercial - shoot on sight.
I'm sure too many sysops are being cautious about such actions. If there's general agreement, this needs to be emphasised as policy to sysops for it to really take effect.
In terms of patrolling this, could we somehow tag all corporation newpages with a specific category? I develop a vandal fighting tool called MWT (See [[WP:MWT]]), essentially a lightweight recent changes patroller on wheels. One of its strengths is being able to easily grab recent changes to articles in a particular category (actually a feature of recent changes itself, but lacking from other vandal fighters). I'm sure we could release a build for patrolling articles on corporations for vanity.
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I've replaced the G11 that was added with (what I think is) a better-worded A9. The current text of it (assuming no reverts) is:
'Vanity articles. An article about a real person or corporation which appears to have been written by the subject, by one of its employees, or by a third party hired by the subject to write the article, regardless of the notability or otherwise of the subject.'
This solves the concern that admins would use the 'shoot on sight' as an excuse to delete good articles which they thought were 'non-notable'. My A9 draft makes it clear that an article has to be a VANITY article to qualify - and that its notability is not the issue. Thoughts anyone?
Cynical
On 01/10/06, David Russell webmaster@davidarussell.co.uk wrote:
'Vanity articles. An article about a real person or corporation which appears to have been written by the subject, by one of its employees, or by a third party hired by the subject to write the article, regardless of the notability or otherwise of the subject.'
Looks relatively robust against the sincere variety of rules lawyer (I could be wrong) and seems to follow sensibly from the basic content policies.
- d.
On 10/1/06, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
On 01/10/06, David Russell webmaster@davidarussell.co.uk wrote:
'Vanity articles. An article about a real person or corporation which appears to have been written by the subject, by one of its employees, or by a third party hired by the subject to write the article, regardless of the notability or otherwise of the subject.'
Looks relatively robust against the sincere variety of rules lawyer (I could be wrong) and seems to follow sensibly from the basic content policies.
The problem I would say is that it's really easy to confuse an article written by a third party for one written by the subject.
I've submitted a number of articles on freeware, for instance, and had them deleted as "vanity". I also know of a case where an article on a professor which was copied straight out of the Vanity Fair Magazine was listed on VfD as "vanity", and it received a significant majority of votes for deletion as "obvious vanity" at the time I went to Borders and noticed the plagiarism.
It seems to me that it's far to difficult to recognize which articles "have been written by the subject, by one of its employees, or by a third party hired by the subject to write the article" without having a large number of false positives or a large number of missed negatives.
I think it makes much more sense to let people remove those parts of articles they feel are not written from a neutral point of view, or are not verifiable. If it turns out there is nothing left, well, then an article might be a candidate for unilateral removal.
Anthony
On 1 Oct 2006, at 16:42, Anthony wrote:
On 10/1/06, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
On 01/10/06, David Russell webmaster@davidarussell.co.uk wrote:
'Vanity articles. An article about a real person or corporation which appears to have been written by the subject, by one of its employees, or by a third party hired by the subject to write the article, regardless of the notability or otherwise of the subject.'
Looks relatively robust against the sincere variety of rules lawyer (I could be wrong) and seems to follow sensibly from the basic content policies.
The problem I would say is that it's really easy to confuse an article written by a third party for one written by the subject.
I've submitted a number of articles on freeware, for instance, and had them deleted as "vanity". I also know of a case where an article on a professor which was copied straight out of the Vanity Fair Magazine was listed on VfD as "vanity", and it received a significant majority of votes for deletion as "obvious vanity" at the time I went to Borders and noticed the plagiarism.
It seems to me that it's far to difficult to recognize which articles "have been written by the subject, by one of its employees, or by a third party hired by the subject to write the article" without having a large number of false positives or a large number of missed negatives.
I think it makes much more sense to let people remove those parts of articles they feel are not written from a neutral point of view, or are not verifiable. If it turns out there is nothing left, well, then an article might be a candidate for unilateral removal.
This sounds sensible to me.
We would benefit from a more sophisticated measure of likely article quality, related to the number of independent editors and frequency of edits. If we get the formula right, it will apply to all articles. Vanity is only one possible cause of NPOV.
On 10/1/06, Stephen Streater sbstreater@mac.com wrote:
This sounds sensible to me.
We would benefit from a more sophisticated measure of likely article quality, related to the number of independent editors and frequency of edits. If we get the formula right, it will apply to all articles. Vanity is only one possible cause of NPOV.
Unfortunatly most authors have very few distinct editors. .. And it's hard to differentiate editors who simply fixed a typographical mistake and editors who actually read the content (it's not to hard to find examples of people copyediting fairly obvious vandalism in Wikipedia. :( )...
As a result coming up with good metrics are hard, and coming up with ones which couldn't easily be gamed .. maybe almost impossible.
On 10/1/06, Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com wrote:
Unfortunatly most authors have very few distinct editors. .. And it's
s/authors/articles/
Sorry.
On Sun, 1 Oct 2006 17:23:21 -0400, "Gregory Maxwell" gmaxwell@gmail.com wrote:
Unfortunatly most authors have very few distinct editors. .. And it's hard to differentiate editors who simply fixed a typographical mistake and editors who actually read the content (it's not to hard to find examples of people copyediting fairly obvious vandalism in Wikipedia.
True. At the risk of losing a treasured friend, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rob_Kell - I believe he meets the bio criteria (as an author of an article in Britannica if nothing else) but I would be amazed if more than a handful of other people will ever edit that article.
Guy (JzG)
This solves the concern that admins would use the 'shoot on sight' as an excuse to delete good articles which they thought were 'non- notable'. My A9 draft makes it clear that an article has to be a VANITY article to qualify - and that its notability is not the issue. Thoughts anyone?
One major problem - to my mind, an article written by the subject that is notable, sourced, etc ought not be deleted.
The problem word here is "appears," which is going to get ignored as people go on lengthy hunts to make the connections so that they can show an apparent commercial motive and thus whack the article.
This apparentness needs to be firmly situated in the article text itself. That is to say, "An article about a real person or corporation that reads as though it was written by the subject..."
This situates the problem firmly as a content problem, which is key in content policies.
-Phil
On 10/1/06, Phil Sandifer Snowspinner@gmail.com wrote:
One major problem - to my mind, an article written by the subject that is notable, sourced, etc ought not be deleted.
[snip]
With 'only' 1.3 millionish articles I suppose it's not TOO unlikely that there are still some seriously notable living people without articles who might want to start one themselves...
BUT...
If a person is notable, then some unrelated person will eventually come by and write an article.
Thus, while the deletion of a self authored article about a notable person might be a loss, it isn't much of a loss. Wikipedia won't be done in a day.
Also: an honest and sincere person probably would have a hard time figuring out if they, their company, or their client is notable enough for inclusion in Wikipedia (since we, often, can't figure it out without a poll) ... notability just isn't a good criteria to direct people about self authored articles. ... But no-self-articles is clear and can be followed by anyone who is acting honestly.
Some basic thoughts: 1) There are more non-notable people than notable by far. 2) The desire to have a wikipedia article about yourself is at best weakly and more likely *inversely* related to your actual notability. 3) If someone/thing is really notable a mostly disinterested third party will eventually want to write about it.
Given the above it would appear that a solid rejection of self-initiated articles is sound policy.
On Oct 1, 2006, at 5:20 PM, Gregory Maxwell wrote:
Thus, while the deletion of a self authored article about a notable person might be a loss, it isn't much of a loss. Wikipedia won't be done in a day.
You misunderstand my concern - it's not merely that good content will be eliminated, though that is a problem. It's that making vanity- hunting a priority in any way encourages assumptions of bad faith - every article on a person or corporation becomes something we have to try to sniff out the creator of.
Content decisions should not require paranoid checking of the contributors.
-Phil
On 01/10/06, Phil Sandifer Snowspinner@gmail.com wrote:
You misunderstand my concern - it's not merely that good content will be eliminated, though that is a problem. It's that making vanity- hunting a priority in any way encourages assumptions of bad faith - every article on a person or corporation becomes something we have to try to sniff out the creator of. Content decisions should not require paranoid checking of the contributors.
Yes. Are we now rescinding the core hard policy "Assume good faith" because Danny and Brad don't scale?
- d.