P.S. The paragraph ending "instead of backsliding, and" should have been followed by "proposing cuts to the payroll tax."
On Fri, Apr 14, 2017 at 12:54 PM James Salsman jsalsman@gmail.com wrote:
Is it better to think of the problem as paid editing or organized advocacy for persuasion at the expense of accuracy regarding all costs and benefits?
Burger King is a commercial enterprise which makes money by mass production of beef products, which require more water and produce more greenhouse gas per calorie at retail marked-up prices than more frugal and healthy alternatives, but their Wikipedia-focused PR budget is tiny compared to producers of other products which similarly do not have a good cost-benefit ratio in terms of money or productive years of life.
Some of the strongest such abusers of organized advocacy don't spend a lot of money on Wikipedia editors, but they do promote a narrative that anti-science types are suppressing information about them because of Luddite unreasonableness, which causes the many editors who want to defend science and their poorly-perceived conceptions of modernity to come to their defense. But, like Burger King, they often sell products which cost more than their benefits.
Examples beyond beef include: fossil fuels, nuclear power, neonicotinoid pesticides, and tax cuts for the wealthy. Luckily, lab grown beef is likely to soon provide suitable replacements for those who want to eat beef without the environmental, ethical, and some of the health externalities. But will it go the way of the texturized vegetable protein of the 1970s? I recently discussed the solution to the fossil fuels problem on this list. (Sorry I got the name of the King of Saudi Arabia with whom FDR met wrong, but I highly recommend the "history teachers edit" of the BBC "Bitter Lake" documentary on YouTube for those who don't want to watch the whole thing.) Nuclear simply can't compete in the marketplace against renewables. Advocacy organizations are telling the story about the true costs of various pesticides, and those are making their way into MEDRS sources.
But I have no idea if Wikipedia is strong enough to overcome the self-organizing advocacy for greater income inequality, which is a very serious health issue as per unopposed MEDRS sources, but the fake news narrative is being pushed:
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/04/trump-budget-director-wants-hig...
https://www.gc.cuny.edu/CUNY_GC/media/CUNY-Graduate-Center/PDF/Centers/LIS/M...
http://talknicer.com/ehip.pdf (full MEDRS-grade, with no substantial opposition in other secondary sources.)
My opinion is that when issues like these impact the Mission, including the extent that we can effectively educate, the Foundation should get involved and do everything they can to set things right. But are these appropriate issues for Legal, or Communications?
Would it help if the Communications team did a blog series on solutions from the last U.S. presidential election prior to 9/11, when Buchanan was Trump's opponent on the far right, taxes were set to be increased on the rich by deficit hawks including Trump, and single payer was Trump's preferred health care plan? Trump has recently signaled a return to his 1999 roots, by demoting Bannon, demanding a superior health care plan instead of backsliding, and
Yes, these are political issues, but they are about issues which directly impact the ability to execute the mission, and are only incidentally about particular candidates. But they are also extremely crucial to restoring our a civil society from the distopia of the use of state power against the rights of individuals, and the abuse of the encyclopedia with organized advocacy for persuasion over accuracy, in persuit of extralegal profits.
On Fri, Apr 14, 2017 at 11:36 AM Risker risker.wp@gmail.com wrote:
I'm just a bit agog at the idea that this article became "advertising" when Burger King made the connection using Google Home. Since its very first edit, it has been an advertisement for this product. It may not have been intended that way, but that is the reality. Now it's almost 4200 words long - probably the longest writing on this single product anywhere outside of the Burger King home offices - and we're pretending that it isn't an ad.
I know it is terribly disillusioning, but an awful lot of our articles are advertisements. There have always been LOTS of paid editors on English Wikipedia. It has never meant that the editor was editing primarily in a promotional manner - in many cases they were facilitating the ability for others to include promotional materials, and I've spotted what in retrospect were obvious paid edits going back to 2001. There are people who I've identified as likely paid editors who were instrumental in our early discussions about notability. There were people who "worked with" external organizations to get access to their commercial repositories of images and information - with huge financial benefits to the owners of those repositories; sometimes this was innocent, with the editors trying to gain access to hard-to-find material, but the end result was the same.
The article is an advertisement. It was one from its first edit (which included product prices) and it is one today. It's good copy, but it's still an ad. I'll guarantee this isn't the first or last time that a paid editor made significant changes to the article. And it's just like thousands and thousands of other articles that turn consumer products into "encyclopedic content". A 300-word discussion of Burger King's most notable product would be appropriate in the main article, or even in a daughter article about Burger King's products. But as it stands, we have literally hundreds of thousands of words about various Burger King products: lists, articles about individual products, summaries, advertising campaigns, etc. These are all advertisements. Don't blame Burger King for leveraging exactly what we're doing ourselves.
Risker/Anne
On 14 April 2017 at 12:39, Gabriel Thullen gabriel@thullen.com wrote:
This advertising campaign is particularly interesting, it appears that
this
is the first time we can talk about an exploit (as is said in computer security). It has been done once so it can be done again.
What worries me here is that an advertising campaign like this one,
mixing
TV advertising and content editing on Wikipedia is not a last minute
thing,
done on the spur of the moment. IMHA, the agency responsible for these
ads
must have experienced wikipedians working for them. These guys know how
the
community usually reacts. There is a lot of money involved and they know that they will have to get it right the first time the ads are aired.
This looks like a bait and trick, and we were all fooled by it (by we, I mean the wikipedia community of editors). The bait was the minor grammatical errors in the new introductory sentence. An experienced
editor
got tricked into correcting these missing spaces and such, and the text itself gets a "stamp of approval", and the edit done by a new account
will
no longer show up as the last modification done to the article.
These paid edits were made on April 4, the article started to be
vandalized
one week later, on April 11. But it looks like the campaign did not
create
the expected buzz because Google reacted quickly (just under 3 hours)
and
Google Home stopped reading out the Whopper article at the end of the advert.
The damage has been done. Theverge.com claims to have done such a modification on Wikipedia, to quote them "as did we, in a test
yesterday".
We will probably see more of this.
Gabe
On Fri, Apr 14, 2017 at 5:39 PM, Dariusz Jemielniak darekj@alk.edu.pl wrote:
On Fri, Apr 14, 2017 at 5:23 AM, Gnangarra gnangarra@gmail.com
wrote:
but they didnt spam, nor did they introduce any false hoods, or
remove
controversial content, they just put a description of the Whopper
for
the
opening sentence.
I agree with James on this one. They "described" their product in a
very
flattering way, unnecessarily introducing marketing jargon ("known as America's favorite", "00% beef with no preservatives", "no fillers",
"daily
sliced" etc.). It is spam and in the future, near rather than far, we
need
to start seriously thinking how we can combat such content attacks/hijacking. There are some similarities to our work with anti-harassment, but I hope we'll be able to develop a more dedicated approach to this problem, that the Burger King manifestation is only a single example of.
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