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:
(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(a)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(a)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(a)alk.edu.pl>
wrote:
> On Fri, Apr 14, 2017 at 5:23 AM, Gnangarra <gnangarra(a)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.
>
> dj
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