Gabe highlights the issue
- its not easy to identify a paid editor with one or two edits only - Google home is the service creating the issue - this issue is just that first sentence.
flagged revisions would work here to stop the immediacy but would never guarantee that a good faith tidy up by an editor reviewing and edit would actually identify the problem. Ok a flagged revision bot could do a cursory check and pass all non lead paragraph edits to reduce the backlogs but it still needs a human and one thats skilled to identify paid editors.
To solve the issue maybe we need google to be looking at a cache of an article not the current version, that both works for us in managing this issue and for google in preventing its service being ambushed... We'd have to create a way to for humans to review leads less than x weeks old.
This ambush editing isnt the same as paid editing where all article content is susceptible and should be treated differently, now one has succeeded we can assume others will also try then without even warming up the beans we can be assured that someone will play the negative side of the game as well. ie "Whopper is not as popular as the big mac made fresh on demand at mcdonalds"
On 15 April 2017 at 18:58, Gabriel Thullen gabriel@thullen.com wrote:
Paid editors have been adding content to Wikipedia for a long time. Some of them might even be doing so in accordance with the rules and guidelines, but that is not what makes this case stand out. The PR agency did a total of three edits, and the third one managed to pass under the radar. They deliberately inserted text with minor grammatical errors to bait an editor into fixing it up while at the same time leaving it as an introductory sentence. The TV ad came out one week later. What disturbs me is that Wikipedia is being instrumentalized by these big corporations, and we do not need to debate whether the text is factually exact, if it is sourced, or if it is too peacocky. Most of us are volunteer editors, and we must make sure that we do not have to waste our time rooting out these malicious edits. The PR company wrote the text to make it look like it was put there by some ordinary "grammatically challenged" fanboy. A contributor reverts the edit the first time around, saying rightly that it was too promotional, then fixes up the grammatical errors the second time around. Other contributors would no longer touch the article seeing that a community member is already watching over it. We will have the check out the introductory sentences in hundreds of articles. When somebody asks Google Home "what is xyz..." in their own voice, Google will very obligingly spew out the Wikipedia article. IMHA, that is the real issue here. These paid editors are quite willing to turn Wikipedia into the worlds biggest high-tech distributor of junk mail.
Gabe
On Sat, Apr 15, 2017 at 8:36 AM, Peter Southwood < peter.southwood@telkomsa.net> wrote:
So the Americas favorite burger should have been "America's Favorite Burger(tm)". Agreed. Cheers, Peter
-----Original Message----- From: Wikimedia-l [mailto:wikimedia-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of FRED BAUDER Sent: Saturday, April 15, 2017 8:21 AM To: Wikimedia Mailing List Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] [arbcom-l] Where is WMF with pursuing
companies
that offer paid editing services
"The Whopper, also known as America’s favorite burger, " is a problem as it implies that the Whopper is the favorite burger of the American
public.
Perhaps it is, but that is a trademark, not the result of a survey. The other stuff, "a flame-[[grilling|grilled]] patty made with 100% beef with no preservatives, no fillers and is topped with daily sliced tomatoes and onions, fresh lettuce, pickles, ketchup and mayo, served on a soft sesame seed bun." happens to be factually true and cannot be said of the
products
of, say, McDonalds where the "fixings" arrive in delivery trucks.
Fred Bauder
On Sat, 15 Apr 2017 08:06:50 +0200 "Peter Southwood" peter.southwood@telkomsa.net wrote:
James, Which parts of those statements to you consider factually inaccurate, and which parts do you consider misleading in some other way? Cheers, Peter
-----Original Message----- From: Wikimedia-l [mailto:wikimedia-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of James Heilman Sent: Friday, April 14, 2017 5:32 PM To: Wikimedia Mailing List Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] [arbcom-l] Where is WMF with pursuing companies that offer paid editing services
Wikipedia is not for sale. We are not simply another advertising venue available to the corporations of the world. We have mechanisms for corporations to suggest changes to our content and it is called the talk page.
Lets look at the changes likely made by Burger King staff in more detail:
In this edit this sentence "The Whopper is a burger, consisting of a flame-grilled patty made with 100% beef with no preservatives, no fillers and is topped with daily sliced tomatoes and onions, fresh lettuce, pickles, ketchup and mayo, served on a soft sesame seed bun."
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Whopper&type=revision&diff= 773836335&oldid=773833110 was added not once but twice. And than was added again following its first removal.
In this edit this sentence "The Whopper, also known as America’s favorite burger, has a flame-[[grilling|grilled]] patty made with 100% beef with no preservatives, no fillers and is topped with daily sliced tomatoes and onions, fresh lettuce, pickles, ketchup and mayo, served on a soft sesame seed bun. Whopper and America’s Favorite Burger are trademarks of Burger King Corporation. <https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Whopper&diff=
773807497&oldid=773585358>"
was added.
One of the accounts did not disclosed their relationship to the company in question. And yes this is spam, so they did spam Wikipedia. See [[WP:PEACOCK]] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style/Words_to_watch #Puffery and [[WP:NPOV]] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Five_pillars, the latter of which is pillar number 2.
This is not the first time the marketing department at a multi billion dollar company has tried to adjust our content for the company's / shareholder's gains. A few years back a couple of the heads of marketing at Medtronic https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/08/wikipedia-editors -for-pay/393926/, along with a number of physicians one of whom they had paid more than a quarter of a million dollars, tried to remove the best available evidence regarding vertebroplasty, a procedure which medicare spent at the time more than a billion dollars a year on. Half a dozen paid editors working together can easily get a majority in many of our decision making processes.
Our readers deserve a Wikipedia which is written independently of the subject mater in question. Our readers have been harmed by undisclosed paid editing in the past. These are individuals typically less savvy and less wealthy than the executives at a large corporation. I am sorry but our readers are the ones that deserve our attention and our protection. We already have the Wifione case http://www.newsweek.com/2015/04/03/manipulating-wikipedia-promote-bogu s-business-school-316133.html were Wikipedia was used to promote an unethical Indian university and therefore we played a role in misleading the students who applied. We must do better.
James
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. As Andy said rather than biting and creating arguments amongst ourselves would it not be better to have used the opportunity to benefit the community in a positive way.
On 14 April 2017 at 18:44, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
On 14 April 2017 at 11:38, Andy Mabbett
andy@pigsonthewing.org.uk wrote:
A far better (and less WP:BITEy) outcome would be to get then to
Pretty sure WP:BITE doesn't apply in the case of deliberate abuse for clear purposes of spamming.
- d.
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