Given that it’s completely trivial to make new pseudonymous accounts how
would you propose even remotely accurate data collection to measure paid
editing?
If we are worried about the impact of paid editors on the integrity of
content, we are much better served investing even more in efforts to
dramatically strengthen our volunteer community’s ability to defend the
projects. That means better software to help each editor do more, making it
fun, easy and welcoming for new contributors, and fighting the attrition in
admins and other functionaries. If our volunteer community was larger and
healthier, the threat of paid interference would be less scary.
On Tue, Sep 7, 2021 at 7:20 PM Samuel Klein <meta.sj(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Aha -- I was pointed to en:wp's List of paid
editing companies
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_paid_editing_companies>.
(thanks!) This is a great resource and deserves to be better linked. The
page is semi-active - 4 additions in the last month, including the Olaf
case. I've cleaned it up a bit and linked it to the German page. This
really needs some automated scripting and tracking, at the scale of ORES...
Is there any routine analysis / stats compiled of edits associated with
these orgs, or of their activity online?
On Tue, Sep 7, 2021 at 2:19 PM Samuel Klein <meta.sj(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Jan Böhmermann
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_B%C3%B6hmermann>
published an amazing expose on political WP editing in Germany; it gets
good around 15 minutes in
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FNsTaKwyAzI&t=900s>. In the video he
exposed the workings of a paid editing farm run (by Olaf Kosinsky (
Wikidata <https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q30108329>; CheckUser discussion
<https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProjekt_Umgang_mit_bezahltem_Schreiben/Verdachtsf%C3%A4lle/Olaf_Kosinsky>
; archived PR-services site
<https://web.archive.org/web/20210416110100/https://kosinsky.eu/>), an
excellent long-time editor with over 3 million edits.
*We need to distinguish paid editing from general COI editing*. Paid
editing is COI editing by professionals, who have strong external
incentives to persist, no leeway in the outcome they are aiming
for, experience in doing this in dozens of cases, and may have colleagues
who can drop in as 'uninvolved' editors to forge consensus or social
proof.[1]
This is one of our great recurring challenges, siphoning off both our
reputation and our community. There are many things we can do about paid
editing, starting with maintaining *paid-editing metrics and a dashboard*
of known and estimated paid editing. We can estimate its prevalence by the
availabiity of services online[2]; and look for patterns of such editing on
wiki. Even with large error margins, this would be a step above simply
waiting for outbreaks to be discovered and reacting to the visible bits of
the iceberg.
What sort of metrics like this do we have already? Who is working on
such things?
Since the above video came out, de:wp started a table of WP editing
services
<https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProjekt_Umgang_mit_bezahltem_Schreiben/F%C3%A4lle#Wikipedia-Web-Agenturen_auf_dem_Markt>.
It currently includes an initial dozen examples, with no estimate of
activity (the 1 account known to be associated with each is in most cases
blocked; but most have active websites soliciting work) This would be
useful in all languages.
SJ
[1] as Melmann wrote
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(policy)/Archive_167#Limiting_the_scope_of_COI_edit_requests>
recently:
"*in my experience, **all the most difficult edits are WP:PAID
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:PAID>**. Most non-paid COI
comes from a place of desire to make things better, and often can be
relatively easily guided towards a better place... [or] it is relatively
easy to use existing enforcement mechanisms to to correct and ultimately
control their behaviours. PR professionals, on the other hand, are subtle
and sometimes downright deceptive, and it takes lots of effort to check
their edits when most of the time you lack context and expertise and you
really have to research in depth to see their edits for what they really
are. I think that one of the fundamental mistakes of the current policy is
lumping paid editors with general COI editing as paid editors are
fundamentally playing on a different level in terms of PR expertise and
incentives*"
[2] Just searching for this online led to ads from dozens of services.
The first 10 below seem to be clones of the same service (perhaps run by
the same farm)
Elite Wiki Writers
Wiki Curators
Wiki Genies
Wikipedia Legends
Wiki Page Writing
Wiki Page Creator
WikiProfs
Wiki Specialist LLC
Wiki Writers Workshop
Wikipedia Publisher
Wikipedia Services
360 Ghostwriting
Contentfly
Otter PR
Premium Content Writing
ReputationX
Upwork
--
Samuel Klein @metasj w:user:sj +1 617 529 4266
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