Hi David,
you say that "A large number of these persons are paid editors / PR -SEO "consultants" who have worked themselves up to positions of administrators". Although there is no clear evidence, there is a lot of mistrust and suspicion about "paid editing". Since people need to make a living, they find a way to market their skills, sometimes honestly and other times dishonestly. Not everybody can combine a job and take positions of responsibility in the movement without burning out after a while.
However you come to say that the WMF should "purge all rogue editors" and I consider that it is wrong to consider the WMF as the police of the site. It is right to have assistance in legal matters when the community requests it, but it would compromise the autonomy of the movement if the wmf would take an interventionist role. It would do more damage than good >> https://xkcd.com/1217/
I do advocate for an evolution in the culture of the community, but that cannot come from external sources, it has to come from volunteers themselves taking more responsibility, increasing the partnership with the professional arm of the movement, and creating in the process more trust to take appropriate action - and there is never a solid definition of what it constitutes.
When I started the tread I mentioned other volunteership models (like WOOF, or workaway) that could help create more trust. It is unclear if it could work for us, or if it would be scalable, but given the state of the movement perhaps it doesn't hurt so much to try new things and see how it goes.
Cheers, Micru
On Tue, Mar 1, 2016 at 2:58 AM, David Emrany david.emrany@gmail.com wrote:
Hi David,
It would be even nicer if we have more editors editing voluntarily instead of driving them away.
In the present scenario a University of Minnesota report by Aaron Halfaker says "The declining number of editors is not due to the site's inability to keep longtime editors contributing. Instead it can't keep new editors from sticking around, due to an abrasive collective of editors and a system that is crushingly bureaucratic." [1]
English Wikipedia's biggest problem today is its established syndicates of 90% white male "content creators" and their self-protecting policies. A large number of these persons are paid editors / PR -SEO "consultants" who have worked themselves up to positions of administrators, Arbs, and WMF Trustees and blatantly misused their positions and lied about their background / Conflicts of Interest.
I suggest its high time now for the WMF to directly take legal responsibility for the actions and policies of their (mostly) anonymous users and what is "hosted" on WMF servers.
I suggest the WMF should immediately institute a regime of verified identities for its users and administrators across all its projects, and purge all rogue editors (along with their self serving so-called""community" policies) who are damaging the credibility of its projects, including through paid editing.
David
[1] http://www.businessinsider.in/Wikipedia-Could-Degenerate-If-It-Cant-Fix-One-...
On 2/29/16, David Cuenca Tudela dacuetu@gmail.com wrote:
James, I think it is very nice to put measures against paid editing, but
it
would be nicer to put measures to get editors more free time to edit voluntarily... There are not that many suggestions on how to do it, so it could be that
it
cannot be done.
Cheers, Micru
On Mon, Feb 29, 2016 at 6:14 AM, James Heilman jmh649@gmail.com wrote:
With respect to paid promotional editing, I have done a bit work trying
to
address it. For example I reached out to Upworks the company behind
Elance
and Fiverr and they are interested in working together on this. Have
been
a little distracted and not sure if there is sufficient community or foundation support to move forwards.
With respect to using AI to detect paid editing, I spoke with Aaron Halfaker about the possibility in Nov 2015. What he needed was datasets
of
confirmed paid promotional editors. I have sent him some details. If others have details that would likely be useful. Things are in the very very early stages from what I understand.
-- James Heilman MD, CCFP-EM, Wikipedian
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