Trillium, they were not writing to " bring the apparently self-submitted but failed drafts of articles of persons, organizations, and businesses up to compliance with Wikipedia standards ". They were mostly posting the same rejected article, supplemented sometimes by references that made it look more impressive, but actually had little if any relationship with the articles subject. They did act to "get them live", but they did it by subterfuge, using various tricks to bypass the usual process of new page patrol and other review. T
I personally examined all the articles; so did several other people with long experience in knowing what passes WPs deletion processes. Out of the over 200, I was able to identify 3 where it might have been possible to write a satisfactory article; other people spotted a few additional ones. The remainder were on topics where nobody could do so. If the perpetrators of this scheme did know Wikipedia, as they claimed to in their sales pitches, they would have known this also, and known that they were asking for payments for what they would have known they could not deliver. If they had no such knowledge, they were making false claims of expertise. In either case, they were sufficiently clever to make no guarantee.
Are you still " not seeing the harm"?
Sometimes "well-off Westerners" have done similar things, though we have had no previous example of such blatant and extensive extortion, and we have hundreds of cases where we have proceeded equally against them.
Matt, it isn't WP they are going to sue. It's the people who defrauded them. It isn't removing this material that might give us a bad reputation; it would have been the failure to remove them. No technical measure will prevent similar attacks on our integrity, though ones under discussion will make it more difficult for naive beginners. Only vigilance by WPedians who are willing to fully and knowledgeably examine contributions will have any substantial effect. But we do in fact have something to be ashamed of, which is our previous negligence: there are probably 100,000 or so articles not challenged in the past that need to be skeptically revisited.
On Thu, Sep 3, 2015 at 10:04 AM, Trillium Corsage trillium2014@yandex.com wrote:
Response to Peter Southwood's question.
Are the investigators acting in bad faith? Does a mob know it is a mob, or is it that the people in it have lost the capacity for self-critical and analytic thought? On the one Orangemoody article I've been able to review so far, Bosch Sensortec (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bosch_Sensortec), I found it to be a solidly-sourced, neutrally-toned, and informative "stub." It's currently being derided by Orangemoody investigators as promotional copy-and-paste of an alleged company press release (which has not been pointed to) and further claimed without visible evidence to have been contracted out by Orangemoody to a low-wage author through Elance.
The answer is that I don't know; in order to examine it further I'd like to view the deleted articles to see for myself whether they were actually promotional and unsourced obvious advocacy articles. Or if, like Bosch Sensortec, they tended actually to be pretty good. Unfortunately the Orangemoody investigation's team has decided they must remain unavailable to the public, allegedly to protect the article subjects from repeat alleged victimization.
Trillium Corsage
03.09.2015, 07:55, "Peter Southwood" <email clipped>:
Do you really think they may be acting in bad faith? Peter
-----Original Message----- From: wikimedia-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org [mailto:
wikimedia-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Trillium Corsage
Sent: Wednesday, 02 September 2015 10:58 PM To: Wikimedia Mailing List Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] "Wikipedia rocked by 'rogue editors'
blackmail scam targeting small businesses and celebrities"
The Orangemoody network seems to have been providing a service: bring
the apparently self-submitted but failed drafts of articles of persons, organizations, and businesses up to compliance with Wikipedia standards and get them live, then accept a previously negotiated fee. After some months of safeguarding those articles for free, they would offer to continue doing so at a monthly rate. I'm not seeing the harm.
Oh, I'd like to check if the articles were actually unduly promotional
and POV and so forth, unfortunately the erstwhile investigators have deleted them so no-one except administrators may see. Which comes in handy for the investigators, because it means everybody must go by their characterizations of the articles.
I heard a murmur that Orangemoody would actually request deletion of its
own articles if the subject failed to agree to the monthly fee, but Risker said this vaguely as if there were only a couple or few examples of this.
As well, though the IP addresses have not been disclosed, one of the
accused Orangemoody accounts belongs to a Bangladeshi editor of three or more years. Raising the question of whether geolocation to Bangladesh and other nearby poor countries was a clue to the investigators to connect the Orangemoody accounts. Which on confirmation would raise the further question of whether the entire case was almost exclusively comparatively well-off westerners destroying the business and livelihood of impoverished Bangladeshis and other easterners just trying to put food on the table for their kids.
Trillium Corsage
02.09.2015, 21:53, "Matt Campbell" <email clipped>:
Glad to hear it.
<text clipped for brevity>
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