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(a)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(a)lists.wikimedia.org [mailto:
wikimedia-l-bounces(a)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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