Any one signed up yet? http://www.ereleases.com/pr/visibility-wikipedia-easier-43135
On 18 November 2010 11:30, wiki-list@phizz.demon.co.uk wrote:
Any one signed up yet? http://www.ereleases.com/pr/visibility-wikipedia-easier-43135
Founder:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alex_Konanykhin
I don't see what could possibly go wrong with this idea.
- d.
On Thu, Nov 18, 2010 at 14:09, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
On 18 November 2010 11:30, wiki-list@phizz.demon.co.uk wrote:
Any one signed up yet? http://www.ereleases.com/pr/visibility-wikipedia-easier-43135
I could find anything wrong in their code of ethics http://www.wikipediaexperts.com/codeofethics.html
-- Amir E. Aharoni
On Thu, Nov 18, 2010 at 14:09, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
On 18 November 2010 11:30, Â wiki-list@phizz.demon.co.uk wrote:
Any one signed up yet? http://www.ereleases.com/pr/visibility-wikipedia-easier-43135
I could find anything wrong in their code of ethics http://www.wikipediaexperts.com/codeofethics.html
-- Amir E. Aharoni
Neither do I, which bodes problems for the business. They hire you to break Wikipedia rules, not follow them. The question remains: is paid editing which does conform to Wikipedia policies and guidelines acceptable, even welcome?
Fred Bauder
On Thu, Nov 18, 2010 at 17:42, Fred Bauder fredbaud@fairpoint.net wrote:
On Thu, Nov 18, 2010 at 14:09, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
On 18 November 2010 11:30, Â wiki-list@phizz.demon.co.uk wrote:
Any one signed up yet? http://www.ereleases.com/pr/visibility-wikipedia-easier-43135
I couldn't find anything wrong in their code of ethics http://www.wikipediaexperts.com/codeofethics.html
Neither do I, which bodes problems for the business. They hire you to break Wikipedia rules, not follow them.
... Or rather, they hire someone to follow Wikipedia rules, because they don't have the time to read through dozens of our policy pages.
-- אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי · Amir Elisha Aharoni http://aharoni.wordpress.com "We're living in pieces, I want to live in peace." - T. Moore
On 18 November 2010 10:42, Fred Bauder fredbaud@fairpoint.net wrote:
On Thu, Nov 18, 2010 at 14:09, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
On 18 November 2010 11:30, Â wiki-list@phizz.demon.co.uk wrote:
Any one signed up yet? http://www.ereleases.com/pr/visibility-wikipedia-easier-43135
I could find anything wrong in their code of ethics http://www.wikipediaexperts.com/codeofethics.html
-- Amir E. Aharoni
Neither do I, which bodes problems for the business. They hire you to break Wikipedia rules, not follow them. The question remains: is paid editing which does conform to Wikipedia policies and guidelines acceptable, even welcome?
My teeth grate when I think that some people are getting paid to do what so many of us do simply for the joy of sharing. Having said that, I can certainly understand why some article subjects have tired of depending on our rather inefficient methods of ensuring that articles on notable subjects are accurate, unbiased, well-sourced and relatively complete. I have increasing difficulty rationalizing the deprecation of "paid" editing when a goodly number of what are assumed to be "paid-for" articles conform more closely to our policies and guidelines than what volunteer editors have created - or never got around to creating, for that matter. (I'll note this holds true for more than just English Wikipedia, as I have heard reports that there's significant bias on other Wikipedias as well.) Anyone who's tried to rebalance an article that gives undue weight to negative issues, or to remove salacious trivia about a BLP subject, knows how incredibly frustrating it can be to bring articles into line with policy.
Risker/Anne
It looks to me like they just get paid to get volunteers to work. Nice scheme. So it's not technically paid editing :)
"WikipediaExperts is a fast-growing network of experts which includes many Wikipedia editors. When a new assignment arrives we send it to the editor whose profile is the best fit with the subject of the article. We also provide support for pro-bono work of the participating editors."
On Fri, Nov 19, 2010 at 5:27 AM, Keegan Peterzell keegan.wiki@gmail.com wrote:
It looks to me like they just get paid to get volunteers to work. Nice scheme. So it's not technically paid editing :)
That sounds similar to the role of a few WMF staff...
-- John Vandenberg
On 18 November 2010 21:28, John Vandenberg jayvdb@gmail.com wrote:
On Fri, Nov 19, 2010 at 5:27 AM, Keegan Peterzell keegan.wiki@gmail.com wrote:
It looks to me like they just get paid to get volunteers to work. Nice scheme. So it's not technically paid editing :)
That sounds similar to the role of a few WMF staff...
Someone on another list discussing this suggested the WMF marketing monitoring the article about you as a service ...
- d.
On 18 November 2010 21:28, John Vandenberg jayvdb@gmail.com wrote:
On Fri, Nov 19, 2010 at 5:27 AM, Keegan Peterzell keegan.wiki@gmail.com wrote:
It looks to me like they just get paid to get volunteers to work. Â Nice scheme. Â So it's not technically paid editing :)
That sounds similar to the role of a few WMF staff...
Someone on another list discussing this suggested the WMF marketing monitoring the article about you as a service ...
- d.
So we would charge people to monitor the article about them? Would we do that for firms too? There would could be negligence liability if we miss something.
Fred Bauder
On Fri, Nov 19, 2010 at 9:32 AM, Fred Bauder fredbaud@fairpoint.net wrote:
On 18 November 2010 21:28, John Vandenberg jayvdb@gmail.com wrote:
On Fri, Nov 19, 2010 at 5:27 AM, Keegan Peterzell keegan.wiki@gmail.com wrote:
It looks to me like they just get paid to get volunteers to work. Â Nice scheme. Â So it's not technically paid editing :)
That sounds similar to the role of a few WMF staff...
Someone on another list discussing this suggested the WMF marketing monitoring the article about you as a service ...
Which list is this?
So we would charge people to monitor the article about them? Would we do that for firms too? There would could be negligence liability if we miss something.
'monitoring' =/= 'action'
It would be easy to build an RSS feed for a set of articles and 'give' that to any fool willing to pay for it.
-- John Vandenberg
On Fri, Nov 19, 2010 at 9:32 AM, Fred Bauder fredbaud@fairpoint.net wrote:
On 18 November 2010 21:28, John Vandenberg jayvdb@gmail.com wrote:
On Fri, Nov 19, 2010 at 5:27 AM, Keegan Peterzell keegan.wiki@gmail.com wrote:
It looks to me like they just get paid to get volunteers to work. Â Nice scheme. Â So it's not technically paid editing :)
That sounds similar to the role of a few WMF staff...
Someone on another list discussing this suggested the WMF marketing monitoring the article about you as a service ...
Which list is this?
So we would charge people to monitor the article about them? Would we do that for firms too? There would could be negligence liability if we miss something.
'monitoring' =/= 'action'
It would be easy to build an RSS feed for a set of articles and 'give' that to any fool willing to pay for it.
-- John Vandenberg
If it is that easy, maybe it should be a feature available as a courtesy to anyone or any organization that has an article about them.
Fred Bauder
On 18 November 2010 22:40, Fred Bauder fredbaud@fairpoint.net wrote:
If it is that easy, maybe it should be a feature available as a courtesy to anyone or any organization that has an article about them.
And to everyone else, too :-)
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=John_Smith&feed=atom&actio...
All you'd need to do is produce a nice wrapper for it...
On 18 November 2010 22:37, John Vandenberg jayvdb@gmail.com wrote:
Someone on another list discussing this suggested the WMF marketing monitoring the article about you as a service ...
Which list is this?
Comcom. Idle chitchat, not a serious suggestion. (I certainly hope.)
It would be easy to build an RSS feed for a set of articles and 'give' that to any fool willing to pay for it.
Ixnay on the oolfay. "Most Valued Customer."
- d.
It looks to me like they just get paid to get volunteers to work. Nice scheme. So it's not technically paid editing :)
"WikipediaExperts is a fast-growing network of experts which includes many Wikipedia editors. When a new assignment arrives we send it to the editor whose profile is the best fit with the subject of the article. We also provide support for pro-bono work of the participating editors."
-- ~Keegan
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Keegan _______________________________________________
I think you sign up with them and get paid, but I'm not interested in doing any more undercover work, just to find that out. I suspect they have no "stable of writers" at present, but hope to. It is quite likely the boss will do any writing to be done for now.
Fred Bauder
On 18 November 2010 15:57, Risker risker.wp@gmail.com wrote:
On 18 November 2010 10:42, Fred Bauder fredbaud@fairpoint.net wrote:
On Thu, Nov 18, 2010 at 14:09, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
On 18 November 2010 11:30, Â wiki-list@phizz.demon.co.uk wrote:
Any one signed up yet? http://www.ereleases.com/pr/visibility-wikipedia-easier-43135
I could find anything wrong in their code of ethics http://www.wikipediaexperts.com/codeofethics.html
-- Amir E. Aharoni
Neither do I, which bodes problems for the business. They hire you to break Wikipedia rules, not follow them. The question remains: is paid editing which does conform to Wikipedia policies and guidelines acceptable, even welcome?
My teeth grate when I think that some people are getting paid to do what so many of us do simply for the joy of sharing. Having said that, I can certainly understand why some article subjects have tired of depending on our rather inefficient methods of ensuring that articles on notable subjects are accurate, unbiased, well-sourced and relatively complete. I have increasing difficulty rationalizing the deprecation of "paid" editing when a goodly number of what are assumed to be "paid-for" articles conform more closely to our policies and guidelines than what volunteer editors have created - or never got around to creating, for that matter. (I'll note this holds true for more than just English Wikipedia, as I have heard reports that there's significant bias on other Wikipedias as well.) Anyone who's tried to rebalance an article that gives undue weight to negative issues, or to remove salacious trivia about a BLP subject, knows how incredibly frustrating it can be to bring articles into line with policy.
Risker/Anne
I agree that the concept of "being paid to edit Wikipedia" does not fit well with the ethos of our movement... That said, I think a lot of the problems with paid editing in the past (however conceived) have been because the person doing the paying was trying to game the system and circumvent the policies of Wikipedia. Things like being commissioned to whitewash a corporation's article is clearly a violation of the rules - not because it's paid per se, but because it breaks Conflict of Interest guidelines. On the other hand, if someone is employed as a subject area professional (e.g. university professor, museum curator) and their organisation has decided that improving Wikipedia should be part of their job description then I suppose that is technically paid editing, but I don't believe that should be seen as a bad thing. See, for example, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Coi#Subject_and_culture_sector_profes...
Personally I would like to see discussions about paid editing differentiated from discussions of COI and Spam because, whilst they often overlap with negative consequences, it they are not necessarily synonymous.
-Liam
Wittylama.com/blog Peace, Love & Metadata
On 18 Nov 2010, at 15:42, Fred Bauder wrote:
On Thu, Nov 18, 2010 at 14:09, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
On 18 November 2010 11:30, Â wiki-list@phizz.demon.co.uk wrote:
Any one signed up yet? http://www.ereleases.com/pr/visibility-wikipedia-easier-43135
I could find anything wrong in their code of ethics http://www.wikipediaexperts.com/codeofethics.html
-- Amir E. Aharoni
Neither do I, which bodes problems for the business. They hire you to break Wikipedia rules, not follow them. The question remains: is paid editing which does conform to Wikipedia policies and guidelines acceptable, even welcome?
What I worry about is the volunteer time that gets taken up tidying things up after something like this goes wrong - or worse, goes somewhat right but not completely (so that a simple revert is out of the question and a major cleanup of an article is needed, or a lot of discussion with the editor is necessary to set things straight). That's volunteer time that could otherwise be spent either productively, or tidying up after other volunteers.
It almost leads into the catch-22 scenario where the paid editors need to guarantee that if their work isn't up to scratch then they'll pay someone else to fix it...
Mike
On Fri, Nov 19, 2010 at 2:42 AM, Fred Bauder fredbaud@fairpoint.net wrote:
On Thu, Nov 18, 2010 at 14:09, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
On 18 November 2010 11:30, Â wiki-list@phizz.demon.co.uk wrote:
Any one signed up yet? http://www.ereleases.com/pr/visibility-wikipedia-easier-43135
I could find anything wrong in their code of ethics http://www.wikipediaexperts.com/codeofethics.html
-- Amir E. Aharoni
Neither do I, which bodes problems for the business. They hire you to break Wikipedia rules, not follow them. The question remains: is paid editing which does conform to Wikipedia policies and guidelines acceptable, even welcome?
We have 'paid editing', 'COI editing' and 'POV editing' happening all the time. We deal with it.
We should be less concerned about the motivation, and more concerned about the output.
A fringe academic pushing their theories is just as bad as a corporate shill, if not worse.
Am I 'paid editing' when I write articles during 9-5 ? Is that bad?
-- John Vandenberg
On 18 November 2010 23:09, John Vandenberg jayvdb@gmail.com wrote:
Am I 'paid editing' when I write articles during 9-5 ? Is that bad?
The problem with paid editing is when it violates content guidelines, such as NPOV.
Someone paid to improve the area of linguistics in general? (This has happened.) Fine by me.
Someone paid by (say) a museum to write articles on the contents of their collection? Could risk NPOV, but the idea is probably a net win. And the photos!
Someone paid by a company to monitor their article for negative information and edit it accordingly? Could violate NPOV. The very proper way to do this is to openly introduce yourself as a PR person on the talk page, supply information as appropriate and never touch the article text itself; this can be problematic for you if there's little actual interest in the article, though, and so little third-party editor traffic.
Someone paid by a person to keep rubbish out of their BLP? Trickier. In a perfect spherical Wikipedia of uniform density in a vacuum, they shouldn't go near the article on them. In practice, BLPs are our biggest problems, for reasons I needn't elaborate on. Usually if they contact info@wikimedia.org with a BLP issue it gets an experienced volunteer on the case, and the BLP Noticeboard is an excellent and effective way to get experienced attention to an article.
"Paid editing" is, of course, not one thing.
- d.
On 18 November 2010 18:33, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
On 18 November 2010 23:09, John Vandenberg jayvdb@gmail.com wrote:
Am I 'paid editing' when I write articles during 9-5 ? Is that bad?
The problem with paid editing is when it violates content guidelines, such as NPOV.
Someone paid to improve the area of linguistics in general? (This has happened.) Fine by me.
Someone paid by (say) a museum to write articles on the contents of their collection? Could risk NPOV, but the idea is probably a net win. And the photos!
Someone paid by a company to monitor their article for negative information and edit it accordingly? Could violate NPOV. The very proper way to do this is to openly introduce yourself as a PR person on the talk page, supply information as appropriate and never touch the article text itself; this can be problematic for you if there's little actual interest in the article, though, and so little third-party editor traffic.
Someone paid by a person to keep rubbish out of their BLP? Trickier. In a perfect spherical Wikipedia of uniform density in a vacuum, they shouldn't go near the article on them. In practice, BLPs are our biggest problems, for reasons I needn't elaborate on. Usually if they contact info@wikimedia.org with a BLP issue it gets an experienced volunteer on the case, and the BLP Noticeboard is an excellent and effective way to get experienced attention to an article.
"Paid editing" is, of course, not one thing.
I'll repeat what I said on enwp's Administrator's noticeboard here for a different audience:
"We are extraordinarily ineffective at providing neutral, well-written, relatively complete and well-referenced articles about businesses and individuals - even as of this writing we have tens of thousands of unreferenced and poorly referenced BLPs - and equally bad at maintaining and updating them. Given this remarkable inefficiency, and the fact that a Wikipedia article is usually a top-5 google hit for most businesses and people, there's plenty of good reason for our subjects to say "enough is enough" and insist on having a decent article. We've all seen the badly written BLPs and the articles about companies where the "controversies" section contains every complaint made in the last 10 years. We aren't doing the job ourselves, and it's unrealistic to think that we can: the article-to-active editor ratio is 1:960 right now[1], and getting higher all the time. I'm hard pressed to tell someone that they can't bring in a skilled Wikipedia editor, following our own policies and guidelines, to bring an article they're interested in up to our own stated standards. As to COI, one wonders why financial benefit seems to raise all these red flags, when undisclosed membership in various organizations, personal beliefs, and life experiences may well lead to an even greater COI. "Put it on the talk page" only works if (a) someone is watching the article, (b) that someone doesn't have their own perspective that they feel is more valid, (c) and someone is willing to actually edit the article. Those three conditions aren't being met nearly enough (see editor-to-article ratio above). We've created the very situation where organizations and people are no longer willing to accept that they have to put up with a bad article about themselves. And precisely why should they be prevented from improving our project?"
As to the Volunteer Response Team, they are a very small group of volunteers who are usually swamped with requests, and they often wind up having to negotiate with the existing "interested" editors to clear out BLP violations and clean up the articles to meet our own standards, sometimes having to fight tooth and nail to do so. (I should clarify that there is a large group of volunteers, but only a few who are actually responding to tickets on a regular basis, not unlike most wiki-projects.) It is challenging for subjects of articles to find their way to submit a request to have their article fixed, too. And remember that 1:960 ratio - even if every active editor on enwp made it their business to do nothing but maintenance and improvement of existing articles, we couldn't keep up with the workload.
Risker/Anne
Most current paid editing gets deleted at Speedy, simply because the organization has no serious claim to being notable. People who deliberately write paid articles on topics they know hopeless are unethical; if they write them without knowing, they are incompetent. But this sort of thing is not the current problem, for it's no more difficult to handle than the even larger amount of similar articles by volunteer editors.
The problem with the more competent of the people writing for pay is not that they try to flout Wikipedia rules, but that most of them have assimilated only the more superficial elements of the technique . They do not adequately understand the difference between promotional and informative, and they typically include inappropriate content such as contact information or a long list of products. But this is fairly easy to spot. It would be easier to spot if they declared their status, and I think a rule against paid or other COI editing that we do not enforce is unproductive-- if it is good editing, we cannot detect it, and if it isn't, we do not need the rule any more than with bad volunteer editing.
And of course there is the continued existence of the reward board, which is in direct contradiction to policy, but would not be if we accepted declared COI or paid editing.
As for the proprietor of this service, I've just been removing from the article on him article one of the clear signs of COI/promotional editing , the excessive use of his name.
On Thu, Nov 18, 2010 at 6:50 PM, Risker risker.wp@gmail.com wrote:
On 18 November 2010 18:33, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
On 18 November 2010 23:09, John Vandenberg jayvdb@gmail.com wrote:
Am I 'paid editing' when I write articles during 9-5 ? Is that bad?
The problem with paid editing is when it violates content guidelines, such as NPOV.
Someone paid to improve the area of linguistics in general? (This has happened.) Fine by me.
Someone paid by (say) a museum to write articles on the contents of their collection? Could risk NPOV, but the idea is probably a net win. And the photos!
Someone paid by a company to monitor their article for negative information and edit it accordingly? Could violate NPOV. The very proper way to do this is to openly introduce yourself as a PR person on the talk page, supply information as appropriate and never touch the article text itself; this can be problematic for you if there's little actual interest in the article, though, and so little third-party editor traffic.
Someone paid by a person to keep rubbish out of their BLP? Trickier. In a perfect spherical Wikipedia of uniform density in a vacuum, they shouldn't go near the article on them. In practice, BLPs are our biggest problems, for reasons I needn't elaborate on. Usually if they contact info@wikimedia.org with a BLP issue it gets an experienced volunteer on the case, and the BLP Noticeboard is an excellent and effective way to get experienced attention to an article.
"Paid editing" is, of course, not one thing.
I'll repeat what I said on enwp's Administrator's noticeboard here for a different audience:
"We are extraordinarily ineffective at providing neutral, well-written, relatively complete and well-referenced articles about businesses and individuals - even as of this writing we have tens of thousands of unreferenced and poorly referenced BLPs - and equally bad at maintaining and updating them. Given this remarkable inefficiency, and the fact that a Wikipedia article is usually a top-5 google hit for most businesses and people, there's plenty of good reason for our subjects to say "enough is enough" and insist on having a decent article. We've all seen the badly written BLPs and the articles about companies where the "controversies" section contains every complaint made in the last 10 years. We aren't doing the job ourselves, and it's unrealistic to think that we can: the article-to-active editor ratio is 1:960 right now[1], and getting higher all the time. I'm hard pressed to tell someone that they can't bring in a skilled Wikipedia editor, following our own policies and guidelines, to bring an article they're interested in up to our own stated standards. As to COI, one wonders why financial benefit seems to raise all these red flags, when undisclosed membership in various organizations, personal beliefs, and life experiences may well lead to an even greater COI. "Put it on the talk page" only works if (a) someone is watching the article, (b) that someone doesn't have their own perspective that they feel is more valid, (c) and someone is willing to actually edit the article. Those three conditions aren't being met nearly enough (see editor-to-article ratio above). We've created the very situation where organizations and people are no longer willing to accept that they have to put up with a bad article about themselves. And precisely why should they be prevented from improving our project?"
As to the Volunteer Response Team, they are a very small group of volunteers who are usually swamped with requests, and they often wind up having to negotiate with the existing "interested" editors to clear out BLP violations and clean up the articles to meet our own standards, sometimes having to fight tooth and nail to do so. (I should clarify that there is a large group of volunteers, but only a few who are actually responding to tickets on a regular basis, not unlike most wiki-projects.) It is challenging for subjects of articles to find their way to submit a request to have their article fixed, too. And remember that 1:960 ratio - even if every active editor on enwp made it their business to do nothing but maintenance and improvement of existing articles, we couldn't keep up with the workload.
Risker/Anne
[1] http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediaEN.htm _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
I drafted this. It still seems the best approach in terms of keeping good editing and reducing problematic editing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:FT2/Commercial_and_paid_editing
FT2
On Fri, Nov 19, 2010 at 12:05 AM, David Goodman dgoodmanny@gmail.comwrote:
Most current paid editing gets deleted at Speedy, simply because the organization has no serious claim to being notable. People who deliberately write paid articles on topics they know hopeless are unethical; if they write them without knowing, they are incompetent. But this sort of thing is not the current problem, for it's no more difficult to handle than the even larger amount of similar articles by volunteer editors.
The problem with the more competent of the people writing for pay is not that they try to flout Wikipedia rules, but that most of them have assimilated only the more superficial elements of the technique . They do not adequately understand the difference between promotional and informative, and they typically include inappropriate content such as contact information or a long list of products. But this is fairly easy to spot. It would be easier to spot if they declared their status, and I think a rule against paid or other COI editing that we do not enforce is unproductive-- if it is good editing, we cannot detect it, and if it isn't, we do not need the rule any more than with bad volunteer editing.
And of course there is the continued existence of the reward board, which is in direct contradiction to policy, but would not be if we accepted declared COI or paid editing.
As for the proprietor of this service, I've just been removing from the article on him article one of the clear signs of COI/promotional editing , the excessive use of his name.
On Thu, Nov 18, 2010 at 6:50 PM, Risker risker.wp@gmail.com wrote:
On 18 November 2010 18:33, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
On 18 November 2010 23:09, John Vandenberg jayvdb@gmail.com wrote:
Am I 'paid editing' when I write articles during 9-5 ? Is that bad?
The problem with paid editing is when it violates content guidelines, such as NPOV.
Someone paid to improve the area of linguistics in general? (This has happened.) Fine by me.
Someone paid by (say) a museum to write articles on the contents of their collection? Could risk NPOV, but the idea is probably a net win. And the photos!
Someone paid by a company to monitor their article for negative information and edit it accordingly? Could violate NPOV. The very proper way to do this is to openly introduce yourself as a PR person on the talk page, supply information as appropriate and never touch the article text itself; this can be problematic for you if there's little actual interest in the article, though, and so little third-party editor traffic.
Someone paid by a person to keep rubbish out of their BLP? Trickier. In a perfect spherical Wikipedia of uniform density in a vacuum, they shouldn't go near the article on them. In practice, BLPs are our biggest problems, for reasons I needn't elaborate on. Usually if they contact info@wikimedia.org with a BLP issue it gets an experienced volunteer on the case, and the BLP Noticeboard is an excellent and effective way to get experienced attention to an article.
"Paid editing" is, of course, not one thing.
I'll repeat what I said on enwp's Administrator's noticeboard here for a different audience:
"We are extraordinarily ineffective at providing neutral, well-written, relatively complete and well-referenced articles about businesses and individuals - even as of this writing we have tens of thousands of unreferenced and poorly referenced BLPs - and equally bad at maintaining
and
updating them. Given this remarkable inefficiency, and the fact that a Wikipedia article is usually a top-5 google hit for most businesses and people, there's plenty of good reason for our subjects to say "enough is enough" and insist on having a decent article. We've all seen the badly written BLPs and the articles about companies where the "controversies" section contains every complaint made in the last 10 years. We aren't
doing
the job ourselves, and it's unrealistic to think that we can: the article-to-active editor ratio is 1:960 right now[1], and getting higher
all
the time. I'm hard pressed to tell someone that they can't bring in a skilled Wikipedia editor, following our own policies and guidelines, to bring an article they're interested in up to our own stated standards. As
to
COI, one wonders why financial benefit seems to raise all these red
flags,
when undisclosed membership in various organizations, personal beliefs,
and
life experiences may well lead to an even greater COI. "Put it on the
talk
page" only works if (a) someone is watching the article, (b) that someone doesn't have their own perspective that they feel is more valid, (c) and someone is willing to actually edit the article. Those three conditions aren't being met nearly enough (see editor-to-article ratio above). We've created the very situation where organizations and people are no longer willing to accept that they have to put up with a bad article about themselves. And precisely why should they be prevented from improving our project?"
As to the Volunteer Response Team, they are a very small group of
volunteers
who are usually swamped with requests, and they often wind up having to negotiate with the existing "interested" editors to clear out BLP
violations
and clean up the articles to meet our own standards, sometimes having to fight tooth and nail to do so. (I should clarify that there is a large group of volunteers, but only a few who are actually responding to
tickets
on a regular basis, not unlike most wiki-projects.) It is challenging for subjects of articles to find their way to submit a request to have their article fixed, too. And remember that 1:960 ratio - even if every active editor on enwp made it their business to do nothing but maintenance and improvement of existing articles, we couldn't keep up with the workload.
Risker/Anne
[1] http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediaEN.htm _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
-- David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG
foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
On Fri, Nov 19, 2010 at 12:25:12AM +0000, FT2 wrote:
I drafted this. It still seems the best approach in terms of keeping good editing and reducing problematic editing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:FT2/Commercial_and_paid_editing
Hmm, your current rules fail the Duck test.(I also apply this test to persona's or other odd phenomena on-wiki)
==The duck test== If it waddles like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it's a legitimate duck... errr... wikipedia editor, and they should be allowed to edit.
If it fails to act like a duck, then it is not a legitimate duck^Wwikipedia editor.
== duck test for editors ==
People may have many motivations to edit wikipedia. Maybe they're bored, maybe they're motivated about their hobby, or maybe someone is giving them money. Whatever the case may be, we don't typically question people's motivation. Instead, our basic rule of thumb is to check whether they are contributing positively to the wiki.
== People who may be paid to edit who are unlikely to have a bias ==
If people are inserting misinformation or bias, well... they should not do that. On the other hand, -for instance- scientists, museum curators, or people like software developers might be asked to update wikipedia as part of their duties.
* Scientists: During literature research one finds additional sources for a wikipedia article. This should be fine. * Museum Curator: Adding information about artifacts in the collection. This should be fine. * Software Developer: Adding information about missign tools, or correcting or updating information on languages, API's, Open Source, IT related subjects. etc...
All these people get paid to do their job, and it should be ok for them to update wikipedia as part of that job.
== Open Source coders get paid too! ==
Open source programmers often get paid to write open _source_: if someone is willing to pay people to create open _content_ and/or maintain the wiki as per consensus, who am I to stop them?
In fact, it would be good to have a number of people who are available to work on the wiki for 40 hours a week, as per the "Red Cross model" (Volunteers can refuse to do the dirty work, but paid editors have to take on the less pleasant tasks too)
I think Jimmy Wales was the first to come up with this model, it'd be interesting to hear some comments from him!
== Getting paid means more time can be spent on wikipedia ==
This can only be a good thing, imo. ;-)
There are a number of charities or indeed even companies that might want to do things like upload, document, and/or classify: * artwork or historical artifacts (GLAM, and service companies with GLAM customers) * information about proteins (bioinformatics; universities, genetics companies, pharmaceuticals) * list or update information about diseases and medicines (pharmaceuticals) * too many to list...
Also, sometimes there's the rare company (or manager) who already understands the value of sharing. (Seriously!) (Awwww). We need to encourage more of these! :-)
== Here's where FT2's proposal can do better ==
1. Familiarisation. Heck no. If one isn't a respected editor and can't even get an admin flag (which is free), why should we give them actual money? ;-). So no, one shouldn't merely familiarise oneself. Instead one should already be working properly and ethically within the system.
2. Disclosure breaks the duck test. It should be obvious without any disclosure that one is editing correctly. Further information is superfluous.
3. Transparency. Why different rules for paid users? No. The same account rules apply! If this is merely a simplification for someone not yet familiar with wikipedia, see 1.
4. Good Conduct: We have always sought the same standard for everyone. I don't feel like creating upper *or* lower classes.
5. Respect for usual content standards. Another rules reminder: once again, we should set the same standard for paid editors as for everyone else. (see 3)
sincerely, Kim Bruning
In my experience, it is simply not correct that people who may be paid to edit, even for a nonprofit organization, are unlikely to have a bias. (Of course, so do the unpaid. COI does not require money , but money always produces COI.)
I've seen too many cases of such people adding inappropriate content: inserting more links to the organization than anyone else would do, using vague adjectives of praise, using the full name of the company as often as possible, adding excessive links to internal sources, trying to mention every possible product and feature and event and minor corporate milestone, using favorable comments made about them from non-reliable sources, adding a list of too many executives, using publications from their company or organization as references disproportionately in articles, and trying to say things 3 times over, in the infobox, the lede, and the main article.
These are the ways we pick up their edits now, and will be able to do so whether or not they declare themselves. I have seen such editors who do not do this but whom I can identify as paid internal or outside editing, and I agree with you there should be no objection to such editing. (I identify from the particular subject concentration, the trick of style, features in subjects I know something about which are characteristically seen in their declared PR and advertising -- and, for external editors, the consistency across different articles. Even when what they add is appropriate, there can still be a pattern.)
As an easy example of what anyone can identify, are political campaign biographies.
On Sat, Dec 11, 2010 at 4:21 PM, Kim Bruning kim@bruning.xs4all.nl wrote:
- Museum Curator: Adding information about artifacts in the collection. This should be fine.
On Sat, Dec 11, 2010 at 04:37:40PM -0500, David Goodman wrote:
In my experience, it is simply not correct that people who may be paid to edit, even for a nonprofit organization, are unlikely to have a bias. (Of course, so do the unpaid. COI does not require money , but money always produces COI.)
I've seen too many cases of such people adding inappropriate content: inserting more links to the organization than anyone else would do,
... which is when they are doing COI editing ...
There are a lot of situations where a paid editor wouldn't (or doesn't) have a COI. I mentioned a lot of examples.
* I have no issues with people being paid to simply be wikipedians. This happens rarely, but should be encouraged.
Unfortunately, people who are paid to be good wikipedians are outnumbered by
* people paid to market something on wikipedia.
This latter activity should be discouraged. The latter group is clearly ruining it for the former. :-(
sincerely, Kim Bruning
So for every article we have 960 active editors? I assume you wrote that wrong.
On Thu, Nov 18, 2010 at 6:50 PM, Risker risker.wp@gmail.com wrote:
On 18 November 2010 18:33, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
On 18 November 2010 23:09, John Vandenberg jayvdb@gmail.com wrote:
Am I 'paid editing' when I write articles during 9-5 ? Is that bad?
The problem with paid editing is when it violates content guidelines, such as NPOV.
Someone paid to improve the area of linguistics in general? (This has happened.) Fine by me.
Someone paid by (say) a museum to write articles on the contents of their collection? Could risk NPOV, but the idea is probably a net win. And the photos!
Someone paid by a company to monitor their article for negative information and edit it accordingly? Could violate NPOV. The very proper way to do this is to openly introduce yourself as a PR person on the talk page, supply information as appropriate and never touch the article text itself; this can be problematic for you if there's little actual interest in the article, though, and so little third-party editor traffic.
Someone paid by a person to keep rubbish out of their BLP? Trickier. In a perfect spherical Wikipedia of uniform density in a vacuum, they shouldn't go near the article on them. In practice, BLPs are our biggest problems, for reasons I needn't elaborate on. Usually if they contact info@wikimedia.org with a BLP issue it gets an experienced volunteer on the case, and the BLP Noticeboard is an excellent and effective way to get experienced attention to an article.
"Paid editing" is, of course, not one thing.
I'll repeat what I said on enwp's Administrator's noticeboard here for a different audience:
"We are extraordinarily ineffective at providing neutral, well-written, relatively complete and well-referenced articles about businesses and individuals - even as of this writing we have tens of thousands of unreferenced and poorly referenced BLPs - and equally bad at maintaining and updating them. Given this remarkable inefficiency, and the fact that a Wikipedia article is usually a top-5 google hit for most businesses and people, there's plenty of good reason for our subjects to say "enough is enough" and insist on having a decent article. We've all seen the badly written BLPs and the articles about companies where the "controversies" section contains every complaint made in the last 10 years. We aren't doing the job ourselves, and it's unrealistic to think that we can: the article-to-active editor ratio is 1:960 right now[1], and getting higher all the time. I'm hard pressed to tell someone that they can't bring in a skilled Wikipedia editor, following our own policies and guidelines, to bring an article they're interested in up to our own stated standards. As to COI, one wonders why financial benefit seems to raise all these red flags, when undisclosed membership in various organizations, personal beliefs, and life experiences may well lead to an even greater COI. "Put it on the talk page" only works if (a) someone is watching the article, (b) that someone doesn't have their own perspective that they feel is more valid, (c) and someone is willing to actually edit the article. Those three conditions aren't being met nearly enough (see editor-to-article ratio above). We've created the very situation where organizations and people are no longer willing to accept that they have to put up with a bad article about themselves. And precisely why should they be prevented from improving our project?"
As to the Volunteer Response Team, they are a very small group of volunteers who are usually swamped with requests, and they often wind up having to negotiate with the existing "interested" editors to clear out BLP violations and clean up the articles to meet our own standards, sometimes having to fight tooth and nail to do so. (I should clarify that there is a large group of volunteers, but only a few who are actually responding to tickets on a regular basis, not unlike most wiki-projects.) It is challenging for subjects of articles to find their way to submit a request to have their article fixed, too. And remember that 1:960 ratio - even if every active editor on enwp made it their business to do nothing but maintenance and improvement of existing articles, we couldn't keep up with the workload.
Risker/Anne
[1] http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediaEN.htm _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
On 18 November 2010 11:30, wiki-list@phizz.demon.co.uk wrote:
Any one signed up yet? http://www.ereleases.com/pr/visibility-wikipedia-easier-43135
Well, fools and their money are easily parted, I suppose.
http://wikipediaexperts.com/codeofethics.html sounds very nice - an improvement on most "online marketing consultancy" services that vaguely promise this sort of thing - but I wonder what will come of it in practice.
(I have written articles on companies. I never thought to *invoice* them for it...)
On 11/18/2010 12:30 PM, wiki-list@phizz.demon.co.uk wrote:
Any one signed up yet? http://www.ereleases.com/pr/visibility-wikipedia-easier-43135
I'm not able to find it now but there was an article form marketing/PR professionals to fellow marketeers describing why not to do exactly this what is offered here.
The result of such editing is usually not worth ruining the reputation if the articles are marked as spam.
What they offer is to write them in a way it will not be easily dicovered. And that is braking our rules.
disgusting.
masti
On Fri, Nov 19, 2010 at 9:53 AM, masti mastigm@gmail.com wrote:
On 11/18/2010 12:30 PM, wiki-list@phizz.demon.co.uk wrote:
Any one signed up yet? http://www.ereleases.com/pr/visibility-wikipedia-easier-43135
I'm not able to find it now but there was an article form marketing/PR professionals to fellow marketeers describing why not to do exactly this what is offered here.
The result of such editing is usually not worth ruining the reputation if the articles are marked as spam.
What they offer is to write them in a way it will not be easily dicovered. And that is braking our rules.
Where do they say that?
Their code of ethics is much like the OTRS practises.
http://wikipediaexperts.com/codeofethics.html
Of course our OTRS practises are .. in practise by openly disclosed OTRS volunteers, and we have no idea how well wikipediaexperts works in practise or who they are in our wikis, editing our articles.
I think we should give them the benefit of the doubt, but someone (WMF?) should ask them to provide a sample of their work for review.
-- John Vandenberg
I've signed up, for the heck of it - I wonder how big of a scam it is.
On Thu, Nov 18, 2010 at 4:01 PM, John Vandenberg jayvdb@gmail.com wrote:
On Fri, Nov 19, 2010 at 9:53 AM, masti mastigm@gmail.com wrote:
On 11/18/2010 12:30 PM, wiki-list@phizz.demon.co.uk wrote:
Any one signed up yet? http://www.ereleases.com/pr/visibility-wikipedia-easier-43135
I'm not able to find it now but there was an article form marketing/PR professionals to fellow marketeers describing why not to do exactly this what is offered here.
The result of such editing is usually not worth ruining the reputation if the articles are marked as spam.
What they offer is to write them in a way it will not be easily dicovered. And that is braking our rules.
Where do they say that?
Their code of ethics is much like the OTRS practises.
http://wikipediaexperts.com/codeofethics.html
Of course our OTRS practises are .. in practise by openly disclosed OTRS volunteers, and we have no idea how well wikipediaexperts works in practise or who they are in our wikis, editing our articles.
I think we should give them the benefit of the doubt, but someone (WMF?) should ask them to provide a sample of their work for review.
-- John Vandenberg
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