[Foundation-l] Paid editing comes of age

[Risker]

On 18 November 2010 18:33, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 18 November 2010 23:09, John Vandenberg <jayvdb at 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 at 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>