[Foundation-l] Paid editing comes of age

[FT2]

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 at gmail.com>wrote:

> 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 at gmail.com> wrote:
> > 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>
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>
>
>
> --
> David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S.
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG
>
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