[WikiEN-l] Yet another PR company busted ... apparently it's all our fault

[Charles Matthews]

On 17 November 2012 16:10, Andreas Kolbe <jayen466 at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sat, Nov 17, 2012 at 8:14 AM, Charles Matthews <
> charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com> wrote:
>
>> On 17 November 2012 01:34, Andreas Kolbe <jayen466 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> > Well, no, because the Foundation has made it abundantly clear that they
>> > assume no responsibility whatsoever for content, or for questions like
>> > whether we have flagged revisions or not. All of that is fully delegated
>> to
>> > the community.
>>
>
>> In a couple of misleading senses you could argue this. The legal buck
>> stops with the WMF.
>
>
>
> No it does not, except in very limited circumstances: if the Foundation
> receives a DMCA takedown notice and don't respond to it, they become
> liable, as in the recent Loriot case. And if they are advised of child
> pornography and fail to remove it from servers, they become liable. But
> beyond such limited cases, they do not have legal responsibility for the
> content of Wikipedia articles, the Wikipedia main page, or Commons
> categories or Wikiversity courses. That editorial responsitility is fully
> delegated to the community. If you believe otherwise, you are wrong.

What you have written doesn't contradict what I wrote.

>> (You clearly want to look further than the legal
>> position, but in the context of PR editing it has been argued that the
>> law is the standard, not "ethics"). What software is in operation is
>> handled by the developers employed by the WMF. It has indeed been
>> contentious whether the WMF should impose its view on the software, so
>> it has backed off at present.

> In cases of software features that affect fundamental editorial policy,
> like pending changes/flagged revisions or the image filter, we have seen
> very clearly that the decision to implement or not rests with the
> community. And as a mere host for the projects, the Foundation is not
> legally liable for the consequences of editorial community decisions.

We could discuss the image filter, but let's not. I was of course
alluding to it.

>> It does seem you want to target a "blame game" at the community,
>> whatever bad actors do who are certainly not within the community by
>> any reasonable standard of compliance with norms.
>>
>
>
> I am not talking about blame, but about recognising that the community has
> a responsibility, and that there is no point in waiting for the Foundation
> to come up with ways to deal with what you correctly call "bad actors".

We're all in this. The "bad actors" who happen to be paid PR folks are
not to be excused just because they are not the only bad actors. That
would be the point of this thread.

>  <snip>
>
>
>
>> The third is about on-site politics, which I don't think is in a very
>> satisfactory state, but about which I have adopted a "less is more"
>> line in my own comments for a few years (for reasons that are obvious,
>> at least to me). It is not closely connected in any case with dealing
>> properly with complaints, which is the problem-solving approach to
>> things going wrong on WP, as opposed to looking round for someone to
>> blame.
>>
>
>
> I am talking about problem prevention rather than problem solving. That
> does not require apportioning blame, but assuming responsibility.
>
> The community needs to think further than saying "those bad actors are not
> part of us". It needs to think about ways to minimise the impact bad actors
> can have on the project's content and on subjects' reputations.

As far as I know, huge numbers of words have been typed into Wikipedia
on these very subjects.

> So can we discuss points arising in some other thread, please? All of
>> the above may be worth talking about, but conventionally off-topic
>> matters get a new subject line. Such as "If only the enWP community
>> got its act together we would never have to worry about PR editing
>> because it would be a Brave New World", perhaps.
>
>
>
> Look, Charles, this thread is called, in part, "...apparently it's all our
> fault". Can't we have a good-faith investigation of what things the
> community might indeed do better to prevent justified complaints? The
> Foundation will not manage what you called "bad actors": how to do that is
> the community's job to figure out. Right now, as SmartSE demonstrated, one
> guy and another guy who hates him can spend months reverting each other
> without anyone else taking an interest, even if the wronged party asks for
> help repeatedly. Flagged revisions would prevent this sort of slow edit
> war, with improperly sourced reputation-damaging material being deleted and
> inserted again and again.

We do have dispute resolution on the site, you know. I happen to
support some sort of revision control, but simply expanding your
definition of "bad actor" to include parties who should be in
low-level dispute resolution doesn't forward your point, as far as I
can see. (Dispute Resolution 101 says people are going to imply the
other party is a vandal, which gets us nowhere.)

> In my opinion, the following are all things the community could do better:
>
> 1. We don't put enough obstacles in the way of bad actors.
>
> 2. We tell aggrieved organisations and their representatives to complain on
> talk pages, but when they do post to talk pages, they often don't get a
> reply.
>
> 3. We tell aggrieved organisations and their representatives to email OTRS,
> but when they do, it sometimes takes weeks before they even get an answer.
>
> 4. We could build bots that recognise and flag slow edit wars between
> subjects and their detractors, as SmartSE suggested.
>
> There is one thing the Foundation could do: provide better software support
> to OTRS. As far as I can tell, OTRS volunteers have unanimously complained
> about the software for years, and to no effect.

The OTRS situation having been discussed on another list, I certainly
agree with the last point. We know that in fact the reason for 3 is
that OTRS is clogged up with relatively timewasting material. It
doesn't particularly help to quote a "worst case" rather than"average
case" figure in 3, but I don't suppose you will stop doing that.

Point 2 seems to be a misunderstanding, anyway. Getting someone to
explain the problem in their own terms is the first step in any
dispute resolution. It is absolutely basic. We ask for it not least so
that there is a statement to refer to. Obsession with "escalation" can
lose sight of this point.

Point 1: so it always has been an "arms race", and we have always
aimed to apply a many-layered system.

My conclusion: If we did get our act together, then WP could become
the sober-sided free information utility we want. In fact we'd reach
the situation where COI editing was _clearly_ the major unsolved
problem. It is not going to go away, and the pretexts will change, but
those who see WP pages as targets for personal or corporate advantage
will have exactly the same motivations.

Charles