Misplaced Pages

Revision as of 11:54, 9 May 2012

Page move

(I moved the actual page to User:Jimbo Wales/Paid Advocacy FAQ.)--Jimbo Wales (talk) 14:27, 8 May 2012 (UTC)

Questions

Q:You say that the reason people should listen to you, despite the fact that paid advocates do edit, is that it earns the respect of the community. Why should this mean no paid editing, rather than paid editing that otherwise is in accordance with Misplaced Pages policies (unless you believe the policies do not express the will of the community)?

Q:Wouldn't all the same arguments apply to editing a BLP about yourself? Being paid by X to edit an article about X has a similar COI to being X and editing an article about X. Yet while editing your own BLP is discouraged, it is not outright prohibited. If anything, there's more need for paid editors to edit articles about the company they work for, since we don't have special "biographies of companies" protections like we do for BLP. (Also note that BRIGHTLINE applies to BLPs as well, since it applies whenever there is a COI and the subject has a COI.)

Q:If the paid advocate sees something genuinely wrong with an article--unsourced statement that the company's product contains ground-up babies, bad WP:UNDUE problem, or whatever--the paid advocate uses the talk page or other channels, and nobody fixes the article, must the company endure the bad article forever? If not, is there some time limit after which the paid advocate may edit the article since the rest of Misplaced Pages has shown itself to fail in properly maintaining it? (And if you say "Misplaced Pages never fails to maintain an article," I'll laugh.) Ken Arromdee (talk) 18:19, 8 May 2012 (UTC)

Your second two questions are good. The first one is a bit muddled. I think the reason people should listen to me is that this is going to become policy in the near future, I believe. Hard policy. So it's worth paying attention to now.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 19:14, 8 May 2012 (UTC)

My first question was referring to this:

Q: Yeah, that's nice, but I see so many paid advocates advocating freely. Why should I listen to anything you say?

A: Because it is in your best interests to do so. If you want to be successful as a paid advocate, you must obtain the respect of the community.

Also it looks like you added my other two questions and then someone else deleted one....

Ken Arromdee (talk) 21:43, 8 May 2012 (UTC)

• Per "I think the reason people should listen to me is that this is going to become policy in the near future, I believe. Hard policy." - I haven't seen the slightest indication that the extreme so-called "Bright LIne" principle has significant traction in any of the numerous prior debates on COI editing, such as, for example, the vast array of proposals vetted at the recent failed RFC on COI editing launched by ArbCom. I fail to see how this is to become "hard policy" short of being rammed through by WMF fiat, which will inevitably result in a circus that makes the ill-fated flagged revisions and image filter proposals look tame. I would respectfully advise another approach more in tune with the political realities of the situation. There seems to be little stomach for "editor-based" COI policy versus "edit-based" COI policy — that is, it is not a question of who is doing the writing, but what is being written. There is absolutely no way to police a so-called "bright line" short of mandatory registration and Sign-In-To-Edit. As long as WP is anonymous by design and so-called "outing" not only frowned upon, but sanctionable, it boggles how such a policy could possibly be enforced.

What IS needed is a set of realistic "best practices" — mandatory declaration of COI on the talk page, mandatory adherence to NPOV, strong suggestion to avoid controversial editing, and invitation of scrutiny. There would be traction for something like this. Beyond that, I don't see the votes, so to speak... Carrite (talk) 23:43, 8 May 2012 (UTC)

• Q: What consequences would a confirmed or suspected paid advocate face if found editing article mainspace against Bright line guidelines? SkyMachine 01:13, 9 May 2012 (UTC)

self disclosure needs a reason

This approach provides no reason for which people would self-identify as paid editors. First, I do not disagree that we need controls on paid editing and stricter controls on paid advocacy. But blanketly banning somebody from editing an article to which they want to monitor/edit? Why on earth would anybody self identify to that? Because Jimbo says it would garner trust from the community? Really? Are we that niave? Would anybody self-identify to a restriction that has no benefit when there is little to no means to regulate/identify?

If we want people to self-identify, then we need to incenticize doing so and/or lessen the consequences of doing so. If we want people to self-identify, then there needs to be a reason for them to do. Self identifying to face strict limitation? Not gonna happen.

I think a much better approach would be to require paid editors to identify whom/where they work and what they are being paid to do---and their real life identity. Let our OTRS system verify that. Once so verified, they would be recognized as paid editors for the specified institution. This would mean that the people would know that they might have special/more knowledge than the general public; but also that they might have a specific POV/BIAS. As a recognized employee of a company, their behavior/actions now reflect their employer. John Smith of the AMCE Corp is going to go out of his way to adhere to our guidelines, because the last thing John Smith wants to happens is that he gets taken to ANI/ArbCOM and drags the ACME Corp name with him---where his supervisors will see it. John Smith would be much more willing to disclose his identity if A) it was policy that he did so, B) it was not wikicide for him to do so, C) there were advantages for him to do so. As is, there is no reason to do so. Let John Smith, paid employee of Acme, develop a reputation as either a advocate or a person who is trying to improve the articles. As an anonymous user, there is less personal stake in being taken to ANI/ArbCOM, even if observed by management, it won't reflect as much on John Smith specifically. Plus, if John Smith of Acme corp ever wants to get a job at Acme's competitors, he might be more willing to mind his P&Qs here if his real life identity were known! If Obama/Romney's state X campaign manager says something outrageous on WP, it will suddenly be picked up as such... thus creating a built in control.

We can also create rules/guidelines surrounding the use of personal accounts. John Smith might be a paid editor on Acme, but wants to use his personal account when editing his personal area of interest---ornithology.---Balloonman 22:02, 8 May 2012 (UTC)

May I phrase this as a question: "What incentives does your position offer to people who are paid advocates to self-identify and follow the rules?" That's a valid question, and I have a very good answer. I also note that your position on requiring real name identification is even more extreme than mine, so I'm a bit confused based on your other remarks as to what your position is. Is it your position that people will be ethical enough to go through an identification procedure, but too unethical to restrict themselves to an appropriate edit-suggestion process? --Jimbo Wales (talk) 22:40, 8 May 2012 (UTC)

You mean your policy about being barred from editing the articles directly while they attempt to earn the respect of the community after casting themselves as second rate citizens? That is not going to encourage people to self identify. My position offers several reasons: 1) It becomes a means for which people can advance themselves directly. John Smith for the Acme Corp can in fact develop a reputation here and then carry that with him to future employers. 2) It affords them a position of being Subject Matter Experts. 3) It allows them to edit articles directly. 4) It affords PR people an opportunity to put their names out there and develop a reputation---which is something many PR people want. And yes, I do believe people in PR roles would be willing to self-identify to comply with the rules and let them edit their relative articles BEFORE they would self identify to be banned from doing so. Corporate PR people are used to putting their names to publications/statements. Thus, doing so here, would not be a big deal... they would undoubtably have anonymous accounts for their personal editing.---Balloonman 02:34, 9 May 2012 (UTC)

• I've had a read of the proposal, and it seems to me to be a practical compromise between the ideal of nobody ever advocating anything for material gain, and the practicality that it does happen. And I can see why honest paid advocates would self-identify (and I have an actual example). Or to put it another way, those who want to stay hidden and do their advocacy are going to try to stay hidden anyway, regardless of any new policies, so anything that encourages honest paid advocates to self-identify has to be good, I think. On to my example. In real life, I work freelance in my chosen business, and a client, knowing I'm a Misplaced Pages admin, recently asked me what they should do to make an article relating to their company more acceptable in terms of Misplaced Pages policies and therefore more likely to be kept. I told them about RS, NPOV and all that, and when I checked the article later, I found they had removed some slightly flowery wording, made it read neutrally and factually, and last I heard they were looking for better sources. That's the kind of advocate who I think would be happy to have a self-identified account, and to use that account to ask for changes on Talk pages and generally ask for help in making an article more acceptable to Misplaced Pages. The unprincipled PR people out there won't, but we already have that problem anyway. Now, I don't know if I'm being naive here and expecting too much from the marketing departments of this world, but I'm all for starting with the AGF approach, which I think this proposal embodies. (And for the avoidance of doubt, I have never made any edits on behalf of clients, and never would). -- Boing! said Zebedee (talk) 00:07, 9 May 2012 (UTC)
  • Exactly. A good PR person would have no problem self identifying and they are the type we should encourage to edit the articles... as they are more likely to try to adhere to the policies.---Balloonman 02:34, 9 May 2012 (UTC)
• Brightline enforcement is impossible without real name registration and sign-in-to-edit. I'm actually in favor of those things, mind you, but they don't have a chance in hell of gaining even simple majority support, let alone the super-majority needed for consensus at WP. Ergo, anonymous editing, AGF, and sanctioning of those who "out" anonymous editors will remain — and brightline enforcement won't be workable. Dismiss the idea and think outside the box. From WP's perspective: the problem isn't necessarily who is doing the writing, it is what is being written, bad POV positive content. From Pro PR's standpoint: the need isn't to do the writing themselves, it is to make sure bad POV negative content doesn't stand. Both sides have a common interest, I note, in NPOV content. That's where the solution lies: how do we make sure that articles maintain NPOV? What mechanism is there to remove bad negative POV content to avoid manipulations by those who may, intentionally or accidentally, whitewash things with bad positive POV content? That's the fundamental solution: devising a mechanism for the improvement and maintenance of NPOV business articles. Carrite (talk) 00:17, 9 May 2012 (UTC)

Agree... brightline is a dream.---Balloonman 02:34, 9 May 2012 (UTC)

• I too like Balloonman's proposal: real-name identification to the Foundation and on the user talk page, and preferably also within the user account name, naming the relevant company or employer, with the right to edit the article in line with policy. Such people will edit with their real name on the line, which is more than most Wikipedians do, and will no doubt be subject to scrutiny. Plus we can be clear that we will throw the book at anyone, whether it's a newbie or a respected admin, found surreptitiously editing articles related to their business customers or employer. Topic ban, site ban, whatever. We can declare an amnesty for past COI edits, give people time to declare their hitherto unacknowledged conflicts of interest, and after that, the game is played for keeps. You want to make COI edits: you declare your COI. --JN466 02:18, 9 May 2012 (UTC)

Yuppers, paid editing occurs, the recent ANI thread relative to the Admin who opposed paid editing but appeared to have been a paid editor shows it happens. The 'crat who lost his priviledges shows it has been happening for a while. Paid editing occurs. We aren't going to stop it and a "brightline" that asks people to self identify to undergo severe limitations is not going to work. The only way that we will get people to self identify is to give them a reason to do... gaining Jimbo's respect isn't going to do it.---Balloonman 03:23, 9 May 2012 (UTC)

Pandoras Box?

Please explain what is the "huge" difference between paid editing and paid advocacy...I really do fail to see much distinction and I also fail to see how your example at the FAQ suffices as an excellent example. Yes, there may be completely neutral editors such as the exampled university professor, that has it in his/her blood to produce (while being paid) a completely neutral, fact based and authoritative article...but my better judgement believes that this will not be the norm. If someone pays a Wikipedian to edit an article, it seems preposterous that the payee isn't going to be expecting (advocating) a certain outcome (FA or at least GA) and bias/slant. I think you're being way too generous to the entire issue of paid editing and this is not the way to support our NPOV policy. I'm not attacking you here but I want you to help me better understand your position...I am fully willing to be convinced I am wrong.--MONGO 00:58, 9 May 2012 (UTC)

Re: "If someone pays a Wikipedian to edit an article, it seems preposterous that the payee isn't going to be expecting (advocating) a certain outcome (FA or at least GA) and bias/slant" - As I understand it, Jimbo is indeed including such editors in the category of paid advocates. -- Boing! said Zebedee (talk) 01:12, 9 May 2012 (UTC)

Mongo, can you walk me through your thinking here? Let me flesh out for you the example of the University professor. I meet a lot of university professors and a lot of university administrators. University professors are most often given a wide scope of academic freedom to engage with the public and other academics in a variety of ways, and schools often make community service an explicit part of desired behavior by professors. Many professors approach Misplaced Pages in this fashion, and their Universities are supportive of it. It reflects well on them. My specific example is of a history professor editing articles about history, but I've seen many examples of math professors editing history articles, etc. While the employers in this case are supportive of the work (they don't ban it, restrict it to lunch hours, etc., they do praise it, support it as a valuable community service, etc.) they aren't asking for or receiving any advocacy as a result.

Now, it is not hard to imagine a University also paying staff for communications work. Asking that history professor to edit the article about the school itself to make the school look better (minimize controversies, emphasize good stuff, etc.) is advocacy. But that's a pretty obvious difference. Are you imagining that Universities won't support professors editing unless they are pitching on behalf of the school? I know of no reason to think that's true.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 07:37, 9 May 2012 (UTC)

I think one reason the professor example might not be a good one is that some academics end up doing advocacy for ideological reasons; i.e. promoting pet theories and so forth. The topic areas of biblical history and climate change being prime examples. If I follow your reasoning through, you chose academics on the basis that academia has higher standards of objectivity (so in theory a professor should be capable of objectivity). In practice I find that is not always true. --Errant 11:47, 9 May 2012 (UTC)

Example

See , . Now I momentarily toyed with the idea of leaving an IP post on that article's talk page pretending that I represent Vodacom and would like the article fixed ... and reporting back after half a year or so to say that this paragraph was still in the article. I think there would have been very little risk of anyone actually replying to such a talk page comment. The talk page was last edited in November 2008.

The point I am making is that the article talk page is not the right place. Either we widen the scope of the BLP noticeboard to include such issues or we need a new noticeboard PR professionals can use in cases like this. JN466 01:56, 9 May 2012 (UTC)

I'm not sure the example you give is the best one, because the controversy in question for Vodafone is a real one and should be in the article. The text that the ip inserted is not very good, of course, but my point is that I think we have much worse examples which support your point! I do agree though that there are cases where posting on the talk page isn't sufficient, and that we need to have clearer means to escalate. I don't think a new noticeboard is necessary, but would be supportive of giving one a try to see if it is useful.

My point is that if you know what you are doing, there already exist plenty of well-functioning avenues for escalation. So the problem is not that we need to build yet another path for escalation, but that people don't know what they are doing in many cases. Post to the talk page, contact other editors who are active and who have edited the same page in the past, find an admin, post to a relevant Wikiproject, post to BLPN, post to COIN, post on Jimbo's talk page, email OTRS, post to ANI, etc. There are many ways to get help, but a lot of people outside the community don't know what to do. But we can fix that.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 07:46, 9 May 2012 (UTC)

The main problem with the paragraph was the wording "Many have called this racism" when the only mainstream source the user cited said "Vodacom’s R7,5bn blacks-only empowerment deal is causing white supremacists to see red". Misplaced Pages presented the white supremacist position as the mainstream position. What it also illustrates well is how Misplaced Pages articles come to suffer from undue weight. The use of a separate subsection, which will show up in the table of contents, is a standard technique that people adopt quite naturally to highlight their addition. In that respect the Stormfront poster's advice reflects a widespread practice. Does this content belong in the article? Not at present, given the present content, and given that the section on this "racial scandal" represented about a quarter of the entire body text, which is grossly undue. Yes, in an 8,000-word featured article there ought to be room for a measured discussion of Vodacom's effort to balance the racial composition of their shareholder population, but we cannot write decent articles using what I call WP:ADAM, the anonymous dirt accretion method. WP:Eventualism, i.e. the idea that one day someone will come who will assemble all the collected POV bits into a decent, neutral article, is not an option any more when articles are years old and the work in progress is a top Google link for the individual or company. We have said as much for BLPs; we need to say the same for companies.

I still remember what arriving at Misplaced Pages was like. I only looked at articles and article talk pages at first and was quite reluctant to look "under the bonnet"; it took me months or years to get something approaching an overview of the important policy pages and noticeboards. Misplaced Pages's internal structure is labyrinthine and arcane. Its processes and social rules are unlike any people are likely to recognise from their work environment. Of course there are lots of noticeboards that a PR professional could post to if they don' get any response on the talk page. But this takes time. It involves checking the talk page every day, and seeing that there is still no response yet, while there is some outrageous clanger in the article on your company, and the Edit tab is beckoning. Even posting to a noticeboard does not alway s generate a prompt answer. I have had posts to the BLP noticeboard ignored, archived without ever receiving a response. The fact that the BLP noticeboard functions today at all is largely due to one editor, Youreallycan (Off2riorob); before he adopted it three years ago or so, it had tumbleweeds blowing across it. Should he ever leave, we may be back to that state of affairs, as he still makes far more edits there than anyone else; and while BLPN and RSN are reasonably healthy, other noticeboards seem less so. So if we point PR people to noticeboards in general when they do not get a satisfactory response on the article talk page we may only end up sending them from one place where they are ignored to another. Hence the idea for a single place, which can also be communicated fairly succinctly to the outside world. We can call it the company help desk, or whatever. I could see a board like that attracting a healthy mix of contributors with different types of expertise. --JN466 11:54, 9 May 2012 (UTC)

History merge

I've just history merged the FAQ with this talk page to fix Jimbo's cut-and-paste move, so all the attribution is in the right place. Graham87 02:05, 9 May 2012 (UTC)

Thank you! I realized after I did it that it wasn't the best way but wasn't sure what to do.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 07:22, 9 May 2012 (UTC)

Questions from ErrantX

As I was invited to add possible questions here:

1. What are the differences between an advocate who is paid, and one who is driven by ideological motive? Why does the former require specific policy?
2. How well does Misplaced Pages protect the neutrality of articles about companies?
3. How quickly are talk page requests answered?
4. What (specifically) is Misplaced Pages doing to help improve the protection that company articles receive from both vandalism and non-neutral editing?
5. How will you incentivize current "under the radar" paid advocates to comply with this new policy?
6. How do you propose to catch and stop paid advocates who continue to violate this new policy?

There may be more ideas later. --Errant 05:44, 9 May 2012 (UTC)

Thanks, these are good. Some of them are empirical questions ("How quickly are talk page requests answered?") for which I think we don't have an easy quick way to get good data on, so we/I may want to modify them. I think that question in particular has no one single answer, but rather "it depends" - and I think what the question is really driving at is: what if someone engages on the talk page and no one answers for a long time, then what?--Jimbo Wales (talk) 07:23, 9 May 2012 (UTC)

Yeh absolutely, that was kinda what I was aiming at. But also I'd suggest that for us to develop a policy that paid advocates want to comply with (i.e. the carrot to go with the stick) we need to know how effective we actually are engaging with talk page requests on company articles - real numbers. It is all very well saying these individuals must stick to talk pages, but if that gets them nowhere then there is little incentive for them to bother. I think that for this policy to actually interest paid advocates we have to demonstrate an understanding of any associated problems with our processes and show how we are willing to address those issues. Is this a policy for us or for them (i.e. does it give us a platform to block or ban, or them a platform for engagement). --Errant 07:31, 9 May 2012 (UTC)

To be successful, it has to be both. To the extent that their problems are legitimate, they are also our problems. Just by the way, one of their problems is that they are editing article space and therefore risking a bad headline about their company. I know of one example that I won't mention right now (not important) so as not to risk some reporter reading this discussion and writing that bad headline, of a company whose paid representative has been great about engaging on the talk page, but with little or no response there, and then reluctantly (as shown on the talk page) making edits. The downside of this is that he's the #1 editor on the page by far, and there's an easy headline to write screaming that this company is controlling their Misplaced Pages entry. It'd be better if he'd known how to escalate, and if we'd responded better. One of the issues is that many company articles are quite properly boring, and people don't have them as a hobby so there are few of them on watchlists.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 07:50, 9 May 2012 (UTC)

Absolutely; I know of multiple examples of such a situation. One idea I had was for a "noticeboard" to deal with company articles - rather like BLP/N (but I envision something a lot more "newbie" friendly). But with lots of links and information about Paid Advocacy and what steps to take. And then we can go round and slap a talk page notice on all the company articles pointing at that new location. It doesn't solve the problem of finding volunteers to do unsexy work, but it does at least help push it to a central clearing house. I also wondered whether it would be possible to customise "Articles for Creation" to focus on how to create company articles for review. Just some random ideas. --Errant 11:52, 9 May 2012 (UTC)