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Well, Rich Farmbrough just got blocked for a year

See Misplaced Pages:Arbitration/Requests/Enforcement/Archive131#Rich_Farmbrough - he's been blocked for a year for what was arguably, IMHO, manual editing with typos. I don't like that fact one bit, and Jimbo, you shouldn't either. Time to reign in ArbCom and the anti-Farmbrough zealots, somebody, please. I make typos, and I've screwed up articles, and some of those errors have been committed with (gasp!) search (f3)/replace (ctrl-V), right in the edit window. But I'll be damned if I'm going to let the precedent stand that two editors can block a long-standing, productive, enthusiastic, skilled (ok, sometimes overenthusiastic) editor for a year, based on guesswork and an exaggeration of a now years-old ArbCom decision that didn't make sense in the first place. --Lexein (talk) 16:19, 26 March 2013 (UTC)

It's quite obvious that he did a global search and replace and didn't bother to check the results, leaving other editors to clean up the mess. Leaving the mess for others is the recurring problem, and there seems to be no way to prevent him from doing it except a total block from editing. Looie496 (talk) 16:44, 26 March 2013 (UTC)

Lexein, it's obvious you're angry about this and it's understandable that you would be if you feel an injustice was done, but this is now the fourth place you've attempted to get action on this issue. Please, pick one spot, have a discussion, and stop running around to a new place each time you don't get an answer quickly or don't get the one you want. A fluffernutter is a sandwich! (talk) 16:53, 26 March 2013 (UTC)

It's unfair to criticize Lexein for the first venue listed "pointily" above, because apparently that was an inappropriate venue. The record of this response to the block was suppressed prior to the block getting archived, as there is no link from the archived action to the talkpage response to it. There was already an active discussion at Misplaced Pages talk:Arbitration/Requests when that dialogue was dumped at the bottom of it. The next edit further obscured this dialogue. Wbm1058 (talk) 18:05, 1 April 2013 (UTC)

No, three, I undid one. Actually two, since one is merely an advisory of discussion occurring elsewhere. This IMHO deserves wide exposure. If I have to take a little friendly fire for posting in the most appropriate venues for active discussion, I'll take it. And Looie496, I don't think it's obvious at all, since I've made that very same class of mistakes without using global search and replace. However, I agree that editors should not leave messes for others to clean up, but I don't think Farmbrough has refused to clean up when asked. So why not leave it at asking? That's my whole point. --Lexein (talk) 17:10, 26 March 2013 (UTC)

The main problem is this Misplaced Pages notion of trying to require editors with an identified issue to become paragons. To ask him to avoid automated edits that would start other users on the road to trouble ... fine. But to demand he not use tools that everyone else can, and hold even a single slip-up as reason to ban him for a year? You've deliberately set yourselves up to fail, and congratulations! You succeeded. Wnt (talk) 19:44, 26 March 2013 (UTC)

I was pretty surprised to see rich banned again so quickly so I wanted to see what for. I can't really figure it out. Can someone please explain in detail what it was for exactly.--Amadscientist (talk) 23:01, 26 March 2013 (UTC)

apparently, screwing up using semi-automated tools (which he was forbidden to use), copy-pasting the edits in. i assume they mean like reflinks and checklinks. -- Aunva6 00:44, 27 March 2013 (UTC)

Lexein is not the only one that thinks a 1 year block is too severe, if a block is even warranted at all, which it isn't. I really wasn't surprised at all personally Amadscientist. The same editor that opened the AE thread has been trying to get Rich blocked for years. The one who imposed this block tried to block Rich for a year when he imposed the last 2 month block but backed down when a year block didn't have community support then. Apparently it still doesn't and for good reason. A 1 year block (the limit of the admin tools as far as I know) should be reserved for severe cases like Copyright violations and vandals. Not longterm editors for frivolous edits. KumiokoCleanStart (talk) 01:49, 27 March 2013 (UTC)

Ah. I see. Involved admin finding a way to get their way. LOL! No wonder admin are looked at with suspicion most of the time.--Amadscientist (talk) 01:57, 27 March 2013 (UTC)

Wnt, Rich was not blocked a year for "a single slip up". He was blocked for a year for what was only the latest error from an editor with a multi-year history of errors that have inevitably been left for everyone else to clean up. Misplaced Pages editors don't need to be paragons, but frankly, competence is required. Perhaps it is time we stop putting up with Rich's incompetence. Resolute 02:06, 27 March 2013 (UTC)

Errors can be fixed by others. That is a policy or guideline as well. Now demonstrate that those errors constituted a lack of competency. I am dead serious.--Amadscientist (talk) 02:10, 27 March 2013 (UTC)

Any editor who is responsible for 5 million edits is going to make mistakes. I would rather fix somee mistakes of someone who would do 5 million edits to make this place better than zero defects from the editor who would do 5 edits and leave me nothing to fix. KumiokoCleanStart (talk) 02:13, 27 March 2013 (UTC)

There isn't much else you can call nine blocks for problematic, erronious and/or unsupported automated edits, Amadscientist. The simple fact is, neither restrictions nor short blocks have had any effect on his editing behaviour. Errors can be fixed by others, but others should not be expected to put up indefinitely with an editor who produces so many. He was given numerous chances, and blew every single one. Resolute 02:22, 27 March 2013 (UTC)

I can think of a couple things. Hounding, Stalking, shall I go on! A couple of those 9 blocks are valid, at least 6 are complete bullshit. KumiokoCleanStart (talk) 02:26, 27 March 2013 (UTC)

Whatever good a person has done, whatever experience he can gain, it floats away on the breeze, without substance. But all his demerits go on his permanent record. It is enough to make a person wonder if all of the good done by any of us is only an illusion. Wnt (talk) 07:14, 27 March 2013 (UTC)

A year in the briar patch for Ixian collaborators -- what could possibly go wrong? This bodes well for collaboration, even if not the sort that was intended. 75.166.194.35 (talk) 02:45, 27 March 2013 (UTC)

Well Resolute, there is your basic argument....and then there is the argument that is proposed by the above IP user. If you look at my block log you will see a number of blocks. Some are indeed not worth the efforts to block me. The first one was my own stupidity and ignorance with Misplaced Pages policy and when given the chance not to be blocked ( the blocking admin gave me a chance not to be blocked at all over the issue) for the 3RR situation I found myself in I was stupid enough to state that I should be blocked even if I did not understand what I had done, thinking I was being the better person. No...I was being the "stupider" person. Something I have vowed never to do again. Another block was a mistake made by the Admin who blocked me over a single edit that all parties involved (even the reverted editor) explained was a legitimate revert and that I was working with the editor to resolve the content in question. Block logs don't say much. They simply state that a block was made...not that they were justified.--Amadscientist (talk) 07:15, 27 March 2013 (UTC)

He is a top editor and template expert

For people unaware of his background, User:Rich Farmbrough (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs) is a long-term user (and admin) who is among the top few editors with the highest edit-count, over 1 million edits, and not just minor changes, but large rewrites, plus 1,572 new articles. He is also a template expert, and years ago, he began developing fast-cite templates to generate wp:CS1 cites (with COinS metadata) which ran 10-15x times faster than old Template:Cite_web, to reduce a 20-30 second edit-preview down to just 2-3 seconds of reformatting. That was at a time when most major nation articles each reformatted over 25 seconds, such as "Israel" often running over 45 seconds to edit-preview. Due to Rich's successful fast-cite ideas, the new Template:Cite_quick was developed and improved and has cut 20-30 seconds off the reformat times of massive articles, even avoiding fatal page-size limits, another issue which Rich had solved years ago. However, instead of following his wise advice, or trying to compromise, other people fought his advancements for over a year. At the time of the recent 1-year block, when editing numerous articles, he had made hundreds of corrections and updates, during several edits, to new article "Mohan Deep" where he was accused of making 3 apostrophe errors by use of search-and-replace editing (see "Madhubala" in edit of 180 changes: dif-82). Anyway, the deterioration of talks between Rich and other admins gives evidence that Misplaced Pages has serious collaboration problems in the admin ranks. The Swedish Misplaced Pages, since 2006, has used 1-year term limits to remove admins, as easier to avoid bitter feelings, and I think enwiki is seeing more evidence of the dangers of the "imperial admin" elite class. -Wikid77 (talk) 11:08, 27 March 2013 (UTC)

8 very similar apostrophe errors, not 3. The "hundreds of corrections and updates, during several edits" were only made after the errors in the first one were pointed out at the ArbCom enforcement, when he suddenly returned to the Mohan Deep page two days after his sole edit to it. And Rich isn't an admin anymore, he was desysoped on 15 May 2012. Fram (talk) 13:43, 27 March 2013 (UTC)

Really, wow, 8 whole errors. That certainly does change things and makes a 1 year block warranted. (sarcasm intended). I also find it more thana little suspicious that its the same Admin/editor who seems to always find these problems. On obscure articles no less. The only plausible way that could happen is if said admin (thats you by the way Fram) watched a certain editors edits constantly just checking to see what was done on the article. Only a couple days after being unblocked no less. That seems a whole lot like Houdning, Harrassment and Stalking to me. But what do I know. i'm not an admin right. Only an admin would be able to recognize those things and only an admin would be able to interpret violations of those. KumiokoCleanStart (talk) 16:36, 27 March 2013 (UTC)

Oh, shut up already. If all you're going to do is toss into the mix intentionally-sarcastic bombs, then this discussion would be much better served by your absence. Farmbrough is a very well-known and notoriously problematic editor, it is not surprising or even unusual if the same admin or admins are the ones to highlight misdeeds, as they are the ones most familiar with the matter. It isn't "stalking" or "houdning" to check in on an editor with the history that Farmbrough has. It isn't even an admin-exclusive thing...if say by some staggering miracle Grundle2600 was ever let back in, you can be damn sure I'd be clicking on Special:Contributions/Grundle2600 once in awhile. Tarc (talk) 16:45, 27 March 2013 (UTC)

Sure I get that some editors have a problem with his edits. But not all of us, probably not even a majority, that's why the case went through the Arbitration committee so they could make an Arbitrary decision about a situation that failed to gain consensus in the community. As I have stated before. Any editor who is responsible for 5 million edits is going to have some problems. I would also counter that the majority of the complaints about Rich's editing were not about the "problems" but about the minor edits. Some editors feel that minor edits are important enough to ban an editor from the community or that 1000 easily fixable errors out of millions is a valid reason to block. I don't and never have denied that there were problems with some of his edits. We all make mistakes. What I am saying is that we should not be doling out 1 year blocks to an editor who has done by far more good than harm because a couple editors with the admin tools are butt hurt that he wouldn't respond to their comments and continual harrassment. KumiokoCleanStart (talk) 22:57, 27 March 2013 (UTC)

• Need better ways to work with highly intelligent people: In many cases, after working with highly intelligent people, I have found that they "do not suffer fools gladly" so it is important, when working with them, to be alert and not "waste their time" with potentially petty issues. Perhaps we need an essay "wp:How to work with intelligent people" so that the social dynamics can be better understood. In general, Misplaced Pages's rules for "crowd control" seem naive, or sophomoric, and many intelligent people will not react well under such conditions, merely pretend while they roll their eyes. There needs to be tolerance for trivial "8 errors" among "200 corrections" made in a single edit, and nitpicking at that level, is likely to breed contempt with intelligent people. I suggest we develop a core of "gradmins" as people with advanced degrees in various fields and advanced social skills, and have them interface with the highly intelligent people, to try to establish a common dialogue. -Wikid77 00:51, 28 March 2013 (UTC)

I thought you (Wikid77) were taking credit for the {{Cite_quick}} templates. If Rich had been responsible for installing even one, he would have been immediately blocked.... — Arthur Rubin (talk) 22:27, 27 March 2013 (UTC)

• Rich had created "Template:Cite_web_quick" in October 2011, which was used in some articles, but it was later "removed without incident" and was wp:TfD-deleted on 7 January 2012. It ran 10x-15x times faster than old Template:Cite_web (in reconstructed comparisons) but was not fully understood for its future potential, to quicken large articles to edit-preview within 5 seconds rather than 20-45 seconds. Also, it would have been perfect in translating articles to other-language wikipedias, where they could have formatted the copied citations which are often accepted as-is in preparation to find native-language sources later. -Wikid77 00:51, 28 March 2013 (UTC)

• No, he didn't. Amalthea created the template in March 2011; in October 2011, Rich Farmbrough made one edit to the template, and self-reverted one minute later. He essentially didn't create and didn't contribute anything to that template (which isn't a problem, of course; but he shouldn't get credit or blame incorrectly). Fram (talk) 09:35, 28 March 2013 (UTC)

• Please tell me this isn't over apostrophe errors.--Amadscientist (talk) 02:30, 28 March 2013 (UTC)

It apparently started with "8 apostrophes" overlooked in Bollywood author article "Mohan Deep" (see 180 changes: dif-82)), and then Rich was threatened with a block, so he continued editing and made about 1,343 repetitive changes to "List of Other Backward Classes" where a footnote reftag was added into 1,343 entries. Issuing threats is not very effective with intelligent people. Anyway, it was considered a violation of his prior ban against using search-and-replace, or even copy/paste, when he was limited to using keyboard characters only, during edits. I cannot even think of trying to edit in that manner. Imagine getting an edit-conflict and not allowed to copy/paste the prior inserted replies, into the current conversation text. It is such cruelty that it could be considered inhuman, so I would recommend to reduce the restrictions to a workable compromise, such as 300 changes per article (or such). Anyway, the final conclusion, about using "automated edits" (for 3 articles) is in wp:AE section "WP:Arbitration/Requests/Enforcement#Result concerning Rich Farmbrough". -Wikid77 05:19, 28 March 2013 (UTC)

He edited Mohan Deep, mixing improvements with errors in a way that violated his arbcom restriction. He only went back to edit the article again after the errors were pointed out. Similarly, he added the same ref to some 1000 entries in a list, but made an error with it, so that the ref didn't show up but created one of those big red cite ref errors in the ref section. Again, he didn't notice this and only corrected it after I had noticed it. Considering that this is the same pattern that lead to his community and arbcom restrictions and previous blocks, taking swift action instead of letting this go on and on is the normal solution (and exactly what AE is intended for). "It is such cruelty that it could be considered inhuman" qualifies for the over-the-top statement of the year though. Fram (talk) 07:50, 28 March 2013 (UTC)

So, let me get this straight. We blocked the second highest contributor the encyclopedia has for a year over making errors so that it would have the appearance of being "swift" due to arbcom sanctions even after he corrected them. Yep...this project has some serious problems that may well end very badly. Very badly indeed. Meanwhile we have an editor making unsubstantiated claims about others that are being taken seriously in the media making us all look like asses, and that same editor is deeply involved in both the article they are making claims about and the policy page that it involves and no one gives a flying bleep about that. Wow....just freaking WOW.--Amadscientist (talk) 08:07, 28 March 2013 (UTC)

Do you know any of the backstory, Amadscientist? One of the elements in the earlier cases was that he doesn't check his automated edits (the results of his automation), and that it is up to others to check them (and usually, those people then get flak for hounding him, and are told to leave it alone and that others will do it, even though those others never materialize). One of the reasons for the restrictions is that we don't want an editor using automation but needing one or more nannies to clean up after him. The result is that now, after years of patience, chances, more chances, ..., he is on a much shorter leash than other editors, and was lucky to even have that instead of a full ban. Fram (talk) 08:39, 28 March 2013 (UTC)

Would you mind clarifying, Fram, what percentage of edits made by Rich Farmbrough since he came off his last block contain errors? --Epipelagic (talk) 08:19, 28 March 2013 (UTC)

Yes, I would mind. I'm not going to spend even more time on this, to give you figures which are unrelated to this case. If someone has e.g. an interaction ban, we don't count the number of edits he makes that don't violate the interaction ban. Why would we treat this restriction differently? Fram (talk) 08:39, 28 March 2013 (UTC)

I take from your reluctance to disclose the percentage that it is infinitesimally small. I can't edit without occasionally making an error. So this is very disconcerting. --Epipelagic (talk) 09:03, 28 March 2013 (UTC)

You can take whatever you want, whether it involves ABF or not. But I don't think you have e.g. made 500 identical errors when running a bot (at first on your own account, then as a bot), then found out that you made the error, correct your bot, continue with the task but never bother to go back to correct those 500 errors? Rich Farmbrough did, I corrected them two months later. This is not about error-free editing. Fram (talk) 09:30, 28 March 2013 (UTC)

I'll give you some errors added between his block expired and the AE case was filed. These are only some examples of uncorrected errors, he also made some errors which he corrected in a further edit, seems a bit pointless to include these as well. I don't see what the relevance of this is for this discussion, but since you seem to find it important enough to ask but not important enough to research for yourself, a few examples:

• changes "LISTE DÉFINITIVE DES DÉPUTÉS ÉLUS À L’ISSUE DES DEUX TOURS" in "Liste Définitive Des Déeputés Élus À L’issue Des Deux Ttours", adding an error in "Députés" and in "Tours".
• adds "perecntqage"
• changes a "prorector" in a "proctor", even though they are not the same and a prorector was correct here
• adds a badly formatted piece of WP:OR to the article at the bottom. I reverted it some 2 1/2 days later, and the article was subsequently semi-protected by Bearian with the reason "Addition of unsourced or poorly sourced content: Recent need to rv WP:OR, important article"

I haven't checked all his edits, only some of those in the mainspace, but I think it is pretty clear that despite what you incorrectly inferred from my reluctance to waste my time on hardly relevant sidetracks, the percentage is clearly not "infinitesimally small".

Note that I'm not claiming that these involve automation, that I'm also not claiming that these warrant any further action, and that I only searched for and added these because people started drawing incorrect conclusions from my reluctance to do so. I would prefer if people would ignore this section and focus on the core aspects of the AE enforcement (or drop it altogether of course). Finally, this is a sample, not a definitive, exhaustive research. I'm not going to try to make a definitive, complete list so people can find the exact percentage. If anyone wants that anyway, they can do the work as well. Fram (talk) 10:21, 28 March 2013 (UTC)

Fram you don't have to repeat anything but if you could point me in the direction of where I can find the backstory that would be a start.--Amadscientist (talk) 09:15, 28 March 2013 (UTC)

Misplaced Pages:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Rich Farmbrough Fram (talk) 09:30, 28 March 2013 (UTC)

If someone has a restraining order, e.g. to stay at least 500 m away from the house of his former wife and children, and he violates that restraining order, he will get arrested, even if he was cleaning graffiti or helping old ladies cross the street at the time. The offense for which he was arrested may seem very minor, but the backstory explains a lot. (Obviously, neither the situation nor the result here are of a criminal nature, it's just an analogy, before anyone reads this the wrong way). Fram (talk) 09:30, 28 March 2013 (UTC)

It turns out I was familiar with some of the back story, if even just a small amount. It also does appear, at the very least, that Rich can't seem to let go of the use of automated tools to make huge amounts of edits. Which does at least illustrate the point that high edit count does not mean quality editing.--Amadscientist (talk) 10:27, 28 March 2013 (UTC)

There was a lot more to the Rich F Arbcom case than what Fram presents above. For one, the Arbs decided that he should be desusopped largely because he unblocked his own bot which was and still is common practice among Admin bot operators. Next there is the issue of Fram's involvement. Rich and others including myself repeatedly asked Fram to walk away and quite hounding. Rich couldn't even log in without Fram commenting about some edit. If things are that bad then there are more than enough editors and admins who will comment. After a while Rich just stopped responding to Fram altogether. If Fram would have been willing to accept he was involved (something that he still refuses to do) things would be much smotther and there would be a whole lot less drama. Another factor in Rich's case was that of creating categories. Most of which still exist by the way and are perfectly fine. Some folks just didn't like them because they act as a marker for Sockpuppets and vandals. Then there was the issue of minor edits, not errors but minor edits that really don't amount to anything so whether the bot does or doesn't do them is completely irrelevant to anything unless someone is looking for a reason to argue and block another user. Then we get to the issue of errors. Very few of these were caused by the bot, most of them (still rather few comparitavely speaking) were done by Rich while testing new code to add to the bot. Then there is the issue of complaints from people about him and his bots doing too many edits and filling their wathclists. They didn't like seeing all these edits done to their favoriate articles so they asked him to slow down. Really? Too many edits are filling up my watchlist is just about the stupidest argument possible and yet it was one of the justifications used. When you wrap all this up into one package, Rich was banned for trying to do to much, too fast. He as too willing to use technology to make this place better and some of the purists that don't like bots or would prefer bots don't edit got annoyed. Some editors got annoyed at their watchlists filling up and some others though that a zero defect mentality is necessary for bot operators. 99% of all these arguments are complete, utter bullshit. Pure and simple. KumiokoCleanStart (talk) 19:10, 28 March 2013 (UTC)

I can't really say I agree with the block or even the things arbcom stated in the link Fram left. Some of it really disturbs me such as guessing at whether he was using an automated tool without real proof and just saying the speed and accuracy looks like it had to be a tool. Frankly that is something I see as just an accusation from Arbcom without justification. To me if Arbcom has to guess at things to make decisions they shouldn't be a part of their decision. On the other hand it wasn't a single case or issue and looks like there were enough warnings and previous issues (regardless of the accuracy or importance of those issues) that the entire situation was bound to be revisited. But if the committee chooses a path and editors disagree with it...then there must be a route to take and if not...maybe there should be a community discussion to form something solid.--Amadscientist (talk) 01:38, 29 March 2013 (UTC)

I've seen a lot of stupid things on Misplaced Pages, but this one just about puts all of them to shame. Forbidding the use of copy-paste isn't even remotely close to enforceable. As Amadscientist points out, ArbCom have given themselves the power to create facts out of thin air, determining whether or not an automated process was being used, essentially based on a hunch. They made an accusation and failed to provide evidence for it. What's that called when someone who isn't an arbitrator does it? Hmm, let me think... let's see here... Whatever arbitrators signed on to that idiotic sanction should be forcibly removed from their positions. Now let's all go back to trying to figure out why we're hemorrhaging editors (I wonder!). Evanh2008  03:10, 29 March 2013 (UTC)

I don't see a possible route of forcing arbitrators out. They seem to be resigning anyway on their own. I would ask if we are seeing something of Sea change going on in regards to Arbcom though. I think there have been a number of recent situations where there is real concern from editors at all levels. I think the main issue (to me anyway) is that I can't see how much trust to put in a group that locks themselves away in secret to work. I strongly feel that Arbcom needs to come out of the dark and begin working in full transparency. There will always be instances where privacy will be required, but that should only be when dealing with personal information.--Amadscientist (talk) 09:00, 29 March 2013 (UTC)

What part of the Rich Farmbrough case was done "in secret"? And please keep in mind that the unhappy people are usually more likely to raise their voice than the happy ones; while there are quite a few issues where ArbCom has gotten some flak recently, this doesn't necessarily mean that most editors are concerned about ArbCom. As an example: you are here now complaining about the original Farmbrough case, but the ArbCom that decided this wasn't really shoed away at the last ArbCom elections (at least those members that were up for reelection), while usually the most vocal critics of the ArbCom, the ones wanting a complete change, get relatively little support at such elections. This seems to indicate that there is a "silent majority" which is in general more than happy with the way that ArbCom handles things (without necessarily agreeing with all their decisions or comments). Obviously, it is possible that this has changed over the course of the last few months, but I doubt that a case from May 2012 will have anything to do with that. Fram (talk) 09:17, 29 March 2013 (UTC)

"you are here now complaining about the original Farmbrough case" Am I? Gee I thought I was just discussing the issue. Thanks for correcting me so that I know what I was actually thinking and doing. Gosh, I really do need others to tell me what I mean and you do it so well.....NOT. I support Arbcom, but they do indeed spend much too much time discussing cases with each other via e-mail. Sorry you don't get that. I like things to be accurate as well, and don't like guess work. Sorry for being such a stickler for such things. Just me.--Amadscientist (talk) 14:30, 29 March 2013 (UTC)

I can't help you if you prefer misplaced sarcasm over an out-of-context quote, instead of actually arguing with rational arguments. If so much of the ArbCom discussion and decision was done in secret, then why are they still disagreeing when it comes to the voting? All a charade? Looking at the quality of discussion concerning this AE enforcement block, I can understand that people would prefer to have the discussion somewhere more private though, it would probably significantly improve the signal-to-noise ratio. Fram (talk) 15:15, 29 March 2013 (UTC)

What purpose does this block serve?

Serious question: how does Misplaced Pages benefit from this block? Prioryman (talk) 01:26, 29 March 2013 (UTC)

People need to understand that if you violate an Arbitration Committee and 2 community-placed sanctions, you will get blocked in standard escalation. Rich has admitted to me that he used automation (find and replace), and in a few hours worth of conversation with me has basically shown no remorse, no willingness to admit he was wrong, and no intention to stop violating his sanctions. Therefore, the block benefits Misplaced Pages by not having users around who violate ArbCom sanctions, and who show no remorse when they're blocked for doing so. gwickwire_editing 01:31, 29 March 2013 (UTC)

Presumably it has the "feel good" factor for Sandstein and Fram, and the rest of that component of the Misplaced Pages community who are here, not so much to build content, but more to ensure that "justice" and retribution are dealt out to those who are here to build content. There's no way to avoid this, since it seems built into the human condition. The content building community will always need to supply a steady stream of sacrifices. --Epipelagic (talk) 01:47, 29 March 2013 (UTC)

The justice is being dealt out as you call it to someone who violated 2 community bans multiple times, and now an ArbCom sanction multiple times. You're saying that the community, and ArbCom, has/have no power over other editors, and that's blatantly false. He violated sanctions, he knew he was doing so, he isn't remorseful or sorry he did it, and he doesn't wish to stop violating said bans. He admitted that he used an automated find and replace tool on the articles in question, and knew that was in violation of his ban. That earns him a block to prevent the integrity of community/ArbCom sanctions from going to waste. It's just like why was Kevin desysopped a while ago, because ArbCom wanted to protect the integrity of functionary blocks temporarily. He was resysopped because he said he would respect that, and Rich can't be unblocked because we know he won't respect that. Maybe in 1 year Rich will be mature and thoughtful enough to not go against 3 different sanctions... If you remember, these sanctions were his only way out of a complete site ban, which in all honesty probably would've saved us all this trouble. gwickwire_editing 01:51, 29 March 2013 (UTC)

And how does this pretence at legitimate jurisprudence play out in practice? How much of the encyclopaedia has actually been built as a result of you focusing in this way on these issues? --Epipelagic (talk) 02:18, 29 March 2013 (UTC)

Oh you all need to stop this crap for lack of a better word. You are grasping at straws to get him unblocked. It's clear he violated his ban multiple times since it was imposed. Do you suggest we just ignore that fact and destroy ArbCom's credibility? No. gwickwire_editing 02:43, 29 March 2013 (UTC)

Gwickwire, please don't comment on the "maturity" of your betters. It's redlining my irony meter, and I'm worried you're going to break it. --Floquenbeam (talk) 02:46, 29 March 2013 (UTC)

So you're saying it's perfectly normal and sane and mature for someone to violate every sanction placed on them willingly and knowingly, and then claim "oh I didn't know that was in there" or "oh it was beneficial so what?"... I'm done here, as there's no way I can continue this after my conversations with him, if only you could see them (they're all in -en on IRC, so if you wish to look).. gwickwire_editing 02:55, 29 March 2013 (UTC)

You're done here? Good. You're just embarrassing yourself. Black Kite (talk) 03:05, 29 March 2013 (UTC)

(Reply to Epipelagic): let's see, you ask irrelevant questions above (previous section) for which you can find the answer just as easily as I can, but if I refuse to do the work needed, you just draw the worst possible ABF conclusion from it. Of course, when I actually do some basic reseearch to show that your assumptions were rather wrong, you simply ignore it, and move on to another section where you continue to sprout more divisive nonsense. Both Sandstein and I have more edits, and more articles created, than e.g. you have. That doesn't make us better or worse, but it shows how ridiculous your assertions are about "Sandstein and Fram, and the rest of that component of the Misplaced Pages community who are here, not so much to build content, but more to ensure that "justice" and retribution are dealt out to those who are here to build content". I am here to build content, just like you are, and Sandstein, and Rich Farmbrough, and most others (there are one or two editors in this discussion who are no longer here to build any content, but since they oppose the block, I don't think you are interested in berating them). Feel free to criticize the block or the restrictions as much as you like, but after two badly failed attempts, let's hope that third time will be a charm and you will find something actually correct to base your arguments on. Fram (talk) 08:34, 29 March 2013 (UTC)

I'm sorry you had to go trolling through everything looking for problems, Fram. When I asked that question I thought you would have the details at your fingertips. I was trying to clarify whether the level of problematic edits by RF was actually anything out of the ordinary. I did ask if you "would mind", and was not trying to put you on the spot. You could simply have replied that you didn't have those details to hand, but instead you responded in a dismissive way. That resulted in my suggestion that the proportion of problems was small, a reply which seems to have upset you. You then changed your mind and provided four sample edits. Three contained minor errors. The fourth however was problematic. You say it was OR, and since I cannot access the article I cannot assess that. Then Bearian semi-protected the article with the reason "Addition of unsourced or poorly sourced content: Recent need to rv WP:OR, important article". Why on earth would Bearian do that? It didn't even seem an "important article". Was it just because RF was involved? That was the point where I backed out, and the reason I didn't reply.

I'm not sure why you made those comments about edit counts. If you build content then you must know that edit counts by themselves establish precisely nothing about content contributions. Content contributions could perhaps be established by examining say the principal 20 or 40 articles an editor has written. If you and Sandstein and I are all here to build content in the same way, then we would be seeing eye to eye, wouldn't we. --Epipelagic (talk) 13:29, 29 March 2013 (UTC)

"trolling"? Curious choice of words there. Why would I have those details at my fingertips? I normally don't look at all edits, it's depressing enough to look at a few. You still jumped to a conclusion that wasn't warranted by anything in this discussion but seemed to be based on some preconceived notion you had. Anyway, while two of the four examples are indeed minor, I don't consider changing "prorector" to "proctor" so minor, since it changes the meaning for no good reason at all.

Coming to the fourth problem; what are you actually trying to say? "I cannot access the article"? Have you even tried? It is protected from "editing", not from viewing, you only had to click on the diff I conveniently provided(). Why Bearian said or did anything is his choice, and you would need to ask him for an explanation.

Finally; you started about content builders vs. non-content builders, rather out of the blue and without any evidence. I at least provided the most basic and crude evidence (article creations) to indicate that you were wrong. Feel free to provide better measures to decide who is and who isn't a content builder here. I don't have those measures handy, but since you were rather categorical, I presume you have evidence that I (or Sandstein) are not content builders? Or is the only evidence you have that we are not in agreement in this case? That's a perfectly circular piece of logic you are applying there; "I'm a content builder and I'm right. You are wrong, so it must be because you are not a content builder." "Why do you believe i'm not a content builder?" "Because you don't agree with me." So again, do you have any substantial and substantiated arguments to back up your position? Fram (talk) 13:58, 29 March 2013 (UTC)

I was thinking of trolling (fishing). By "I cannot access the article" I meant I cannot access the source that RF provided. Because the source cannot be accessed, I don't see how you determined he was engaged in OR. You say article creations are the "most basic" evidence of content building. That is worrisome coming from an admin. No content builder would ever think that. Some of the most prolific content builders largely develop or rewrite existing articles, particularly these days. It would be easy to generate 100 stubs a day, and it would mean next to nothing. I'm not sure what you are arguing in the tail end of your comment - it doesn't make sense to me. --Epipelagic (talk) 14:41, 29 March 2013 (UTC)

Trolling (fishing)? Right... As for the source, I'll guess I'll do the work again: . Further: ah, the out-of-context quotes are cheap today! I did not just say that they are the "most basic", I said "the most basic and crude evidence", which is hardly claiming that it is the best or most significant evidence... So, let's see, I have given some examples of errors, which you could have found as well instead of jumping to unwarranted conclusions; I have provided the source, something which you could have done as well; I have given some indication why your argument was wrong, based on things you could have researched before making judgments as well; in return, you have what? Complained? Misrepresented my statements? Continued your claim that I am not a content builder? Yes, all that, but you haven't done any legwork, presented any evidence, ... Basically, you have wasted my time for no good reason at all. Fram (talk) 15:26, 29 March 2013 (UTC)

Sigh...

• Try trawling then, as in trawling through data. It's not difficult.
• You say RF is guilty of OR for claiming that the widely used phrase "who did what to whom, and when" was relevant to the article. That was a minor content issue, which could have been politely debated on the talk page. It needed discussing, but instead you treated him as a vandal with your revert and naked charge of OR. Why Bearean then backed you up and blocked the article is beyond comprehension, and suggests a knee jerk persecution of RF.
• From the evidence you have provided, the percentage of really problematic edits by RF during that period was indeed "infinitesimally small", zero to be precise.
• Sorry Fram. Generating stubs is not evidence per se of content building. It can be just a simple mechanical matter that can be done by bots. It would be easy to manufacture hundreds of stubs over the next few days. What would that prove?
• Where did I say you were not a content builder? I said you were were here, "not so much to build content, but more to ensure that 'justice' and retribution are dealt out to those who are here to build content". Do you disagree with that? Where does that imply that you might not also be here to build content?
• Since you are making such a big deal over how you are a credible content builder, it is now up to you to substantiate your claim.
• On the general issue of content editors – editors who are not content builders tend to minimise what is involved. I don't think people should be able to claim they are content builders without providing supporting evidence. It's rather like Essjay claiming all those unsubstantiated qualifications. Being a content builder is not, and should not be a minor matter, a matter of little more than reverts and stubs. Bone fide content builders are in fact quite thin on the ground on Misplaced Pages, and users should not be able to claim they are content builders without providing evidence if challenged. The same applies to an editor who claims to be a professor or to be an administrator. I'd expect a user who claims they are a credible content builder to provide, preferably accessible from their user page, at least half a dozen examples of substantial articles for which they are the principal content author. Other users can then easily assess the validity of their claim. Put that on one of your user pages, Fran, so it will be easy for readers to judge to what extent you actually are a content builder.
• For myself, I claim to be an aspiring or apprentice content builder. I have long indicated that on one of my user pages, and I'll happily indicate 20 (or 50 or 120) substantial articles as supporting evidence, some of which can be found here.

I am not wasting your time. You are managing to do that without my help. --Epipelagic (talk) 00:38, 30 March 2013 (UTC)

Epipelagic, I'm done with you and your dirty tactics. I don't know whether you are merely incompetent or truly dishonest, but either way, if this is how you normally behave on Misplaced Pages, you have no business here. Please actually read the Five W's edit Rich Farmbrough made; he was not "claiming that the widely used phrase "who did what to whom, and when" was relevant to the article", he was claiming that one particular source at one particular time coined the phrase. That is a very specific claim, with no supporting evidence, so it was pure WP:OR. You are misrepresenting what he said only to strengthen your case and to support your conclusions (you need shifting goalposts for this as well, changing from "what percentage of edits made by Rich Farmbrough since he came off his last block contain errors?" and "I take from your reluctance to disclose the percentage that it is infinitesimally small." to now "the percentage of really problematic edits", which is a completely different claim of course, and your conclusion that that percentage is zero is only supportable if you ignore or twist beyond recognition all the facts; but that was probably to be expected as par for the course). As to what you expect; bugger off. I have provided you with what you wanted over and over again, you haven't presented anything in return, apart from evidence that you are a content builder, which was never disputed and not very interesting. Perhaps you should stick to it, and leave discussions to those of us that are willing and able to play fair. Fram (talk) 10:54, 30 March 2013 (UTC)

• This diatribe by a notorious hardline blocking admin is one of the reasons why Misplaced Pages is unravelling. Bullying behaviour like this from an admin is tolerated by the admin community providing it is directed towards content builders. In the reverse situation the content builder would be blocked indefinitely with a demand that he must crawl in a humiliated manner before the blocking admininstrator if he wants to return to Misplaced Pages. This asymmetric power to bully, block and humiliate content builders, treating them as though they were vandals, is given to users with little experience in building content, as well as users who are temperamentally unsuited to wield such power. This is what sits at the heart of the current dysfunction and growing climate of fear on Misplaced Pages. --Epipelagic (talk) 19:35, 30 March 2013 (UTC)

This matter continues in the following thread --Epipelagic (talk) 08:15, 1 April 2013 (UTC)

You say: "I have more edits, and more articles created, than e.g. you have... I am here to build content, just like you are". Sorry Fram, but that is not "just like" any content builder. That is not how it is in the slightest. The rapid-fire minor general maintenance and semi-automated edits you often make and your production line of stubs made from public domain text does not make you anything like a content builder. That you could possibly think that highlights the confusion some editors who are not content builders have about building content. Now it's time for you to "play fair". As discussed above, can you offer for scrutiny just six substantial articles, say over 30 or 40K and not just lists, for which you are the primary content builder? Perhaps you had trouble finding six articles, otherwise why would you have got so angry? So how about two? Even one would be a start, and would establish a little credibility. But the inference is clear if you offer nothing. --Epipelagic (talk) 07:35, 1 April 2013 (UTC)

IN response to several of the comments above:

• @ Prioryman, It does not. As I have mentioned else where the only thing that this block accomplishes is to show to the community that the policies need to be changed, we need to stop letting bullies and miscreants control the project because too few of us have the stomach for confrontation and don't want to call them out when they do something we don't agree with. I sacrificed my morale character for years and didn't get involved and I regret that now because I could have helped to nip some of this in the butt long ago before it rooted. It also does a pretty effective job of striking fear into editors who might want to start a bot or do a lot of edits using automation.
• @ Gwickwire, we few editors cannot destroy Arbcom's creditibility but cases like this they do that job pretty well themselves. The community see's it, most don't act on it but having 22, 000 pages on my watchlist, several hundred of which are admins, arb members and veteran users, allows me to see a wide array of discussions referring to it. Don't be fooled into thinking that because there are only a few actively commenting that the rest don't care. Many of them prefer to keep their heads down partly out of fear and partly because they want to keep their editing enjoyable and avoid drama.
• @ Fram, you Harass Rich for years incesently, continue to pursue a vendetta to have him banned form the project, refuse to step away from a topic you are clearly too involved in and actually have the gall to accuse another user of assuming bad faith? I would say that perhaps now is a good time for some self refelction but I am familiar enough with your activities to know better. Also, on the topic of being a content editor, yes you have created a lot of articles but as I mentioned before I hardly call cutting and pasting information from another dicionary with no other changes but adding some wikiformatting and a couple of categories as a strong background in article building. Yes it has been confirmed its not Copyright violation but its still plagiarism and still damn lousy writing. I also find it rather ironic that whenever someone disagrees with you, you present a case of I am right you are wrong mentality. And you have the gall to accuse other editors of ABF! Really?KumiokoCleanStart (talk) 14:53, 29 March 2013 (UTC)
  • I have created and expanded a lot of other articles as well, and the fact that you still consider it plagiarism is one of many good reasons why it is a good thing that you never passed an RfA (your continued incorrect interpretation of WP:INVOLVED is another example of this). Wrt disagreements: what I try to do, contrary to many others in this discussion, is "I am right and you are wrong and here is the evidence". But I'll gladly make an exception for you, and not provide any other articles I created or improved. That way, you can just continue believing whatever it is you want to believe. Fram (talk) 15:39, 29 March 2013 (UTC)

Really, not plagiarism? So what is it called when you copy and paste stuff from one source to the other? I don't know maybe they don't have a law for it in your couontry. That's possible, I don't know how the laws work where you live, but here in the US where I live we call that plagiarism and its generally frowned upon. I also don't think my interpretation of involved is a problem. My problem is that you don't seem to recognize that what you are doing, constantly following other users around and frequently provoking them, isn't; and isn't harassment either. That is truly troubling. Also, its true I may never get access to the tools but I don't think you should have them either. You have on repeated occassions shown that you lack the temperment, maturity or technical competance to use them or have them. That editors like you are able to get the tools and continually harass users you don't like and violate policy in a variety of ways while others are not allowed to have them because they can't be "trusted" shows how bad the RFA process needs to be fixed. The one thing I am indeed thankful for is that you rarely use them (other than to be able to see deleted content that you can use in Arbcom cases that is)! KumiokoCleanStart (talk) 20:40, 29 March 2013 (UTC)

To answer your question, cutting and pasting from one source to another is called "quoting". You've probably done it yourself when answering email. Plagiarism is the use of someone else's work without appropriate acknowledgement, which you have ignored in your definition. In the articles you tried to AfD, Fram included a template which acknowledged that the text in the article came from a public-domain source, and named what the source was. Therefore, he did not plagiarize, because he clearly showed where the text came from, and that he did not write it himself. Sarek and Moonriddengirl already explained this at the time, but I am explaining it again: Fram did not plagiarize.

You may not understand or accept the usual definition of plagiarism. That does not mean you can keep calling Fram a plagiarist, any more than a vegetarian could call the police every time her neighbor had a barbecue because "meat is murder". If you continue to follow him around accusing him of plagiarism, that would probably be "frowned upon" and constitute "harassment" by you, as you explained above. If you want to argue for social change or debate Fram's suitability to be an admin, fine, but be truthful when doing so: it's degrading to you if you don't, and it will make people less likely to listen to your calls for change. Choess (talk) 22:01, 29 March 2013 (UTC)

A quote is exactly that, a quote, preferably with a reference associated. Not an entire article copied from the source with scant sources. So let's take a look at an article he just created, Juan Galván Jiménez. A nearly identical copy from Bryan's Dictionary of Painters and Engravers page 212 here. Now I admit this is not a copywritten work and falls under open source material but it still seems like this is plagiarism! But I guess I don't really know what plagiarism is if its not copying info directly. At the very least its extremely poor writing. Now I have used a lot of material from government sources and other open source material but one thing I do not believe I have intentionally done is copy someone else's work in this manner. Yes he left a basic link but Bryans is a massive multi volume compendium so it would have been extremely beneficial to leave at least a page number where the source can be found. People may not like what I have to say, they might even think I am an asshole, but this my friend, is plagiarism! With that said, plagiarism isn't a crime, even with most copywritten works, but its journalistic, literary immoral and reflects a breech of trust towards the community by the individual. You may not agree, and that's fine, but it is what it is.

But this isn't about me and its not about Fram directly. This is about Rich F, who was blocked for a year for the accusation from Fram that he was using automation (loosely defined including copy paste). That is what this is about. There was little proof, just assumptions. Which it seems was enough to invoke a one year block. So, if there is a problem here its not me.KumiokoCleanStart (talk) 00:46, 30 March 2013 (UTC)

If you copy from one author, it’s plagiarism. If you copy from two, it’s research :) Count Iblis (talk) 00:51, 30 March 2013 (UTC)

Kumioko, I'm not sure how much more clear I can make this without doing annoying things with fonts. Plagiarism is not "copying info directly", it's "copying info directly" without proper acknowledgement. I do not disagree with your moral judgments on plagiarism, but you are the only one who thinks that what has been done here is plagiarism. How you feel or what it "seems" like does not change the definition. The template Fram added to acknowledge the source of the article refers to an encyclopedia: it tells you what article it came from, because that's how you look things up in encyclopedias, not by page numbers. (BTW, Template:EB1911 is almost a decade old, so people have been doing exactly what Fram has been doing for that entire time. This is not a new practice or something only he has been doing.) I realize you are eager, emotionally, to give Fram a taste of his own medicine, so to speak; but in order to do that, you first have to have a good grasp of the policy, which doesn't seem to be the case here. If you want to argue that these aren't evidence of content creation on Fram's part, fine (I think even he would agree with you), but it's still not plagiarism.

Re. Rich, if that sort of hypervigilant scrutiny and assumptions of automation were applied to another editor, yes, it would be over the top and unfair. The problem is that Rich was caught having downloaded and used an automation tool two weeks after being told he couldn't make automated edits. Rich got stuck with very broad and draconian restrictions (indeed, I think ArbCom would have been nicer if they'd banned him outright) because it was clear that that was the only way to keep him from continuing to use automation. Yeah, it's a shame he got blocked over something so trivial, but if he'd been more responsive and cooperative originally, he wouldn't have would up in a situation where tiny things like that could put him in violation of his restrictions. Choess (talk) 02:48, 30 March 2013 (UTC)

Ok fine I'm not an expert on plagiarism. I think its pretty funny that the Copyright bots and the folks at CCI kept hitting on the Medal of Honor recipient articles I was creating as plagiarism when it was cited direct quotes (for the citations) from freely distributable government sources. But somehow this isn't. Anyway. Rich was very responsive originally. It was only after being repeatedly hounded and harassed by Fram and CBM that he stopped responding to them and just ignored their comments. It started to become one of those "if you give a mouse a cookie he'll ask you for a glass of milk" situations. Everytime he catered to one of their complaints it only encouraged them to make more of them more often. Anyone would have gotten fed up under those conditions. Kumioko (talk) 03:07, 30 March 2013 (UTC)

I hope you complained to the bot owners. :) I'm not necessarily an expert on plagiarism, either; Misplaced Pages:Close paraphrasing kinda took me by surprise a few years ago. Not that I would have done it, but no one ever explicitly said it either...sometimes you just have to go, "OK, policy is what it is" and walk away. So don't put on a dunce cap or anything.

I don't really know enough about the situation leading up to the ArbCom case to make an intelligent comment. As someone who edits manually, it can be kinda scary to have a bot blasting through your watchlist. If it made 5000 tiny fixes and put 50 hard-to-find errors into my articles, it's hard to see that as an improvement. And once the bot goes away, if you know it's been making errors, you as an editor feel under pressure to try to find them and fix them before they screw up the readers...and the bot is running much faster than you can. Bottom line, if a bot creates 50 errors, that's still 50 errors that have to be fixed by people who don't run bots, even if it had a very high rate of accuracy. Yes, there is a lot of pressure on bot operators, but dealing with that is part of the job. Choess (talk) 04:18, 30 March 2013 (UTC)

The most important issue here is whether or not Rich deserved the block. I really can't say he did and I really can't say he didn't. Is this likely to be overturned? I don't thinks so. Should there be a route for uninvolved editors to apeal this decision? Perhaps, but I do doubt that will happen soon either. Bottum line....see you in a year Rich.--Amadscientist (talk) 15:02, 29 March 2013 (UTC)

But from Misplaced Pages's perspective the block isn't a good solution. So, if we forget what individual editors want, if we just focus on maintaining and improving Misplaced Pages, then banning Rich is like amputating your leg just because you have chronic knee pain. Count Iblis (talk) 01:00, 30 March 2013 (UTC)

Amadscientist asks a good question. I looked for somewhere to challenge the block as a rather obvious over-reaction, and couldn't find it. On the other hand, there is little doubt that Rich is being a dick. He has been repeatedly asked to stop doing certain things, which routinely fuck up actual content, and he refuses to stop. We have been here before (e.g. Betacommand). I wish Rich would simply abide by consensus and rise above it by continuing to do good work. Experience indicates this is a forlorn hope. Guy (Help!) 01:36, 30 March 2013 (UTC)

And...lets think of the flip of this. If he wasn't blocked, how many editors would be upset that he was protected just be cause he is so prolific? Not like we haven't had that discussion on this very page before.--Amadscientist (talk) 01:39, 30 March 2013 (UTC)

cf. the Doncram arb case. If someone had been willing to say to him a few years back, "Look, you're making a lot of borderline-acceptable edits and you're blowing off criticism about them. Send your articles through AFC until things have improved.", it would have prevented a lot of bad behavior on the part of all parties to the case and saved a lot of wasted time and effort bickering. Choess (talk) 02:54, 30 March 2013 (UTC)

Precisely. I looked to see what I might be able to do to help get Rich unblocked, as I like him. The answer is - nothing, really. He chose to go down the road of ignoring valid criticism. That never ends well. Guy (Help!) 15:29, 30 March 2013 (UTC)

• Solution to automation errors is automated verification: This whole debate about "automated edits" has occurred at an ironic time, because the solution is "automated verification" which is now highly possible with Lua script. The main reason I would dred making large changes is because the system was so S-L-O-W that I could not wait to verify the edits. Now, as of 15 hours ago, the transition of Template:Cite_web to use Lua, has made the edit-preview, and edit-save (proofread the contents), over 3x faster for many large (and popular) articles (as 7-8 seconds rather than 20-35). Part of automated verification is to reformat the text to be viewed in the same hour, and it was getting unbearable because large articles were so S-L-O-W to reformat, it had become "automated frustration" not verification, and then the frustration-based mistakes would add garbage into the article, causing edit-preview shock, then wait and redo, then timeout ("wp:Wikimedia Foundation error"), and so people would become afraid of verifying their changes, just make some good-faith effort, click "Save page" and hope it worked after the long delay and timeout error. All that has changed, now, and people can finally edit-preview and see their changes within seconds, without total fear of timeout errors (any article averaging 21 seconds could drag into 60-second timeout). Also, we can create better automated tools, with automated verification, to look for obvious typos (such as 8 suspicious apostrophes), and that is another way to make "automated editing" less error-prone. For one specific problem above, lowercase French text, I had created the tool {fixcaps}, because retyping lowercase letters can be so tedious, numbing, and fall-asleep-typing boring. Hence, now:

• Use: {{fixcaps|LISTE DÉFINITIVE DES DÉPUTÉS ÉLUS À L’ISSUE DES DEUX TOURS}}
• Result: liste définitive des députés élus à l’issue des deux tours

• Use: {{fixcaps|"LISTE/DÉFINITIVE DES/DÉPUTÉS/ÉLUS À/L’ISSUE DES/DEUX/TOURS}}
• Result: Liste Définitive des Députés Élus à L’issue des Deux Tours

In general, see the various other examples in Template:Fixcaps. Another possibility might be to offer a Lua-based spellcheck tool for a short section of text, to compare against common words, where a Lua module could rapidly check the length and warn, "Text section too long to check all words". The concept could work like this: a quick spellcheck cannot actually validate all words, but it would rapidly skip the common words to list only unusual words, and such feedback, to a distracted editor, might focus their attention to look among the unusual words to spot true spelling errors in the selected section of text. This is an example, where "automated" does not mean "automatic" but merely "assisted" where the automation is limited to realistic levels, not to consume the servers with a zillion calculations. We already have quick {spellnum} to pronounce a number with perhaps too many zeroes to easily count: {{spellnum|40000000000000}} states "forty trillion" as another tool, to verify long numbers for dyslexic editors. Anyway, we need to provide better tools to assist editors who think automated tools are the future of improving Misplaced Pages, because at the base level, Misplaced Pages uses computer-based, automated word processing. So, the long-term solution is: more automation, not less. We need to work with our highly intelligent editors, to provide better tools to assist them. -Wikid77 (talk) 16:46/01:01, 31 March 2013 (UTC)

...can't wait to see JW's opinion on this... Basket _Feudalist 19:21, 31 March 2013 (UTC)

I doubt he will comment on this one. He's probably enjoying his Easter weekend and by tomorrow this thread will most likely be archived. With that said its very possible he already saw it and just decided to pass on leaving a comment about this problem. I problem all too common on here from him and a lot of the community in general. Kumioko (talk) 21:54, 31 March 2013 (UTC)

Why would you want to write a number in a tricky form, such that you need a computer tool to check it? Is it supposed that the reader go and use the same tool? Automation - assisted automation as you say - is excellent, I agree, but this is a poor example. Instead of writing "40000000000000" and use a tool to check correctness, you should use probably use "40,000,000,000,000", or "40x10", or spell it out (though trillion would still need clarification, to me that is "40 billion"...). Automation must not help "automation operators" against "keyboard/manual editor" even less against "readers" - Nabla (talk) 11:01, 1 April 2013 (UTC)

Has a witchhunt happened?

Fram has made angry accusations in the section above of dirty tactics, incompetence, true dishonesty, inability to to be fair, unfitness to be here, and so on. This raises the question as to why Fram is resorting to gross personal attacks rather than responding to the issues. It is damaging the health and long term prospects of Misplaced Pages if admins are allowed to avoid accountability in this way. These problems exist because the only people on Misplaced Pages who currently address such behaviours are the admins themselves.

Fram claims above that RF was guilty of "really problematic" OR for asserting that the widely used phrase "who did what to whom, and when" had "passed into common usage" during the 1940s. He rudely reverted RF as though he were a vandal, crudely accusing him of OR in the edit summary. The edit was mildly problematic, not inaccurate, but not really appropriately sourced or formatted. It was hardly a "really problematic" edit, as Fram claims, and certainly didn't warrant treating RF as though he was a vandal. It was just a run of the mill content issue, and Fram could have handled the matter politely and discussed it on the talk page, or edited the entry and used a better source. The phrase indisputably "passed into common usage" was obviously relevant to the article. It also is a phrase that came into common use after the second world war. That is easy to verify informally. I found only two instances on the web where it was used prior to the second world war. RF added nothing to the article that was really misleading or inappropriate, but it was not well sourced and needed further work.

Instead Fram treated him as a vandal, with a revert and a naked charge of OR. Another admin, Bearian, then blocked the article so RF couldn't edit it, using the edit summary, "Addition of unsourced or poorly sourced content: Recent need to rv WP:OR". Why? The protection occurred 6 hours after the event. There was no sign of edit warring. Blocking an article so a content editor can't edit is another way admins demonstrate unilateral power over content editors, another way to disempower and humiliate. It should be used with care if it is going to be used against a skilled and long term editor. How could its use here possibly be regarded as appropriate?

Another issue concerns the timing of these incidents. Why would Bearian look at this particular article at this particular point in time? He had never edited the article before. Was he following RF's edits? Neither had Fram edited the article before. Was it just miraculous coincidence that Fram randomly stumbled upon this article, one out of four million, just three days after RF edited it? Or was Fram stalking RF's edits? In the above thread, KumiokoCleanStart says that Fram has hounded RF over the last two years. If RF was in fact systematically persecuted by Fram, and possibly others, then the validity of his current one year block needs revisiting.

RF had in the past messed things up with automated edits and then refused to clean up after himself. That was a serious matter, not cleaning up, and should have been sanctioned. It was sanctioned. If since coming off that block, RF has not made any really problematic edits, and from the evidence supplied by Fram that seems to be the case, then has a witchhunt happened? --Epipelagic (talk) 08:06, 1 April 2013 (UTC)

• Communications between them became combative (not collaborative): Rather than treating edit-restrictions as a "mutual agreement" of acceptable levels, the restrictions had become too harsh. The severe limit of "absolutely no search-and-replace" rather than "20 repetitions at most" or such, had fostered a bad attitude. Similarly, when an issue is considered "OR" then more study should have been done, such as a talk-page thread questioning the history of phrase "who did what to whom, and when" in article "Five Ws". Naturally, the many experienced content editors would have searched related sources, rather than revert a claim sourced to an offline magazine. For example, the Google Ngram Viewer confirms the general concept of the phrase (as 5-word portions) gaining popular use in the 1940s, where the phrase, "who did what to whom" emerged during the 1940s (see: ngram "who did what to whom") and "what to whom and when" skyrocketed in late 1940s (see: ngram "what to whom and when"). Based on those ngrams, then the claim of the phrase becoming popular in the 1940s does not seem like wp:OR but rather correct, and that could have been discussed in Talk:Five_Ws. When admins are no longer acting in a spirit of collaboration, then the results become a predictable banning and loss of the hounded editor who seems to be right about phrases used in the 1940s, and other issues. -Wikid77 (talk) 10:01, 1 April 2013 (UTC)

Yep I agree with you both. The harassment behind this case was serious but was never taken seriously by those who knew better. IMO, because they got tired of hearing about it more than problems by the editor. But that doesn't change the facts. Whatever Rich did or didn't do, the problems were compounded by the unending discussions and threats by Fram and to a lesser extent a couple of other users. The bigger problem to me is that Fram seems to either genuinely not understand what he is doing wrong, doesn't care he's doing it or is pretending we are too stupid to not see it. Kumioko (talk) 16:30, 1 April 2013 (UTC)

As to my motives

I read Five Ws, and long ago placed it on my watch list, as it is an extremely basic and foundational article for the CJ project and journalism; for example, I rated it "as High-importance on the project's importance" scale on Talk:Five_Ws. I decided to edit it at that specific time, because I wanted a 'clean' version for my students to read. I use this article for several courses, in which I discuss interviewing, especially Civil litigation and Criminal courts. Before I assign my students to read any article on Misplaced Pages, I always check to make sure there is no vandalism, and therefore I semi-protected it when I found recent IP vandalism. I did not claim that Fram or RF (or any other registered User) did anything wrong; to the contrary, it was past IP vandalism that I wanted to protect - hence the semi- not full protection. I take no stance on whose edit is correct, either Fram or RF. I didn't notice anything wrong with what either did. Also, I don't want my students to edit the article that I've assigned. My philosophy is that semi-protection does no real harm to the project, and can only remove temptations. I hope that cleared up any confusion as to my motives. Bearian (talk) 14:19, 1 April 2013 (UTC)

P.S. As has been pointed out at least twice above, "subsequently semi-protected by Bearian," (emphasis added). If I wanted to block a User, I would have fully-protected the article, but that would (a) make no sense, (b) not be my SOP, and (c) probably be an abuse of my sysop privileges. My motive was only to forestall yet more IP vandalism. By the way, I don't know when I watchlisted The 5 Ws, but it had to have been at c. 2011, possibly Jimbo or a Checkuser can check that out and back me up. In any case, I thought both Fram and RF are autoconfirmed users, so my motive could not have been to block either or both of them. I "have no horse in this race". I am very, truly sorry that my ambiguous edit summary has caused upset and confusion. Bearian (talk) 14:35, 1 April 2013 (UTC)

BP and Misplaced Pages redux - looking more closely at the content

section

Jimbo, I'm not sure if you've seen Violet Blue's follow-up to her recent piece on BP's involvement in writing their own article: Big Oil's Misplaced Pages cleanup: A brand management experiment out of control. This article looks more closely at some of the content supplied by an employee of BP's PR department. While BP may not have been editing the BP article themselves, it appears that at least some of the content supplied was less than objective or complete. From reading over the talk page, it is clear that the suggested edits were only reviewed by one or two editors and received very little discussion before being added to the article. These edits were replacements of whole sections of the article, not suggestions about changing a word or sentence. More concerning is that an employee of Chevron Corporation has apparently been editing their articles since 2009, with little success in getting editors to review their changes. I hope you would agree that any content supplied by PR professionals should be thoroughly vetted by unbiased Misplaced Pages editors. That does not seem to have happened in these cases. Can I suggest that a full review of affected articles be conducted by editors not normally associated with those articles? Delicious carbuncle (talk) 22:45, 27 March 2013 (UTC)

The Chevron case is a failure on our part, but not a failure on their part as far as I can tell. Violet Blue is sufficiently biased that her analysis is just useless to consider. The important point is that Arturo did exactly the right thing - he suggested changes, not all of which were accepted, and they were generally good. Did he suggest things that we might modify? Sure, why not? To beat up BP and Misplaced Pages for this is vicious nonsense.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 23:01, 27 March 2013 (UTC)

So let's not beat up on BP or Arturo. He followed our rules. The real question is whether those rules make sense if we aspire to be a serious, respectable reference work. Do you think it's OK for a company's PR staff to play a substantial role in drafting our coverage of that company? A role which is entirely undisclosed to the casual reader? If so, then we're setting ourselves outside the boundaries that have normally defined credible, reputable reference works. MastCell  23:18, 27 March 2013 (UTC)

We have failed in our duty to our readers and we deserve whatever criticism we get. Allowing PR agents and company employees to rewrite sections of articles without thoroughly vetting that content is both naive and foolhardy. It would be premature to say that BP's edits were "generally good". While BP is at the center of this latest episode, I think this applies equally to any other editor with a similar conflict of interest. We should learn from this rather than shooting the messenger again. Delicious carbuncle (talk) 23:25, 27 March 2013 (UTC)

I share your view of Violet Blue's trashy analysis but sadly, Jimbo, the plain fact is that a segment of the editor community (I'm not sure how large; I get the feeling that they are more noisy than numerous) have an ideological objection to any commercially oriented organisation getting involved with Misplaced Pages. They see it as commercialising Misplaced Pages. BP is admittedly a particularly inviting target because of its awful environmental record, but we seem to have these spasms of outrage periodically. Remember when you wrote up a restaurant once, and the reaction that got? You have done a lot of work with PR groups to try to work out a modus vivendi that ostensibly works for all concerned, but the problem is that you haven't been able to sell this to the entire community (and I'm not even sure that the ultras would buy into it at any price). I don't know what the solution is to this problem, but I do think there's more that you personally can do to minimise the impact of such disputes. For instance, in the BP case, you could have involved yourself directly with the editing and given ongoing feedback on what Arturo was doing, which would have lent it a lot more public legitimacy. What people are doing now is trying to review things in hindsight, which I rarely find a satisfactory approach. There should also perhaps be more community-wide transparency about the activities of legitimate COI editors like Arturo. Perhaps we need to have some kind of centralised "register" of legitimate COI editors to make it easier to review what they are doing and where they are active, and I could also see a role for some kind of "PR interchange" WikiProject where experienced editors and COI editors could discuss issues and assist each other. Prioryman (talk) 23:31, 27 March 2013 (UTC)

The editors that reviewed that content and added it to the article are established editors who have a good amount of experience. Arturo, by or behavioral guideline, is not a COI editor. To be considered such, one must be advancing their own interest above that of the project. Arturo does not fit that bill. He is certainly closely associated with the subject, but that alone is not a conflict of interest at Misplaced Pages.--Amadscientist (talk) 23:44, 27 March 2013 (UTC)

That is simply and flatly incorrect. Arturo does fit our definition of a "COI editor"; see WP:NOPR. I'm pretty pessimistic about our ability to have a serious discussion on this topic when we don't appear to inhabit a shared objective reality. MastCell  23:49, 27 March 2013 (UTC)

I have a lot of respect for you MastCell, but on this you are so off base it astounds me. NOTHING in that links suggest that Arturo is a COI editor. Because, he is not. That link you provided has guidelines that only show Arturo to be a "paid advocate" and that editors that fall under that definition are strongly discouraged from editing the article directly. Arturo has not edited the article directly. Could please stop exaggerating the situation because very time you refer to an editor as a "COI editor" incorrectly you are only name calling.--Amadscientist (talk) 00:00, 28 March 2013 (UTC)

If that's not a conflict of interest in Wiki's eyes, then Misplaced Pages has a far more serious problem defining and dealing with conflicts than i could possibly have imagined. Coretheapple (talk) 01:07, 28 March 2013 (UTC)

It is not a conflict of interest. Your imagination isn't the issue. Our guidelines make it clear what a COI editor is and if you follow those guidelines and do everything right, one should not be dragged through the mud because other editors have convinced themselves or been convinced by others that there is a conflict when one does not exist. There is no problem defining a conflict of interest. Our COI behavioral guideline does that. The serious problem is getting editors to understand it and apply them in a disinterested way. Right now editors are truly on a witch hunt, pointing fingers and complaining because British Petroleum has a paid advocate making drafts that some editors agreed to use. Sorry that I don't see the project burning down from that.--Amadscientist (talk) 02:06, 28 March 2013 (UTC)

Just to make my view clear, I have no idea if a BP employee editing about BP constitutes a conflict of interest in the cloud-cuckoo land of Misplaced Pages COI rules. Coretheapple (talk) 02:15, 28 March 2013 (UTC)

Well, if the BP employee was editing the article itself, it would indeed constitute a conflict of interest. However, he isn't. User:Arturo from BP has followed our guidelines completely. He is using the talk page and making suggestions. He has no control over what goes into the article. That is still in the hands of established and experienced editors.--Amadscientist (talk) 02:27, 28 March 2013 (UTC)

BP, through that editor, its employee, drafted text that was incorporated in the article. That he didn't directly edit the article is a distinction without a difference anywhere but in the aforementioned cloud-cuckoo land. Coretheapple (talk) 02:36, 28 March 2013 (UTC)

And actually I also forgot to mention that even editing the article itself would not necessarily put the editor in Conflict of Interest unless their edits removed well sourced content or added content that showed their outside interest to be more important than Misplaced Pages's aims and goals. Welcome to Cloud-cuckoo land then Coretheapple, because that is indeed the distinction with a true difference as set by a number of different policies and guidelines of Misplaced Pages.--Amadscientist (talk) 02:43, 28 March 2013 (UTC)

MastCell is right that Arturo has a conflict of interest (he comes, I believe, from an academic background, this is precisely the sort of conflict that absolutely would have to be declared in an academic paper). However, he has not made any conflicted edits. He is doing the right thing in the right way, any failure is on our part for not applying sufficient critical judgment to the proposed changes. In other words, an article has been carelessly edited. How do we normally fix that? By talking to the editor who made the edits and by fixing up the article. And when I say normally, I do mean that: this is completely routine. Guy (Help!) 21:56, 28 March 2013 (UTC)

When I joined Misplaced Pages, the rule was that every editor's edits were their own, and on their own recognisance. Arturo posted some suggestions that were pro-BP. He did that completely openly, acknowledging that he is a BP employee. I had a similar email from a celebrity, a household name, who made suggestions by email. In both cases a Misplaced Pages editor decided to make the changes. In my case I did not make all the changes requested, and explained why (they were not in MOS style, or whatever). In this case someone else made the edits - and they didn't apply enough critical judgment when doing so. Their bad, nobody died, we just fix it up and explain it to them. It's no different to someone finding a version of events on a company website, bringing it to Misplaced Pages, and then being pushed back (partway at least) because others with wider knowledge know it's not the whole story, or is a glossed-over version of events. All this is perfectly routine. It's how virtually every article on any commercial entity has been written, albeit this time without the usual round 1 of conflicted edits to the actual article which then involves us in educating the company rep to do exactly what Arturo did form the outset. Arturo has done nothing wrong, in fact quite the opposite. He has, it seems to me, played a completely straight bat. Any fault is with our own people - us, in other words - for failing to edit rather than copy and paste. Editing is a skill. The takeaway here is that we still ave a lot to learn, as a community, about the editing process. I think we could usefully try to run some workshops maybe even asking editors of actual dead tree products for input. Guy (Help!) 16:30, 28 March 2013 (UTC)

(ec) The segment of the editing community that works to protect the environment for our reader is in the majority. Our readers are entitled to know and we are duty bound to let our reader know that BP or Chevron or the Gingrich Campaign is over-bearingly involved in the construction of the article they are reading and depending on. They expect an impartial view not one from the top of Corporate Hearquarters. Our readers depend on us to protectr their interests. ```Buster Seven Talk 23:51, 27 March 2013 (UTC)

Speaking as a new user, more of a reader than a Wiki editor, I can tell you from an outside perspective that this entire affair is jaw-dropping amazing. I agree with Delicious Carbuncle and MastCell. The difference between COI best practices on Misplaced Pages and in the real world is humungous. The refusal of some editors to acknowledge COI in a BP employee, editing Misplaced Pages within the scope of employment, is astonishing. I agree with the observation that Misplaced Pages deserves a horse-whipping in the press over this, and I'm frankly disappointed that I haven't seen it. Coretheapple (talk) 23:58, 27 March 2013 (UTC)

What astounds me is how many editors really don't understand....no, REFUSE to understand our policies just so they can hurl mud within our own community. There is no COI editing by Arturo and is the very reason many editors refuse to acknowledge that blatant misinterpretation of our guidelines.--Amadscientist (talk) 00:05, 28 March 2013 (UTC)

Speaking as an editor of a decade's experience, I can tell you that flaps about supposedly "selling out to commercialisation" really aren't anything new - we seem to have one at least every year. Gibraltar ran into the buzzsaw last year, before then Jimbo's restaurant article caused a flap that was covered in the media (e.g. ). Yes, COI is a significant concern; yes, Arturo obviously does have a COI. But what we have here is an ideological divide between editors who believe that any hint of commercial involvement in Misplaced Pages is anathema and those who accept that commercially oriented outside organisations can be useful contributors as long as they act within strict parameters. (There are also a few people who argue that there should be a free-for-all, but their is a fringe view and can safely be ignored.) I don't see how you can bridge that divide; all you can do, it seems to me, is to create a situation where there are far more people on one side than the other. Marginalise the opposition, if you like, or at the very least persuade them to cross the divide. Prioryman (talk) —Preceding undated comment added 00:19, 28 March 2013 (UTC)

Too bad that decade worth of experience hasn't helped you understand our guidelines. Arturo is not a COI editor.--Amadscientist (talk) 02:00, 28 March 2013 (UTC)

I don't know what you mean by "a COI editor". I said that he has a COI, by which I mean that his editing on Misplaced Pages is on behalf of his employer, which is a self-evident COI - his employer's interests are not necessarily Misplaced Pages's. But that's not a bad thing in itself! The dispute is not whether he has a COI but whether it is being properly managed. Prioryman (talk) 13:37, 28 March 2013 (UTC)

I'm not familiar with the "flaps" that you mention, but if you are having regular issues of a similar nature, perhaps you have a recurrent problem that needs to be addressed? I know that this is a volunteer organization and not a business venture, but Misplaced Pages has a public image and it is not great. Perhaps an occasional outside view, not affected by years of being steeped in the Wiki culture, would be helpful at a time like this. Coretheapple (talk) 00:26, 28 March 2013 (UTC)

I wouldn't disagree that it needs to be addressed, and in fact Jimbo has been trying to do so by opening a dialogue with the PR industry to work out avenues of discussion (see past articles in PR Week here). The fundamental problem is that a chunk of the editing community is not reconciled to any interaction with PRs other than, essentially, saying "piss off". This is where Misplaced Pages's biggest weakness comes into play - its lack of effective leadership. The way this community works, it's far easier to block things through noisy objections than to advance them through persuasion. Prioryman (talk) 00:35, 28 March 2013 (UTC)

I haven't been physically able to read through all of the many thousands of words on the BP issue that have appeared in various places on Misplaced Pages, but my impression is quite the opposite. That is, that Wiki people are unwilling to recognize the serious problem posed by corporate involvement in Misplaced Pages articles. In perusing what's been written I found one comment, I forget where or by whom, by an editor who pointed out that Wiki people are vulnerable to being manipulated by corporate operatives, that editors feel they can "outsmart" and control involvement of public relations professionals in articles about their companies. I agree with that perspective. If that attitude is more common than I have come to realize, than it is all for the good. My personal attitude is that PR people/corporate reps should be welcome in pointing out errors and omissions in articles, but should not be permitted to draft text. To me that would be akin to a newspaper or print encyclopedia doing the same thing. I.e., a disreputable practice. To be sure, that is what happens among small newspapers. There are "canned" travel and business articles to be found among bad newspapers. There are press releases and promotional articles that are published verbatim in newspapers but are written by companies. But I hope that Misplaced Pages is better than that, and that it does not fashion its policies after the very worst of American journalism. Coretheapple (talk) 00:56, 28 March 2013 (UTC)

Coretheapple, do you notice that you are now talking about Misplaced Pages editors, not Misplaced Pages readers? Why does Misplaced Pages exist - so that people can edit it, or so that people can read it? Painting the community as polarized into two camps is an attempt to blame someone for the situation, not an attempt to address it. Delicious carbuncle (talk) 01:13, 28 March 2013 (UTC)

COI rules aren't about the reader, they're about the institution. Their purpose is to protect the integrity and reputation of the institution. In this case, the reader is affected to the extent that the BP article may have been slanted by the fact that four-tenths of its written or drafted by BP. But I think the main victim here is Misplaced Pages, because this incident exposes a flaw in Misplaced Pages's structure. Coretheapple (talk) 02:15, 28 March 2013 (UTC)

Oh...there's a flaw showing alright....but is not what you think. Can we make something true on Misplaced Pages by just repeating the circular reference begun on a user's talk page, picked up by the media and then repeated as an absolute truth? If this is really possible...then we do have a very troublesome issue.--Amadscientist (talk) 02:49, 28 March 2013 (UTC)

The problem is not that there is misinformation circulating about Misplaced Pages, but information. Delicious Carbunkle said above that readers were being ill-served, but the problem is with the affect on editors who don't have COI, who aren't paid to write here, who are just doing this as a hobby. Why should they utilize their precious spare time to work on articles as a hobby when companies are allowed to have an active role in the drafting of articles about them? I suspect that antagonizes a lot of editors, as Prioryman alluded to earlier. Volunteer editors may feel less interested in contributing to Misplaced Pages if they feel that Misplaced Pages collectively lacks integrity by tolerating this kind of thing. That's the problem that arises from BP being quite this active in the BP article and the widespread acceptance of that by Jimbo and others as being allowed by COI rules. Coretheapple (talk) 03:08, 28 March 2013 (UTC)

Who said anything about misinformation about Misplaced Pages. The misinformation is about an editor who is complying with our policies and guidelines. If someone is editing in a manner that goes against the encyclopedia's core principles, or even attempting to edit in a manner that would compromise the project they are warned then banned or blocked. Yes, I am sure the editor, Arturo of BP (who does not have a COI) is probably feeling a little confused by all of this. Just like everyone else however, he may choose to stay or leave at anytime on his own. Being antagonized by the fact that someone is doing the right thing and using best practice, getting upset and leaving over that reason is not a concern at all. I would rather people who don't get it stop editing and those that do get it remain. We lose far more editors over those that can't figure out the policies, procedures and guidelines and use their misinterpretations to go after innocent contributors.--Amadscientist (talk) 03:42, 28 March 2013 (UTC)

You keep acting as if this is about vilifying Arturo or BP. It's not, at least not for me. I think Arturo followed our rules. I'm not out to get him. I'm asking a bigger question, about whether our rules make sense or serve our goal of creating a serious, reputable reference work. I'd actually like to hear Jimbo's thoughts on the matter, if he's willing to comment: do you think it's OK for a company's PR staff to play a substantial role in drafting our coverage of that company? A role which is entirely undisclosed to the casual reader? MastCell  04:19, 28 March 2013 (UTC)

In the edit summary to the above comment it states: "sometimes i wish wikipedians were capable of discussing abstract issues, rather than personalizing literally everything; However the comment left here was filled with "You keep", and "not for me" and "I think" and "I'm not" and "I'm asking". The last thing stated was "I'd actually like to hear Jimbo's thoughts on the matter, if he's willing to comment: do you think it's OK for a company's PR staff to play a substantial role in drafting our coverage of that company? A role which is entirely undisclosed to the casual reader?" Jimbo Wales made the first reply to this thread. He said point black: "The important point is that Arturo did exactly the right thing - he suggested changes, not all of which were accepted, and they were generally good. Did he suggest things that we might modify? Sure, why not? To beat up BP and Misplaced Pages for this is vicious nonsense." I agree with that completely.--Amadscientist (talk) 04:37, 28 March 2013 (UTC)

And if you read the other thread, Mr. Wales has said even more. If he would like to comment further, of course that would be great as always...but I feel editors keep asking the same things over and over almost expecting a different answer or a sudden reversal by just wearing him down.--Amadscientist (talk) 04:43, 28 March 2013 (UTC)

If Arturo is confused and decides to leave, someone else from the BP Corporate Communications Team will take his place. This is not about one editor. Or a team of editors. This is about millions of readers who are being protected from knowing too much about BP's or Company A's business. ```Buster Seven Talk 06:15, 28 March 2013 (UTC)

Buster, it may not be a good idea to make such accusations. That sounds a lot like you are claiming BP is involved with a cover-up on Misplaced Pages.--Amadscientist (talk) 06:41, 28 March 2013 (UTC)

Well, this certainly explains my experience here. petrarchan47tc 07:11, 28 March 2013 (UTC)

How so?--Amadscientist (talk) 08:24, 28 March 2013 (UTC)

@ Amadscientist. What does that mean? Do you think BP will be sending out the Corporate Communications Enforcement team? Why isn't it a good idea to defend Misplaced Pages and its readers? I'm not claiming a cover-up. It's more like a "smother-up". ```Buster Seven Talk 07:39, 28 March 2013 (UTC)

@Buster: There is no more conflict here than if BP had placed text on their own website released under GFDL and someone had copied and pasted it here. All articles are a work in progress, it rarely takes long for puff to be pruned back. A major issue here is that for some people the BP article will never be balanced until it makes them look like a cross between the Inquisition and the Mongol hordes. NPOV says that BP is an oil company, better than some, worse than others, pretty much normal for the breed. Some people don't like that: they think all oil companies are global supervillains. They are entitled to that view and I tend towards it myself, but it's not NPOV. Guy (Help!) 16:36, 28 March 2013 (UTC)

• No. It's not the same. In the situation where it's a statement that can be attributed to BP with a citation, than we can write "BP, in a statement says, ... (citation). Here we cannot do so. This further demonstrates the disclosure issue (which at the very least would be attributed to BP by the citation, if they formally issued a statement or wrote something on their website). Alanscottwalker (talk) 19:54, 28 March 2013 (UTC)

I don't think you read what I wrote (or maybe I didn't write what I meant). This is not about attribution, it's about editorial content. Copying text authored by a company is an editorial failing. If a company rep posts text that is not supported by citable sources, that should be explained to him and the text should not be used. Again, if it's inserted in the article without sources, it's an editorial failing. Much as it pains me to defend the buggers, BP have done nothing wrong. Arturo has certainly done nothing wrong, he has acted entirely honourably. Some of the Misplaced Pages community have fallen down on the job - this is an inevitability, we should just fix it and move on, as we normally do. Unfortunately some people seem determined to make something else of it (for reasons we can only guess but probably pretty shrewdly). There's no real need to play into their hands, I'd have said. Guy (Help!) 21:51, 28 March 2013 (UTC)

Why are you trying to defend "the buggers" when nothing in my comment says anyone did anything wrong. The fact remains, however, that editorial content that comes from BP could and would be cited to BP in our article. However, here, it is not, because Arturo from BP wrote it on the talk page, instead of his company website. That is incongruous. Alanscottwalker (talk) 22:10, 28 March 2013 (UTC)

I think we are talking at cross purposes. What BP might say on its website is a primary source and not verifiable fact. We should be guiding Arturo towards providing secondary sources. He is paid, we're not, it's up to him to support his suggested edits with good sources. I don't think anyone here will consider me a defender of paid editing. A BP web page is as usable as a press release - i.e. basically not usable, or at least not if a better source is likely to exist. Almost everything discussed by Arturo seems to me to be amenable to independent sourcing. Guy (Help!) 01:41, 29 March 2013 (UTC)

Anything BP writes on its website often could also be cited to independent sources -- that does not make the source we cite not BP's website, when that is where the information was put together. You are, of course, correct in one sense, information written about BP, written by BP (even using independent sources) has primary source elements and we identify primary sources in articles when they are the source (see, eg. autobiography - which is often a mixture of the primary and secondary)Alanscottwalker (talk) 10:26, 29 March 2013 (UTC)

It means exactly what it says. You should not be making accusations of this kind. It could be a BLP issue when it concerns individuals.--Amadscientist (talk) 08:18, 28 March 2013 (UTC)

I think you are naive. There is a common belief that a press release reprinted by a trade publication is an "independent source", but it is erroneous. And don't forget, Arturo is not BP. He works for BP, but he is not BP. If BP told him to request an edit saying that Texaco kill bunny rabbits to power their death rays, I doubt he'd do it - and if he did, only an idiot would add it. There is nothing actually wrong with a company saying they would like to represent a certain topic in a certain way. Nothing. There is an awful lot wrong with just adding that to an article without thinking.

I work for $VENDOR. I could request an edit to the $VENDOR article saying that $VENDOR are widely recognised as the least arrogant top 10 IT company. I think it's true, but only an idiot would add it. How about if $VENDOR put a page on their website saying "$VENDOR is least arrogant vendor". Would that be OK? How about if they issued a press release and it appeared in The Register. Is that independent? I begin to wonder if people have even the most basic understanding of what we are supposed to be doing here.

In all this debate, nobody has yet suggested a better way for companies to address concerns about their articles. What do you suggest? Guy (Help!) 01:51, 30 March 2013 (UTC)

The idea that a corporation is not the people who work for it, although a well known legal fiction, is what's naive. A corporation can do nothing, nor even exist, without the people who work for it. You may review my previous proposal, on this page, which already resulted in improved disclosure on those article related pages. It's not, here, about what corporations or PR people should do (beside continue to be honest and ethical, which is expected of all editors here), it's what the Pedia should do given that it is known to it that people with acknowledged COI are involved in drafting articles: Disclosure is a good way to deal with that. How that disclosure is made is of some debate, but it is the ethical thing for the Pedia to do, regardless. This is especially the case since (1) it is already practice to cite to corporate sources, when the Pedia uses corporate sources (but, by ommission, states nothing in the article about the corporate source that went into drafting the article); and (2) it is standard academic practice to disclose COI to readers. -- Alanscottwalker (talk) 13:03, 30 March 2013 (UTC)

Break

I noticed earlier this comment "if we aspire to be a serious, respectable reference work", this isn't compatible with "anyone can edit anonymously", you have to pick one, and its pretty obvious that wikipedia has made its pick. Misplaced Pages is too popular to hope that companies will ignore it, so they either participate openly like Arturo/BP, or they do it (or pay someone to do it) covertly without disclosing their CoI. Completely preventing companies from affecting content is not simply possible with the way wikipedia currently functions.--Staberinde (talk) 09:35, 28 March 2013 (UTC)

Yes. That is apparent. But what seems to be going on, in part, is that some want to pretend it does not happen (eg., that having company x suggest copy is, it is pretended, not influencing articles); some want to argue that it should not happen (with no way to implement the should); and some want more upfront disclosure of what happens. Alanscottwalker (talk) 11:42, 28 March 2013 (UTC)

I get an uneasiness with companies providing "copy" to be used by editors on Misplaced Pages. It however is better than allowing PR firms to edit directly. I guess Misplaced Pages is simply becoming too popular for commercial interests to ignore. I recently had a PR professional from a large biotech firm (and the group of editors he had brought with him) inform me that they had to "correct" the Misplaced Pages article in question as if the US government read it they might no longer agree to spent $1 Billion in tax dollars on coverage of the procedure. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 12:38, 28 March 2013 (UTC)

Ques: Currently, is the surreptitious PR substantive edit, subject to sanctions against that covert activity? Doing so would at least state where the Pedia stands on such things. Alanscottwalker (talk) 13:36, 28 March 2013 (UTC)

Several editors have raised an important point, which is company officials surreptitiously editing Misplaced Pages. In my brief time here I've already encountered what I think is probably such a situation. Very little can be done about that apart from enforcing the rules against biased content. However, in situations in which a company does overtly seek to influence content by exploiting loopholes in the COI rules, the solution is to place a notice in the article saying that the subject of the article played a role in the creation and shaping of the article. That notice should be done whenever a company goes beyond correcting errors in the article, but seeks instead to shape the article in general. Current procedures allow a similar notice but only under narrow circumstances. That way, casual readers could be informed that the article has been influenced by the company. This should not harm the subject of the article in any way. After all, the company wants to participate in Misplaced Pages. If the rules allow, why should it be ashamed of telling the public, including shareholders and customers, that it does so? This would, of course, have the impact of curbing the practice. In the real world, COI rules are disclosure rules, and on Misplaced Pages the disclosure is wanting, and is made only internally and not commonly to readers. That loophole is being exploited. Coretheapple (talk) 13:08, 28 March 2013 (UTC)

Funny, I could have sworn there was some sort of interaction ban between Prioryman and Delicious Carbuncle. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 101.118.47.34 (talk) 13:20, 28 March 2013 (UTC)

• I've left a note at Arturo at BP's user page, asking him if he would voluntarily consent to the COI notice appearing on the top of the article. The COI notice is not required by current rules, but that is the only way to inform readers that the subject of the article is influencing content. I think that this would be an enormously helpful indication of good faith and I urged him, as BP's representative to Misplaced Pages, to consent to it as a voluntary gesture of disclosure to Misplaced Pages readers. I think that agreeing to it would go a long way to diffusing the situation. Let's see what he says. The ball is in BP's court. Coretheapple (talk) 13:51, 28 March 2013 (UTC)

• No it wouldn't and no, the ball is not in BP's court. There is no way a notice like that is going to appear on the top of the article. I for one would remove such a notice if anyone was foolish enough to add one. Prioryman (talk) 14:11, 28 March 2013 (UTC)

This entire argument mystifies me. When company reps email OTRS asking what they can do to fix up issues with their company article, we give them the following advice: register an account, declare who you are and that you are making comments on their behalf, suggest changes on the talk page, do not edit the article directly other than to correct obvious vandalism, ask for help on-wiki if there is any problem with another editor, perhaps trying to push an anti company POV. As far as I can tell, that's pretty much exactly what Arturo did. What do people think he should have done differently? Most of the crap that's been kicked up seems to me to be agenda-serving by people who, it seems to me, only care whether any particular incident can be used as a stick with which to flog a dead horse one more time. In some ways the nature of the coverage and the identities of those involved is pretty good evidence that we got it pretty much right - not perfect, but definitely not evil. Guy (Help!) 16:21, 28 March 2013 (UTC)

I don't think Arturo should have done anything differently. He followed our rules as they currently exist. I'm trying to get a sense of whether people are comfortable with those rules. If a reference work routinely allows a company's PR staff to play a substantial and undisclosed (to the casual reader) role in developing coverage of that company, I'd be very hesitant to extend credibility to that reference work. That approach violates every basic precept governing how serious, reputable reference works handle conflicts of interest. I understand your point about OTRS, but I also think there's a practical difference between a small company which finds itself vilified on Misplaced Pages, versus BP which has a public-relations budget of $5 million per week (). In the latter case, I don't think we can reasonably rely on a handful of pseudonymous volunteers to vet the material produced by a massive, dedicated, well-funded professional PR operation.

And while I don't think the mainstream press or the world at large cares a whit about various internal Misplaced Pages machinations and politics, I do think that it will look very bad for this project if/when the mainstream press (as opposed to, as you rightly point out, a handful of people with axes to grind) gets ahold of this. If we seriously expect to defend our practices by saying that we relied on a handful of pseudonymous volunteers to vet material provided by BP's public-relations department, and that we didn't disclose BP's role in drafting the content to the casual reader, then I think we're going to take a pretty big, and well-deserved, hit in terms of credibility. MastCell  16:44, 28 March 2013 (UTC)

Mastcell, thank you for this comment. I think you hit the nail squarely on the head. Delicious carbuncle (talk) 17:46, 28 March 2013 (UTC)

Mastcell. Hammer...nail...head. ```Buster Seven Talk 18:44, 28 March 2013 (UTC)

@MastCell: Sure, but at what point do we decide that a firm is officially "big"? Traditionally, Misplaced Pages edits have always been about individuals. It doesn't seem to me to be very important whether Arturo is a lone ranger or whether he has three hundred shiny-suited PR droids standing behind him. It's not a role account, Arturo is an individual. If thirty or forty individuals came along to hector us to make changes then I would be at the head of the posse to run them out of town. That hasn't happened. Isn't there a certain absence of the assumption of good faith here? Yes, BP is a massive transnational (and not my favourite one, speaking as a cyclist and card carrying woolly liberal) but we do not, as far as I am aware, have a better way for them to interact with us than individual representatives proposing individual edits and individual editors reviewing them. How would you handle it? Your instincts are sound, what would you have recommended Arturo to do? Guy (Help!) 22:18, 28 March 2013 (UTC)

I would view the question of good faith a bit differently: I'm assuming Arturo is doing the job he's being paid to do, which is to promote BP's image here on Misplaced Pages. And I'm not out to vilify him - I think he did exactly what our guidelines told him to do, just as you said. I personally think the issue of how we handle corporate representatives - particularly representatives of large and controversial corporations like BP or, say, the Transcendental Meditation business - is a complex and fraught question where we'd ideally have some Foundation-level guidance.

I'm not sure how realistic that is... so what would I do? With the benefit of hindsight, I'd probably encourage Arturo (or anyone whose job description includes monitoring and influencing Misplaced Pages's coverage of his employer) to avoid drafting large sections of "company-approved" text, and instead restrict himself to commenting on the accuracy and neutrality of other editors' proposals and edits (admittedly, sort of a fine line). Another option (which I see SlimVirgin has proposed) would be to encourage Arturo et al. to post their preferred text on company Web servers rather than directly onto Misplaced Pages. That way, the material can be incorporated into the article (where appropriate), but its provenance would be clear to the casual reader. That approach would be more analogous to standard journalistic practices, where company-approved material can be used but is clearly marked as coming from the company.

I'm not saying that either of these are good, or even workable, solutions; after all, the question of how to handle conflicts of interest fairly and effectively has bedeviled mainstream publishers and academic journals for decades. But I'd like to at least start the conversation and move it past the idea that this is a "witch hunt" aimed at Arturo or BP. MastCell  22:40, 28 March 2013 (UTC)

Guy, I think you're seriously mistaken about the concerns that have been raised, both on Misplaced Pages and in the real world, about BP's involvement in its article. If you think those concerns are somehow wacky or agenda-driven, or otherwise worthy of being summarily dismissed, you definitely have another think coming. Personally I'm horrified by the porosity of Misplaced Pages's conflict of interest rules. All the reassurances that BP's rep here has played by the rules simply underline my concern. Coretheapple (talk) 16:53, 28 March 2013 (UTC)

One thing that this incident shows is that the method BP/Arturo used, following our suggested guidelines of openly stating their COI and only making talk page suggestions, is not a good approach from a PR point of view. What BP has learned is that if you try to be honest, upfront, and open about your COI, you and your company will still be vilified. However, if you are surreptitious and stealthily edit your article, you may still be vilified if you get caught, but at least you have a chance to stay under the radar and get what you want. Deli nk (talk) 18:25, 28 March 2013 (UTC)

Well, if that's the lesson then they didn't need anyone to tell them that, because everyone already knows that when one doesn't tell the truth and or follow ethical rules, one may gain much that one desires (especially, when not caught) -- one just becomes someone that doesn't tell the truth or follow ethical rules. Do you think they want to be that? Alanscottwalker (talk) 19:46, 28 March 2013 (UTC)

I worry that we're making it harder for those that don't want to be like that. Deli nk (talk) 20:19, 28 March 2013 (UTC)

Let's not go overboard in complimenting a BP employee for saying that he is a BP employee. Judging from the high praise that he has received for his work from various Misplaced Pages luminaries, up to and including Jimbo, there seems to be limited downside for a company that dispatches employees to Misplaced Pages for the purpose of influencing its content. BP seems totally unconcerned about the furor that this has unleashed and the publicity that has been generated. After all, what is a Misplaced Pages editing controversy compared to the recent unpleasantness in the Gulf of Mexico? Anyone who thinks that BP has any concern about Misplaced Pages's integrity is seriously in error. Coretheapple (talk) 20:52, 28 March 2013 (UTC)

I'd like to make this very clear: Arturo has done precisely what we advise people to do, as a matter of course, when they contact OTRS. If the community genuinely believes that registering an account, declaring your interest, and suggesting changes on the Talk page to be assessed by editors independent of the subject, is the wrong way to do things, then the community needs to do two things:

First, the community needs to come up with a better way for article subjects to address content concerns. Would you prefer them to email OTRS and have OTRS agents make the changes? As an OTRS agent I would strongly resist that. Not only can we not handle the workload, it's not transparent. I have made a few edits on behalf of article subjects who have a good reason not to be able to work this way but only for content that is not even remotely contentious. Ronald Neame (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) is an example (and I have to say it was an absolute pleasure to help Ronnie and Donna).

Second, they community needs to engage OTRS agents and ensure that the proposed solution will effectively resolve the kinds of things that article subjects routinely ask about.

I will repeat this: we have told probably some thousands of people to do what Arturo did. It was the understanding of OTRS agents that this is the preferred mechanism for transparently engaging with the Misplaced Pages community to address article concerns. We did think quite hard about it and could not come up with a better idea, as I recall. Feel free to propose some radical improvement, but in the mean time I firmly believe that people are shooting the wrong target. The problem here is not that a BP employee openly proposed changes, it's that a Misplaced Pages editor did not apply sufficient critical judgment when responding to those suggestions. We don't know how Arturo would have reacted had the changes been rejected. Maybe he'd have caused a ruckus, in which case we'd certainly want to take action, but I simply do not see any evil here. Guy (Help!) 22:09, 28 March 2013 (UTC)

What disturbs me is that a major corporation can, if it wishes, devote corporate resources to influencing the Misplaced Pages article about it, and that's just fine by Misplaced Pages rules. The procedures that you outline, innocent as you make them seem, seem to institutionalize that practice, which I feel is wrong. What I feel is more appropriate is that subjects of articles confine themselves to raising on talk page issues concerning inaccuracies and bias. If they go beyond that, if they are involved in the Misplaced Pages editorial process beyond correcting errors and bias, that should be disclosed on the article page itself. Surely they cannot object to such a disclosure. If they want to get involved in Misplaced Pages, they should be willing for that fact to be disclosed to Misplaced Pages readers. Coretheapple (talk) 22:32, 28 March 2013 (UTC)

That disturbs you? You live a sheltered life. Seriously. If you believe that every corporation i the world adopts a strictly ethical approach to Misplaced Pages, not trying to influence content in any way and leaving it to our good judgment, then I have a bridge I would like to sell you. The question is not whether it happens but how best it should be addressed. I happen to think that disclosure and transparency are the best tools, and that registering an account, declaring the interest, and restricting yourself to the talk page is both ethical and scalable. I have seen no evidence in this debate that either of these is seriously compromised. If firms employ dozens or hundreds of folks to post on talk pages then we can talk about that but this is just one guy. And while we're bashing him and his employer we are missing a much more important issue: Misplaced Pages editors can be total dunces. Check out any article on a Canadian hockey team - especially minor league and school teams - a wrestler, a MMA fighter, a porn "star" or any other subject where personal passions may play a part. I absolutely agree that there was a failure here, but I dispute the assertion that the failure was either Arturo's or BP's. If Arturo ad kicked up shit about changes being rejected then we could have a conversation, but he didn't.

Back to the core question. A company is unhapppy about some aspect of its article. How do you think that should be handled? And bear in mind that "suck it up" is a bad answer, because some poor sod will spend a lot of time - and I mean a lot of time - debating that with their PR department via OTRS. DAMHIKIJKOK? So, how should we handle it, in your view? Guy (Help!) 02:03, 30 March 2013 (UTC)

A couple of points regarding MastCell's remarks above:

(1) "I don't think we can reasonably rely on a handful of pseudonymous volunteers to vet the material produced by a massive, dedicated, well-funded professional PR operation." I don't follow the logic here. Assuming (as in this case) that those with a COI only made suggestions on the talk page and scrupulously refrained from editing the article directly, why would the degree of PR funding by the organization have any impact on how well those without a COI could vet the material?

(2) "If a reference work routinely allows a company's PR staff to play a substantial and undisclosed (to the casual reader) role in developing coverage of that company, I'd be very hesitant to extend credibility to that reference work. That approach violates every basic precept governing how serious, reputable reference works handle conflicts of interest." This is a reasonable point, but we already allow similar approaches that equally (or more greatly) violate these precepts. Does any other serious, reputable reference work allow "anyone" to edit? Misplaced Pages's core premise is that liberally permitting pseudonymous contributions leads, on the whole, to a broadly objective and credible reference work. But within that population of pseudonymous editors are many who contribute from a vast spectrum of biases and conflicts of interest, and these are very seldom disclosed even informally. Despite the actual, direct editing of articles by people with real-world agendas, we don't place permanent warnings to the reader in our articles. Why does the reader need to be warned about the indirect (at best) influence of a company's PR staff on its article? Do similar warnings need to be made for, say, the talk-page remarks of an anti-corporate activist? A person suing a company? An employee of a company's competitor? The mother-in-law of the company's PR secretary? At what point should we assume that the reader understands the implications of "anyone can edit" and omit the disclosure? alanyst 19:32, 28 March 2013 (UTC)

We already often disclose when the subject of an article says (or their representative states) something of relevance in the text of the article through attribution, or at least by inline citation. -- Alanscottwalker (talk) 20:14, 28 March 2013 (UTC)

As to your first point, there is a massive imbalance between the resources BP is capable of committing to promote itself on Misplaced Pages and the resources we are capable of committing to review their efforts. I see that as an issue. Perhaps you don't, which is fine, but surely the logical basis for my concern is obvious even if you don't share it?

As to your second point, I'm sort of tired of hearing our open-editing model put forth as a justification to ignore or downplay this issue. Yes, we differ from other reference works in that we allow open editing. But our open-editing model only makes it more important, rather than less, to craft a serious and responsible approach to corporate input. Do you see the paradox? We're much more vulnerable to editorial conflicts of interest than other reference works, but we take the subject much less seriously. It's dangerously narcissistic (although also typically Wikipedian) to believe that because our editing model is unique, we're therefore exempt from the usual concerns and responsibilities affecting other serious, reputable reference works.

As to your question about demarcating conflicts of interest, if you're seriously interested there are actually a number of published guidelines and other information about where editors should draw the line in terms of conflicts of interest. Often, the relevant standard is that any "relevant financial conflict of interest" must be disclosed; these would include stock ownership, employment, or litigation, but would exclude, for instance, strong personal feelings about a subject.

And let's talk about "anyone can edit". Our policies clearly state: "Misplaced Pages is free and open, but restricts both freedom and openness where they interfere with creating an encyclopedia." It is possible for us to maintain a free and open editing model and to create a cohesive and responsible policy constraining editorial conflicts of interest. MastCell  20:47, 28 March 2013 (UTC)

Weeelllll.... maybe. Arturo is a single person. The number of posts he makes to the talk page is not so huge. His behaviour was not flagged as problematic, and I honestly don't think it is problematic. A hundred Arturos? That would be a problem. One guy doing Misplaced Pages as part of social media engagement? Seems fair. I know people who have been the social media face of large companies, they are just folks (Marc Farley: if you're reading this, you are waaaaay more than just folks). A few are corporate droids but most really are not. We should look at editors and articles individually, as we always have. We do need to encourage more people to move from casual editing to proper content analysis, and I think that is not unrelated to the huge big deal that adminship has become. New admins are really easy to motivate, IMO. I am not a fan of badge collecting, but there is some merit in it, as was pointed out to me by Giano earlier, as a motivational process. Guy (Help!) 00:35, 29 March 2013 (UTC)

A person whose job it is to edit Misplaced Pages is going to be more motivated to edit Misplaced Pages than one who is not. The danger of your current practices is that they sanction the subjects of articles participating in article discussions and hence the article consensus. This is not a "slippery slope" argument; you are already at the bottom of the slope. It is happening right now in the BP talk page. That is only a problem if you believe that editorial decisions at Misplaced Pages, which are made by consensus, should be made by uninvolved editors and only uninvolved editors. Involved editors should not have a role in the decision making process, no matter how well-behaved they are - except when it comes to pointing out errors and bias. But no, I don't believe that a BP employee should have a voice in determining, for example, what a section header should say.(I happen to agree with the BP employee on that issue, by the way.) If this isn't the current policy then I think that your policy needs to be changed.

It's not a question of article bias, but how Misplaced Pages is run. It's unacceptable, I think, to say to a person who is concerned about this ridiculous situation that he or she needs to work on the article and rectify any bias that the corporate rep may have inserted in the article via his active talk page participation. The solution is to remove corporate reps from the editorial process. Coretheapple (talk) 01:08, 29 March 2013 (UTC)

Sorry, but you do not have consensus on your side. Misplaced Pages works with the consensus of editors not on the idealism of individuals. Point black, involved editors are not excluded from contributing. The local consensus can indeed determine if an editor has crossed a line and if there is some flaw to that, there are notice boards to gather a larger input from the general community. I see no reason to exclude a BP employee following best practices from adding there voice to the discussion and consensus and our policies and guidelines support this. You are really cherry picking your concerns. We still allow editors who are the actual subject to edit there Misplaced Pages page. It is strongly discouraged as it can cause real world embarrassment to the figure...but some people don't embarrass easily and some are able to edit properly and within our standards. That is the real issue. We do not chase off editors based on our perceptions of them.--Amadscientist (talk) 01:21, 29 March 2013 (UTC)

How you're judging "consensus" on something like this is beyond me. It involves a very serious philosophical issue that gets to the heart of the principle of uninvolved editors being principally responsible for what appears in the encyclopedia. Coretheapple (talk) 01:50, 29 March 2013 (UTC)

I probably should have been specific there. When you said: "Involved editors should not have a role in the decision making process, no matter how well-behaved they are - except when it comes to pointing out errors and bias. But no, I don't believe that a BP employee should have a voice in determining, for example, what a section header should say." On that, you don't have consensus on your side. Our behavioral guideline specifically allow "involved" editors to take part in consensus discussions on the talk page. How much weight is given to their views would certainly depend on their neutrality and what they add to the discussion. But that is true with everyone.--Amadscientist (talk) 12:12, 29 March 2013 (UTC)

OK, fine. Thanks for clarifying that. Then what I would suggest is that your policies on consensus contain a loophole big enough to steer a battleship through. Because of the misguided notion that COI is OK if it is disclosed to editors (not to readers), consensus can be dominated by one or more people whose job it is to edit Misplaced Pages. As indicated by IRWolfie below, this issue extends to "people with vested interests who aren't paid" but may otherwise be conflicted. But I don't see the existence of one problematic situation as justifying another. Coretheapple (talk) 13:32, 29 March 2013 (UTC)

More like your misinterpretation of policy is the battleship trying to force its way through the precise wording of "our" policy to get your way. Didn't you just tell me not to speak for others. Try that as well. I don't think you got IRWolfie's point at all.--Amadscientist (talk) 13:45, 29 March 2013 (UTC)

• We let people with vested interests but who aren't paid (often with COIN declared conflicts of interest) edit articles and skew them. I consider it a lesser problem (but still a problem) if people who are paid advocates only edit the talk page. IRWolfie- (talk) 10:54, 29 March 2013 (UTC)

Anyone interested in vetting the BP and Chevron additions?

My interest here is in having the contributions of oil company employees properly vetted, not vilifying particular editors or discussing paid editing in general. The most recent article has pointed out some specific concerns with just one of the sections rewritten by BP, as well as suggesting that several sections of Chevron Corporation were replaced with no review at all. Looking at the discussions on the BP talk page, my impression is that the suggestions from Arturo at BP were not discussed in any detail. The page view stats suggest that the talk page was surprisingly quiet for such a large and controversial company (at least until the story broke in the press). Can we please stop bickering and trying to assign blame and start looking at the articles under discussion here? I know very little about this topic area or I would do it myself. Until we undertake this exercise, much of the discussion here is pointless. Is anyone here willing to organize a thorough review of the changes (comparison of before and after, validation of sources, and correction of omissions)? Delicious carbuncle (talk) 16:22, 28 March 2013 (UTC)

• No, Delicious carbuncle, No one is. I'm not, and you're not, and probably no one else. After all, former editor Petrarchan47 (she's retired in disgust, a result I expect we'll be seeing more and more of in future) took five hours away from playing with her children, watching TV, practicing the flute, or whatever else she might have done with the time and vetted a small section. It's here. No disinterested editors could be bothered to even look at it (I did, and so did Silver seren and Arturo, but none of us are disinterested) and no result or change was obtained. This is even for this highly publicized incident, so you can image the cricket chirping for less famous cases.

This is very understandable and to be expected. No one is willing to take time away from enjoyable and productive activities, here or in real life, to spend time working as an unpaid drone doing the scutwork of vetting press material from Big Oil, for free, and likely to no result anyway.

If we want this to be done, it'll probably have to be with editors paid to counter BP (and similar actors). Where the money might come from I don't know. I have some ideas, but I'm not going to digress into that now. Probably the sun is beginning to set on the day of the volunteer on the internet, which is a challenge to be faced. After all, you can buy Reddit upvotes and Facebook likes and friends and Twitter followers and Yelp reviews and so on, so there's no real reason why the Misplaced Pages should be exempt. All this is too bad IMO but life is change and I'm hopeful that this challenge can be dealt with if the Foundation is willing to be a little forward-looking. Herostratus (talk) 18:35, 28 March 2013 (UTC)

Yeah, because Misplaced Pages has historically really struggled to find editors who support environmental concerns, as evidence the ongoing controversy abut how skewed our content on global warming is towards the interests of our massive Big Oil contingent. Seriously though, you are right. If the people kicking up a fuss devoted the same amount of effort to reviewing the actual content, then Misplaced Pages would be a better place. My main concern is (as I hope I made clear) to ensure that OTRS guidance to subjects remain in step with community values. Guy (Help!) 22:27, 28 March 2013 (UTC)

I strongly support that these articles would be reviewed and vetted by additional editors. There are issues and not necessarily due to Arturo's proposals. Therefore, not only edits proposed by Arturo but these articles as wholes starting from the lead to the last section should be reviewed. Any fresh look on these articles is more than welcome. However, it is unpleasant to read comments that editors have failed to check these edits or that we can't reasonably rely on a handful of pseudonymous volunteers. Don't know about Chevron article but based on my experience editing on the BP article, I have to disagree. If said someone failed, it would be appropriate to show what is the exact problems with current wording. Otherwise, this is disrespectful regarding editors how have invested a lot of time improving the article. But again, fresh reviewers are needed and everybody is invited to take to examine the whole article. Beagel (talk) 09:09, 29 March 2013 (UTC)

Right, and we have processes for that. Having to review articles for insidious bias is absolutely normal, we do it all the time. It's much rarer to find a case where the representative of the subject has identified themselves and where we can identify every word they have proposed, and review its effect on the article. So this time it should be easier than usual to fix the article. To clarify, by "people kicking up a fuss", I refer mainly to the small band of griefers who have seized on this to give their agenda yet another airing - I don't see you as one of them and have deliberately not tried to tie external identities to Misplaced Pages usernames. This is really just another case of Misplaced Pages content as sausage: best not to watch it being made. Guy (Help!) 12:26, 29 March 2013 (UTC)

Guy, thank heavens for those "small band of griefers." They may save Misplaced Pages from itself, though I'll admit the odds are against it. Coretheapple (talk) 16:25, 29 March 2013 (UTC)

It's unlikely. Their leaders have been banned for good reason. They may, like a stopped watch, occasionally get it right, but most of the time it's a simple case of "how can we exploit this to make Misplaced Pages look evil and improve our sense of self-validation". Guy (Help!) 11:23, 30 March 2013 (UTC)

I've looked through the Chevron Corporation's multiple requests for textual additions to the article on that company. I urge all editors to do the same, and in particular to read the response of one of the tiny number of independent editors who monitor that page. This editor devoted unpaid hours to examining this professional public relations person's contributions, and he said as follows:

(quote)I have spent several hours to familiarize myself with this environmental disaster. I've never worked on an article where it was acceptable for a controversial section of a corporation article to be completely rewritten as the corporate rep has done in this case. I think that it should go without saying that this is completely unacceptable for Misplaced Pages. I find the rewrite a brazen attempt to bias our readers to the Chevron viewpoint rather than an unbiased telling of this unfolding incident. This paid editor has gotten rid of the Independent, the BBC, Reuters, and CBS and replaced them with court documents and Forbes saying, "...as currently written, lacks objectivity and is factually incomplete. We seek, in the spirit improving this entry, to provide additional information and context that will benefit this page and Wiki community as a whole. My proposed edits, as always, cite third-party sources and are factual in tone and substance." Very disturbing... Gandydancer (talk) 19:00, 27 December 2012 (UTC)(end quote)

It's unfair to suggest that Misplaced Pages is somehow amiss because unpaid volunteers haven't taken time off from their paying jobs in order to vet and scrutinize spin attempts by full-time corporate operatives. What is amiss is that such spin attempts are allowed to dominate article talk pages, and that protests are met with the explanation that the corporate operatives are behaving in exemplary fashion because they haven't edited the article. Coretheapple (talk) 20:28, 29 March 2013 (UTC)

Modified COI tag?

I think that an appropriate disclosure might help resolve this recurrent problem. I'm experimenting with an altered COI tag in my sandbox . The aim would be to 1. Provide notice to readers that a person connected to the subject matter has a major, continuing role on the talk page, as opposed to a limited, error-correction appearance; 2. To more visibly solicit subject matter experts who may not be regular Misplaced Pages editors. Based on the discussion above, I presume that there is a shortage of persons familiar with BP who would be able to check out the BP contributions without exerting major amounts of time; 3. To discourage large corporations from dispatching their employees to edit Misplaced Pages articles. Coretheapple (talk) 20:05, 28 March 2013 (UTC)

No one is going to tag the article itself with this sort of thing, that suggestion is quite frankly dead on arrival. If there is a problem with the article, then fix it via normal editing and dispute resolution processes. The fact that a person from BP edited the BP article is not in itself an actual problem, and there is no need to call such a thing to the readers' attention. Tarc (talk) 20:09, 28 March 2013 (UTC)

This tag would definitely require a change in the Misplaced Pages perception of "conflict of interest." It is not now considered a conflict of interest for a large corporation to assign an employee or a team of employees to have a continuing, significant influence on its article through the talk page. Indeed, such contributions are actively praised by the founder of Misplaced Pages. I'm working from the assumption that this loophole and mindset is absurd, and needs to be addressed. Disclosure is a traditional method of dealing with conflicts of interest. If a notice to readers is "dead on arrival," then I suggest that the COI policies of Misplaced Pages require change to bring them in line with real-world publishing requirements. Coretheapple (talk) 20:16, 28 March 2013 (UTC)

I would really appreciate it if this section could be for discussing or organizing a review of the edits made by BP and Chevron employees. There are several other places on this talk page to discuss more general issues. Thanks. Delicious carbuncle (talk) 20:14, 28 March 2013 (UTC)

I've put this in a separate section to address your concern. Coretheapple (talk) 20:22, 28 March 2013 (UTC)

Start an article RfC or peer review. Reviewing content for bias is supposed to be a core project activity, guys, this is not exactly the first time some promotional BS has weaselled its way into and article is it? Guy (Help!) 00:26, 29 March 2013 (UTC)

That may be necessary, but it's also necessary to disclose to readers when corporate/government representatives are involved in the editorial process. Coretheapple (talk) 01:17, 29 March 2013 (UTC)

No it is not, and in many ways it is dishonest.--Amadscientist (talk) 01:24, 29 March 2013 (UTC)

They aren't involved in the editorial process. The editorial process is what happens between statements from the subject and content in the article. It's not BP's fault that our editors were asleep at the wheel, and the issues with the article can be fixed pretty easily to the point that almost immediately (FSVO immediately) the proposed tag would be irrelevant and misleading. If we had a hatnote to say "this article might have been edited by people who failed to apply due critical judgment" then we'd have to apply it to every other article as well. This is a classic case of {{sofixit}}. Guy (Help!) 12:22, 29 March 2013 (UTC)

No. Regardless of the placement of the tag, hairsplitting is not helpful. If one proposes words, language, and placement of sources, for an article, than one is involved in editing, by any ordinary meaning of the word. Alanscottwalker (talk) 13:04, 29 March 2013 (UTC)

Amadscientist, if it's happening, if the subject of an article is openly participating in the editorial process, why is it dishonest to disclose that to readers? The editors know it. They know that "Joe from Acme" is a regular on the Acme talk page, has been proposing text and is a great guy who follows all the rules. Why shouldn't readers know that someone from Acme is involved in the editorial process? And please, don't fall back on "that's not the consensus." I'm talking about what makes sense, not how Misplaced Pages does things. Coretheapple (talk) 13:49, 29 March 2013 (UTC)

By this test every article that includes any text from any primary source controlled by the subject should be tagged COI. The problem is not that a BP employee proposed changes. The problem is that the changes were implemented uncritically. To tag the article COI when no BP employee has provably edited the article, is tantamount to witch-hunting. Guy (Help!) 18:05, 29 March 2013 (UTC)

It's not a test, it's definitional; but yes, there is a differrence between someone writing a source and someone writing copy for a Misplaced Pages article. The first is authoring a source (which we can cite) the second is participating in the proposed editing of an article (which we, apparently, cannot cite). Alanscottwalker (talk) 22:30, 29 March 2013 (UTC)

Now that you mention it, there are clear advantages from the subject's perspective to putting its side of the story on its website. Whatever is on the website can be used as editors see fit, and attributed to the company. There is no COI pitfall there. That is the fairest alternative from the perspective of everybody, and would obviate the need to make a disclosure. What's problematic is when a company comes to Misplaced Pages and says "Look, this is how the article should be written." That fosters resentment and, as we have seen lately, bad publicity for all concerned. Coretheapple (talk) 22:56, 29 March 2013 (UTC)

If BP published suggested text on its website, and it was then adopted en masse by an editor, apart from the copyright problem it would just be sloppy and lazy. What's happened here is of a totally different order of magnitude, really like day and night, and I'm baffled that you don't see the difference. Here, a BP employee has been one of the key editors on the talk page, suggesting changes, participating in the editorial process, suggesting text that was placed in the article. Disclosure of this active, ongoing participation isn't "witch hunting" by any stretch of the imagination. Doing so would not identify any editor by name, but would indicate that the subject of the article has actively participated in the editing of the article. Current procedures only allow that information to be disclosed to editors. There is a disclosure on the BP talk page. Why are you opposed to making an appropriate disclosure to readers? Coretheapple (talk) 18:17, 29 March 2013 (UTC)

If BP had information posted on their official website, that would be perfectly fine to use to source information about BP. This is a witch hunt.--Amadscientist (talk) 22:51, 29 March 2013 (UTC)

Nonsense. The difference between the two situations has been repeatedly explained. I'm not going to repeat myself further. Coretheapple (talk) 22:58, 29 March 2013 (UTC)

No, not really. Unless the wording changed we actually encouraged figures that wanted information on their BLP to post it on their official page.--Amadscientist (talk) 23:49, 29 March 2013 (UTC)

Yes. And then we have a cite for our readers and editors. Cited to BP. Alanscottwalker (talk) 00:06, 30 March 2013 (UTC)

A "totally different order of magnitude"? Get real. A company representative came along, said "I am a company representative, I would like the article to say this". That is absolutely fine. What is not fine is simply adding that content to the article without reviewing and editing it first. Guy (Help!) 11:25, 30 March 2013 (UTC)

It's so "fine" that it has caused jaws to drop everywhere except the cloistered precincts of Misplaced Pages internal bulletin boards like this one. Coretheapple (talk) 13:37, 30 March 2013 (UTC)

No it hasn't. A cartoon version of it, containing innuendo, vitriol and wilful misrepresentations, has done that. We have been using this mechanism to interact with article subjects for years without any prior external comment, as far as I can tell. Guy (Help!) 15:34, 30 March 2013 (UTC)

That's just spin. These are reputable news outlets and these articles are damaging to Misplaced Pages. The main reason I'd surmise this practice doesn't get more attention is that outsiders don't know that it's happening, thanks to your policies that do not disclose to readers that corporate representatives have been involved in the articles as editors. Another factor to consider is that Misplaced Pages has a poor reputation to begin with because of inaccuracy and hoaxes, and that the corruption of Misplaced Pages is not startling and may not even be news. Coretheapple (talk) 15:42, 30 March 2013 (UTC)

The Register is a reputable outlet, therefore all the bullshit Cade Metz prints, spoon-fed to him by malcontents, is provable fact? Not in this world. This is a complete non-story whipped up by the usual suspects, whose agenda has, for a very long time, been to cause shit around the issue of conflicted editing, because one or more of them have been banned for that. Guy (Help!) 15:53, 1 April 2013 (UTC)

Can you link to that article? I'm not finding it. All I'm seeing are pieces in Salon, which is reputable, CNet, likewise, etc. Coretheapple (talk) 13:32, 2 April 2013 (UTC)

@Guy - You said: ...They aren't involved in the editorial process. The editorial process is what happens between statements from the subject and content in the article. It's not BP's fault that our editors were asleep at the wheel, and the issues with the article can be fixed pretty easily to the point that almost immediately (FSVO immediately) the proposed tag would be irrelevant and misleading.

You have made similar statements several times. That person that you call "asleep at the wheel", that would be me. I was the only editor that vetted the Prudhoe Bay segment, the only rewrite that Arturo did that (as far as I know) later turned out to be inaccurate. None of the editors that I have worked with put it into the article, an "outside" editor who does a lot of work for corporate articles but has never worked on the BP article added it. It had not even been up for review for a full week when he decided it was ready. I've spent many, many hours on the BP article. I'm wondering, have you actually taken the time to read the talk page? If you have read the talk page and still place blame on me and my fellow editors I'd have to disagree with you, but if you are placing blame without even reading the discussion, you are being highly irresponsible. Gandydancer (talk) 02:26, 30 March 2013 (UTC)

Gandydancer, I don't think that attempting assigning blame here is helpful. And at this point, even if one wanted to assign blame, how would they know where to assign it? I have called for a review of all of the sections rewritten by BP and Chevron employees. That isn't an attempt to single out the one or two editors who were involved in reviewing BP's rewrites, but having looked at those talk pages quite closely, I hope you will admit that we should have had more editors involved and that a more thorough review could only have been beneficial. Delicious carbuncle (talk) 02:46, 30 March 2013 (UTC)

And what should Gandy have done? Canvas editors he knew would be concerned about "the spin" that was happening? How is an ediotr suppossed to handle a situation like that...when you are basically alone against a Corporate checkbook, the company line, and determined COI proxies? Where do you go to ring the alarm bell to warn the community that WP is in danger? ```Buster Seven Talk 05:42, 30 March 2013 (UTC)

I don't understand Buster. Could you elaborate?--Amadscientist (talk) 05:55, 30 March 2013 (UTC)

Not now. It's 1AM. Maybe Monday. ```Buster Seven Talk 06:08, 30 March 2013 (UTC)

Reply to Amadscientist:My 5:42 entry asks for advice from fellow editors so that, if I am ever in gandy's situation (at a corporate article dealing with a paid to edit editor and a cut-n-paste situation) what should I (or anyone else) do. Gandy was the only neutral editor in the vicinity. My question, to whimever, is "What should he have done". Some editors did not see a problem. Gandy did, but until Slim Virgin arrived he was a lone voice in the wilderness. So...if I'm confronted by a member of BP's (or any businesses) corporate communications team and they seem to be working with editors that are willing to foreego any lengthy vetting-type discussion before cutting-n-pasting, what should I do??? ```Buster Seven Talk 13:10, 30 March 2013 (UTC)

Nothing personal, and I have deliberately refrained from naming names because it is something that almost any editor could have done. Are you saying that the biased content int he article pointed out above was not, in fact, proposed by Arturo? There are a lot of diffs to wade through, so I would be happy to own up if I made a mistake in reading it that way. It would be surreal if it turns out that the bias did not come from Arturo's suggestions. Guy (Help!) 11:29, 30 March 2013 (UTC)

@ Delicious carbuncle - You hope I would admit that we should have had more editors involved and that a more thorough review could only have been beneficial! If you have looked closely at the talk pages you must know that I had no way to know that my review would be the only one and that it was not my decision to move the draft to the article. A previous draft had been argued for days and never was accepted by the group.

In fact I was very concerned that it had not been properly vetted and when Arturo presented his next draft and SlimVirgin made her first talk page edit I immediately went to her talk page to speak with her to express my concerns. In fact, I can hardly say how relieved I was when someone finally took note of the dangers of allowing paid editors to rewrite articles because it has been a concern of mine for years. To now ask me to admit to what I've been saying all along is really frustrating. Gandydancer (talk) 11:27, 30 March 2013 (UTC)

I'm really not looking to blame anyone for anything here and I apologize if it was a poor choice of words on my part. Delicious carbuncle (talk) 13:53, 30 March 2013 (UTC)

• Why is this discussion here? Wouldn't it be better to discuss the article at the article talk page, and the COI policy at the COI policy talk page? Poor Jimmy's "You have new messages" lightbulb is going to burn out from all the excess usage. Jehochman 14:03, 30 March 2013 (UTC)
  • The WMF has the funds to pay for a replacement bulb, but not enough to buy back a lost reputation. 14:53, 30 March 2013 (UTC)

Any damage to Misplaced Pages's reputation is down to wilful misrepresentation of the situation by those who have an apparent agenda against the project, as far as I can tell. Guy (Help!) 15:32, 30 March 2013 (UTC)

I'm interested in any evidence you have that the coverage is inaccurate. Were it not for the articles, the public wouldn't know that Chevron was edited by an employee and that a BP employee drafted segments of the article that were incorporated, and remains a part of the talk page consensus to this day. That information emerged externally and shamefully was not disclosed to readers of those articles. Instead of resisting any such disclosure and absurdly tagging it as a "witch hunt," you should try to fix this problem. Coretheapple (talk) 13:26, 31 March 2013 (UTC)

BP staffer proposes changes on talk, the normal practice recommended for years: fact. Changes get put into article: fact. BP have been covertly manipulating content: patent nonsense. Some content was put in the article which favours the subject: fact, but also true of virtually every Misplaced Pages article. Still looking for anything newsworthy or demanding action here... Guy (Help!) 15:51, 1 April 2013 (UTC)

Still trying to figure out how your absurdly cherry-picked version of reality amounts to a "witch hunt." Still looking for inaccuracies in the coverage. In examining the numerous media links to this controversy at Misplaced Pages:WikiProject Integrity, which include CBS, the New Orleans Times-Picayune and other publications, the only ones that treat this controversy the way you do are the PR industry organs listed at the bottom. Coretheapple (talk) 13:34, 2 April 2013 (UTC)

What if BP hosts en.WP-ready text on their site?

If BP hosts a page on www.bp.com that contains an encyclopedia-style article about BP, licensed, formatted and sourced per en.Misplaced Pages's policies and guidelines, and, after due scrutiny for relevance and weight, the consensus on Talk:BP is to copy and paste a section of it into BP, should we? --Anthonyhcole (talk · contribs · email) 16:07, 30 March 2013 (UTC)

I agree that off-loading their suggestions from the talk page, and removing themselves from the talk page consensus, is a necessary first step. But no, copy-and-paste of corporate spin and the "official version" of articles is not the goal. Articles need to be written by, and edited by, and discussed by, independent editors, with the exception of limited interaction in clearcut cases of bias and inaccuracy. Anything beyond that, is for them to place stuff on their website that can be cited from there. But no, I don't think a BP employee should participate in a discussion of whether a section in the BP article should refer to "incidents" or "accidents," as recently took place. That should be decided by independent, non-COI editors, and any rules allowing such editorial participation should rolled back. If BP (or any company) feels that the section header is wrong, on that kind of thing it can opine on its own website. Coretheapple (talk) 20:47, 30 March 2013 (UTC)

I'd certain rather they contributed it here directly, like anyone else, and used their web site in the normal way to promote the company, and post information about their activities from their POV. There's a difference between promotion and encyclopedia writing, and when we use material from a company web site, we know what to expect and watch out for. Of all the company articles in WP, the one I have the least concerns about at this point is the BP article, because it has been watch by some many people, including some out to see if they can find anything wrong with the editing. Every article in WP would benefit from such scrutiny. Tens of thousands are badly in need of such attention. DGG ( talk ) 17:24, 31 March 2013 (UTC)

If there are tens of thousands, or even hundreds of articles in which corporate people have been active participants, Misplaced Pages is even more of a shambles than I realized. Coretheapple (talk) 17:31, 31 March 2013 (UTC)

No it isn't. It's not necessary at all. It's less transparent than the current situation. If you want to institute a policy requiring article subjects not to propose changes on talk pages then that needs community debate, because it has been our recommended practice to them for years. The idea that this is "necessary" represents one end of a continuum which has, as its opposite extreme, those who would like paid editing to be allowed. There is no evidence at all that yours is a consensus view. Guy (Help!) 15:48, 1 April 2013 (UTC)

Where is this policy enunciated? I noticed that WP:COI is a behaviorial guideline, which sounds weaker than a policy. (P.S. I placed another hyphen before "less" in your post above as I think it was mistakenly omitted. If I'm wrong, kindly accept my regrets and revert that.) Coretheapple (talk) 16:58, 1 April 2013 (UTC)

Are we now switching to beating a stick with a dead horse?--Amadscientist (talk) 17:34, 31 March 2013 (UTC)

I have a feeling that the dialogue over this general subject, and disclosure in particular, is only just beginning. Perhaps not here. I'm not clear why this discussion started here in the first place. Coretheapple (talk) 20:32, 31 March 2013 (UTC)

Wisdom needed

Freedom of panorama and Threshold of originality keep popping up regarding images of 3D sculptures and PD 'no threshold met' works on commons and en:wp. There are some recent and crucial issues being discussed in the last day or so and less recent ones as well. See: WT:PW (the urgent post) for the issue on image deletions of trophies and the deletion discussion for File:CFIA-ACIA heraldic emblem.jpg for logo deletions that can be replaced with new .svg versions. Both issues may have many images deleted in the next while. FOP is not allowed in the USA and I hope that may change some day. Fair use images of PD logos are not allowed if we can create one from scratch. I could go into more detail but the links above already have most of it. Other editors including myself have emailed the people that hand out trophies and we have yet to recieve a response. Could we possibly have an 'official' note sent to award/trophy owners to possibly release images of their 3D works in a blanket OTRS? This could include Nobel prize awards down to Rotary Club ribbons. The list would not be that long to start and probably have more jump on the bandwagon once they see the advantage of image releases. Scalable Vector Graphics are far beyond my skills and many others in the projects. Could we possibly fund some graphic artists to replace our 'fair use' images that are ripped from the net and are actually PD if created from scratch? I could go on, but I will let you and others digest and comment first.--Canoe1967 (talk) 03:44, 29 March 2013 (UTC)

The US does in fact allow a sort of FOP on buildings and structures just not on sculpture. Pay for SVG images...? Er, OK...how can I get on that mailing list? LOL! We actually have WikiProject project for requests. You can ask me and I am willing to voluntarily create SVGs from Inkscape. There is also a list of editors who also will take requests at Misplaced Pages:WikiProject Images and Media/Illustration taskforce.--Amadscientist (talk) 05:17, 29 March 2013 (UTC)

By the way, the issue with heraldic emblems and Coat of Arms is that, while the emblem or COA may be in the public domain, the actual versions created by the artist is not. So if we simply create an SVG from the version found that is a recent version, it is copyrighted to that artiest. We must create an entirely new and original version that would have to be based on a version old enough to be PD.--Amadscientist (talk) 05:22, 29 March 2013 (UTC)

Just a side note. If anyone happened to catch all the coverage of the Vatican and Pope over the last month or so...I saw this COA used on flags, posters and t-shirts like crazy. I kept pointing it out and everyone was asking me "Why would the Vatican use a Misplaced Pages image when they have professional artists that can do this sort of thing?". My answer was a question: ""Do they? They aren't exactly known for their computer images these days are they?"--Amadscientist (talk) 05:37, 29 March 2013 (UTC)

The .svg issue is just a matter of replacing them with images from scratch. I could email the Canadian Justice Minister (our copyright guy) to release all the heraldry images from Can.gov sites but he hasn't responded to previous emails I sent. The Canadian Space Agency did release rights on pictures taken by Chris Hadfield with the same PD licence as NASA shots after an email from a commmons user. We are kicking around a new tack about Freedom of panorama at the wrestling project talk page. See: Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Professional_wrestling#VERY_URGENT_MATTER for more details and input.--Canoe1967 (talk) 00:02, 30 March 2013 (UTC)

If the elements from the image that is in danger of deletion is common it could be recreated with relative ease. Let me look into it.--Amadscientist (talk) 08:46, 1 April 2013 (UTC)

Well, the elements are almost all taken from the COA of Canada. Here is an svg file where elements already exist at commons to build with.--Amadscientist (talk) 09:01, 1 April 2013 (UTC)

The combination of professional wrestling and an uppercase URGENT - reliable indicators of lame edit wars, senseless drama, adolescent posturing and the complete absence of any sense of perspective. Cynical? Why, yes. Guy (Help!) 11:34, 30 March 2013 (UTC)

I think you misunderstand the issue. I am far from a wrestling fan but am trying to help them with their images. I have explained why they will probably be deleted unless they fall under De minimis or Freedom of panorama. De min may not wash in articles on the belts themselves because then they become the focus and defeat the spirit of de min. They are not edit-warring nor posturing that I have noticed. They would just like to seek a solution that will have many images deleted from many of their articles. File:Oscar statuette.jpg can be deleted for the same reasons if someone were inclined. We can host a free licence image of it if we receive permission from the rights holder of the sculpture thus the rationale that it 'can't be replaced' with a free licence image shouldn't be allowed. I may just email the Academy and see if they will provide us with an official image of it. We could also host a free licence image of the same statue if it is on display in a public place in a country that allows FOP. Am I making sense as to why we should find a solution to the many fair use images we have in many articles that are actually in violation of policy? We have at least three outcomes at this point: 1) Get permission from the rights holders for images. 2) Use images from countries that allow FOP. 3) Delete them all.--Canoe1967 (talk) 22:02, 30 March 2013 (UTC)

I have the Hockey project discussing images as well now.--Canoe1967 (talk) 14:35, 3 April 2013 (UTC)

Hail Jimbo, GodKing of Misplaced Pages!

We've been evaluating your project for some time now, and based on an assessment of your core articles, especially: your most important living being, the Woodward effect, phased radioisotopes and Britney Spears; We would like to formally offer you integration into the wider encyclopaedia.

There are also some awkward issues about copyright, we're pretty confident that our licenses are mutually compatible, but there are a few other implications.

Some of the technological glitches may need a little work, In particular our logo is quite strongly visible in the Xray end of the electromagnetic spectrum. But as long as you look at your screen from an angle you should be quite safe.

Other implications are now up as a request for comment.

Integration of Wikimedia projects into the Galactic Encyclopaedia

Regards ϢereSpielChequers 04:36, 1 April 2013 (UTC)

Article ownership warning

Welcome to Misplaced Pages. Everyone is welcome to contribute constructively to Misplaced Pages. However, please know that editors do not own articles and should respect the work of their fellow contributors on Main Page. If you create or edit an article, know that others are free to change its content. Take a look at the welcome page to learn more about contributing to this encyclopedia. See Misplaced Pages:Featured portal candidates/Main Page for more details. Thanks. FallingGravity (talk) 07:15, 1 April 2013 (UTC)

A tag has been placed on your user page, User:Jimbo Wales, requesting that it be speedily deleted from Misplaced Pages. This has been done under section G11 of the criteria for speedy deletion, because the page appears to be blatant advertising which only promotes a company, product, group or service, and which is a violation of our policies regarding acceptable use of user pages: user pages are intended for active editors of Misplaced Pages to communicate with one another as part of the process of creating encyclopedic content, and should not be mistaken for free webhosting resources. Please read the guidelines on spam, the guidelines on user pages, and, especially, our FAQ for Organizations.

If you can indicate why the page is not blatant advertising, contest the deletion by clicking on the button that looks like this: Click here to contest this speedy deletion which appears inside of the speedy deletion ({{db-...}}) tag (if no such tag exists, the page is no longer a speedy delete candidate). Doing so will take you to your user talk page where you will find a pre-formatted place for you to explain why you believe the page should not be deleted. You can also edit this page directly to give your reasons, but be aware that once tagged for speedy deletion, if the page meets the criterion, it may be deleted without delay. Please do not remove the speedy deletion tag yourself, but don't hesitate to add information to the page that would help make it encyclopedic. Feel free to leave a note on my talk page if you have any questions about this. ☯ Bonkers The Clown \(^_^)/ Nonsensical Babble ☯ 11:09, 1 April 2013 (UTC)

Blocked

Arctic Kangaroo 14:42, 1 April 2013 (UTC)

Happy April Fools Day, Mr Wales!

Lawsuit against a Wikipedian

The Institute for Cultural Diplomacy is filing suit against User:Benjamin Mako Hill according to his blog and Boing Boing for participating in an Articles for Deletion entry on the company. Can Misplaced Pages be of any help? If I (or any Wikipedian) contributed to a deletion discussion under their real name, could I (they) be sued too? Albacore (talk) 15:00, 1 April 2013 (UTC)

if it's legit, WMF has a policy Policy regarding this. besides, I don't think it would hold up in court, but you never know. -- Aunva6 15:16, 1 April 2013 (UTC)

The letter linked to in the blog discloses no cause of action upon which a claim could be made against the recipient. However,in general, I don't think it can be doubted that we each of us are all potentially liable for every word we ourselves write on Misplaced Pages. Why wouldn't we be? DeCausa (talk) 15:25, 1 April 2013 (UTC)

Their fundamental issue is that we deleted the article they wrote on themselves. We have seen this more times than I can count, especially any of us who handles OTRS tickets. If even DGG advocated deletion, we can be pretty sure that deletion was the right decision. If they find any plausible cause for action that a court will take on, I guess the Foundation has Benjamin's back, but that's unlikely to happen and even if it did I bet PopeHat or someone would find a pro-bono advocate to take it on for him. Guy (Help!) 15:36, 1 April 2013 (UTC)

The case will obviously fail. They cannot have an article if they so choose because Misplaced Pages is a private site with rules and policies that they clearly violated. If 100 editors got involved in the discussion to delete their article, will they sue all 100 of them?Cyber :  Chat  15:52, 1 April 2013 (UTC)

Mako is in contact with the WMF legal team. There's little to worry about here in my non-lawyerly opinion.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 15:58, 1 April 2013 (UTC)

What about the company threatening to sue? They claimed they contacted Wikimedia and received no response.—Cyberpower (竜龙) 16:02, 1 April 2013 (UTC)

But if their issue is with Misplaced Pages, why would they expect to get an answer from Wikemedia? Basket _Feudalist 16:16, 1 April 2013 (UTC)

The Wikimedia Foundation owns and operates Misplaced Pages. The point is, they've got zero coherent grounds for a lawsuit here as far as I can tell. There's nothing even remotely plausible. It costs nothing to send a threatening letter. Going to court will cost them a chunk - including most likely Mako's court costs as the judge laughs them out of court. In any event, yeah, I'm not worried about it and I doubt if Mako is either. :-)--Jimbo Wales (talk) 16:38, 1 April 2013 (UTC)

Big up the fella. He can always frame it and hang it in the toilet Basket _Feudalist 16:45, 1 April 2013 (UTC)

Even so, an editor was threatened and understandably the threat worked, according to his blog. If I understand this correctly it was a threat, not a lawsuit. Assuming that, the initial posting was incorrect in saying that this editor was being sued. Coretheapple (talk) 17:04, 1 April 2013 (UTC)

In what sense did the threat work?--Jimbo Wales (talk) 20:16, 1 April 2013 (UTC)

Benjamin says as follows on his blog, in the post that is linked above: "I have no problem with the ICD and I deeply regret being dragged into this whole mess simply because I wanted to improve Misplaced Pages. That said, Donfried’s threat has scared me off from attempts to improve the ICD articles. I suspect I will not edit ICD pages in Misplaced Pages in the future." Note what I've put in boldface. Coretheapple (talk) 20:25, 1 April 2013 (UTC)

Thanks. I see what you mean.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 20:28, 1 April 2013 (UTC)

(edit conflict)If the users involved don't mind, I'd like to add this to my essay on Chilling Effects on Misplaced Pages here. Thanks. gwickwire_editing 20:30, 1 April 2013 (UTC)

Some homeowner policies have coverage for libel and slander suits. There's a name for such policies, I forget offhand what they're called. I think they're called "omnibus" policies or something like that. This editor may be covered without his even knowing it. Active editors may want to consider such policies. I found this via Google though it's dated and not necessarily accurate: http://www.volokh.com/posts/1107896002.shtml Coretheapple (talk) 20:43, 1 April 2013 (UTC) They're called "umbrella" policies. Coretheapple (talk) 20:45, 1 April 2013 (UTC)

I had a similar problem with organized crime. I got them very mad online. They hacked to get my IP, then used their influence to get my address from my ISP. They stole my car with all my tools in it. I didn't have insurance becuase it was a beater but at least they stopped there when I did online.--Canoe1967 (talk) 21:01, 1 April 2013 (UTC)

What did you do to get them pissed? ZappaOMati 21:14, 1 April 2013 (UTC)

The Hells Angels have factions in Second Life. Nuff said? link to IP hack --Canoe1967 (talk) 21:33, 1 April 2013 (UTC)

My point is if you anger powerful people online then they can get to you. The illegal methods are far easier and cheaper than the legal ones. Checkusers are probably their easiest 'in' to Misplaced Pages.--Canoe1967 (talk) 21:57, 1 April 2013 (UTC)

Thanks. These are all powerful arguments to take up butterfly collecting as a hobby instead of Misplaced Pages. Between the Hells Angels and corporate spin, this is too much. Coretheapple (talk) 23:16, 1 April 2013 (UTC)

Sorry. I didn't mean to scare anybody away from editing. Editors should be aware that some articles are important to powerful people as to the way they are handled. I assumed that Linden Lab was protecting my IP and didn't realize that Emerald wasn't when mine was hacked. We may consider a 'privileged' notice board that is not seen by the public to discuss issues on contentious articles and then have the WMF add the edits after consensus is reached. I stayed away from a recent article like this because of my previous experience from Second Life. Misplaced Pages is big PR and free PR as well. The PR budgets of many or our subjects can buy mucho illegal influence here for lower costs if they are really serious.--Canoe1967 (talk) 23:51, 1 April 2013 (UTC)

You should look in on the BP discussion elsewhere on this page and in various other venues. I'd be interested in your perspective. Just check out my contributions, as I've been doing a tour of that la-la land. Coretheapple (talk) 23:54, 1 April 2013 (UTC)

Since I live the home of dirty oil I am COI with any greenhouse/oil articles. They used to sport bumper stickers when I lived in BC where logging was king that said: "Log it! Burn it! Pave it!". Philip Gaglardi won an election there with: "The smell of pollution is the smell of money."--Canoe1967 (talk) 00:06, 2 April 2013 (UTC)

The above hacking incident is testimony to the fact that "we'll protect your data" claims are all BS. The only "security" is to not try to collect, arm-twist to collect and store the data on individuals in the first place. To Misplaced Pages's credit it does not attempt to do this. I suppose that the weak link is that they are storing IP addresses with username log-in instances, which inevitably will someday get hacked or subpenaed. Misplaced Pages should have a fast delete cycle (~ 2 months) on those. Sincerely, North8000 (talk) 01:11, 2 April 2013 (UTC)

Fortunately, It does. Graham87 09:28, 2 April 2013 (UTC)

Thanks. It's vague on the time period, but maybe it must be. North8000 (talk) 12:55, 2 April 2013 (UTC)

Conflict of Interest

• The blog post again highlights the importance of disclosure of COI. Alanscottwalker (talk) 17:11, 1 April 2013 (UTC)

• Quote of the day, from L. Ron Hubbard:

  "The purpose of the suit is to harass and discourage rather than win. The law can be used very easily to harass, and enough harassment on somebody who is simply on the thin edge anyway, well knowing that he is not authorized, will generally be sufficient to cause professional decease. If possible, of course, ruin him utterly."

This is arguably the most memorable thing that Hubbard ever said.--♦IanMacM♦ 04:28, 2 April 2013 (UTC)

Why wikipedia is being editable?

You shall make wikipedia uneditable, too many editjokes! 190.60.93.218 (talk) 17:07, 1 April 2013 (UTC)

it's april fools. joke edits are most common today, and should be over in a few hours. please Stand by until it is over — Preceding unsigned comment added by Aunva6 (talk • contribs) 17:26, 1 April 2013 (UTC)

FYI

Misplaced Pages:Biographies_of_living_persons/Noticeboard#Inventor Chrisrus (talk) 19:06, 1 April 2013 (UTC)

A beer for you!

for putting up with the pestering from all of us. also, WP:CABALOFWIKIPEDIANSWHOHATEREALLYLONGSHORTCUTSALOTANDWILLNEVERLIKETHEMEVERUNTILTHEHEATDEATHOFTHEUNIVERSEWHENWEALLDIESOLETSGETCRACKINGONTHOSEINSANELYLONGSHORTCUTSTHATARELONGERTHANTHEPAGETHEYREDIRECTTO -- Aunva6 21:30, 1 April 2013 (UTC)

Child protection

RFC about April Fools' jokes

See here. Count Iblis (talk) 17:16, 2 April 2013 (UTC)

Hello!

Hello, Mr. Wales. (Please don't assume pretension. I just don't feel comfortable calling one of my idols "Jimmy.") I am theonesean, an internet citizen for 86% of my life, and Wikipedian for 13% of it. I have decided to more fully commit my time to Misplaced Pages, as of 1 April, so I just wanted to take this opportunity to say hello and formally introduce myself. Thanks! Theonesean (talk) 03:10, 3 April 2013 (UTC)

Lack of permission for File:Paul Myners.jpg

Hi Jimmy,
this is just to remind you — since you are not replying to comments left on your Commons talk page, and I am sure that you are getting notifications e-mails about them — that we are still waiting for your comments on the lack of proper CC-BY-SA 3.0 release for File:Paul Myners.jpg that you uploaded, and which has since been deleted from Commons. I left you a message on March 13, and on March 18 you wrote that you'd be back within a week. However, we haven't heard from you since, even though you were left a couple of reminders.

Would you mind explaining at last why did you upload a file, claiming that it was released under CC-BY-SA, and leaving so many comments about how Commons (and OTRS) are broken, when it turns out that the copyright holder did not agree to it being released under a free licence in the first place? There are people waiting for a proper comment from you for almost three months (since the file was tagged as missing permission on January 14). Looking forward to hearing from you, odder (talk) 11:17, 3 April 2013 (UTC)

It is taking longer to track down the source of the confusion than I had anticipated. It's been difficult to schedule a phone call, in no small part because I'm on a family holiday this week. There's no urgency to any of this.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 11:27, 3 April 2013 (UTC)

There may not be any urgency, but this has been going on since mid January, and all I (and probably most people) have seen are either pompous replies about you being the Founder (with capital F), evasive replies about other files being a bigger problem, threatening (and rather unacceptable) replies like "Do not delete the file until you consult with Wikimedia Legal and me about it." or non-replies like the one above. This doesn't leave a very positive impression. Fram (talk) 12:18, 3 April 2013 (UTC)

That's right. He should've created a brand new account and upload the image as "own work" and slap a public domain tag on it. Nobody would've questioned that, and the image would've likely survived a deletion request. --Conti|✉ 12:47, 3 April 2013 (UTC)

So? Because liars and socks can get away with stuff at Commons (and here), the actions of the Founder are somehow above criticism? I don't see what logic you are applying here. Are there more urgent problems than these pictures? Probably, but that applies to both sides, the uploader and the people wanting to delete it. That doesn't mean that reactions like ""Do not delete the file until you consult with Wikimedia Legal and me about it." are in any way acceptable or justified. Fram (talk) 13:40, 3 April 2013 (UTC)

As I pointed out on Commons, even if he was wrong this time and a different procedure would have been right, it doesn't prove that the different procedure is better. Sometimes something that's usually better will fail while something that's usually bad will work. The fact that someone died by keeping their seatbelt on, and someone was saved by keeping their seatbelt off, doesn't mean that seatbelts are a bad idea. Ken Arromdee (talk) 15:35, 3 April 2013 (UTC)

We aren't discussing the procedure here, we are discussing some uploads Jimbo Wales made which were not policy compliant, but where his responses, varied though they were, were unsatisfactory at best and rather alarming at worst. Fram (talk) 17:12, 3 April 2013 (UTC)

The image is currently deleted, so there's no need for urgency of any kind. At worst, this was a honest mistake. --Conti|✉ 17:23, 3 April 2013 (UTC)

Actually Conti, "at worst", it was a deliberate fabrication followed by grandstanding that was hoped to stifle further inquiry into the facts behind the event. An "honest mistake" would kind of be the "at best" outcome. - 2001:558:1400:10:4C57:5FC3:DF40:AE76 (talk) 17:28, 3 April 2013 (UTC)

All this really goes to show is that this copyright crap isn't as easy to keep track of as some people think. I'm sure that there are many, many volunteers who have uploaded an image after they were told that "sure, it's OK to put it on Commons" only to find out afterward that its use is restricted. Heck, I bet most people who get professional photos taken of themselves assume that it is a "work for hire" that they can reuse at will - after all, that's what it's for, only to get surprised by claims after the fact that they don't own a picture of themselves they paid to have taken. For that matter ... just imagine how many self-photos in front of dramatic landscapes must be on Commons right now, put up by tourists who "had someone hold the camera". Someday, through the miracle of automated facial recognition and contextual processing of eternally archived surveillance footage, all of those anonymous strangers will probably get junk e-mails from spammy lawyers offering to help them sue for their rights. (Not that this will be the worst surprises being doled out by the surveillance state) Copyright doesn't make sense, and when we pretend it does, it makes for unfortunate unpleasantness. Wnt (talk) 18:08, 3 April 2013 (UTC)

I just made a thingy for tourists and others that they may find handy: File:Photograph of tourists permission form.png.--Canoe1967 (talk) 18:46, 3 April 2013 (UTC)

offensive communist symbols

may you ban to use offensive communist symbols in this your project for propaganda by users? Example: User:BokicaK shows File:Hammer and sickle.svg which is illegal in Hungary (Hungarian Criminal Code 269/B.§ 1993), Latvia, Lithuania and Poland but it is offensive for every democratic guy! You can read: mass killings under Communist regimes or RED HOLOCAUST — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2.239.136.182 (talk) 14:26, 3 April 2013 (UTC)

I think that would go against policy. We had the same discussion with the Commonist symbol. The use and meaning of symbols can and does change. The Nazis used an ancient Chinese symbol, now fascist groups have adopted it. The hammer and and sickle seems more a symbol of socialism now than the USSR regime.--Canoe1967 (talk) 14:44, 3 April 2013 (UTC)

Indus Valley Civilization, actually. — Crisco 1492 (talk) 15:38, 3 April 2013 (UTC)

I think you don't understand: is this project a site for propaganda by users in their presentation's pages with symbols of infamous and dictatorial regimes? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2.239.136.182 (talk) 14:53, 3 April 2013 (UTC)

Similar issues occur with the Nazi Swastika. See the Misplaced Pages:General disclaimer.--♦IanMacM♦ 14:59, 3 April 2013 (UTC)

Hungarian Criminal Code is irrelevant to this discussion. The fact that something is offensive to you does not necessarily mean that it's offensive to others. For example, one of the main political parties in Hungary Jobbik has been described by scholars as fascist, racist and Neo-Nazi, but we didn't ban their symbol on Misplaced Pages, although in may be offensive to many people.--В и к и T 15:04, 3 April 2013 (UTC)

Many of our religous editors may be offended by rainbow flags on user pages as well. They may have a stronger arguement that those should be removed because they go against God's laws and not just those of mortal man. Far more people have been killed in the name of God than any other regime that has existed. Should we remove all the symbols of God as well?--Canoe1967 (talk) 15:06, 3 April 2013 (UTC)

It is hard to believe that a Hungarian person will never have come across a swastika or a hammer and sickle. WP:NOTCENSORED applies here, although the use of these symbols on a user or talk page needs to be monitored carefully.--♦IanMacM♦ 15:11, 3 April 2013 (UTC)

A source for our article on Red star about this Hungarian Criminal Code 269/B spoke of an appeal to the European Court of Human Rights, which decided last year that the ban was a violation of the freedom of expression, calling the Hungarian ban "indiscriminate" and "too broad." I hope that this has persuaded the Hungarians to drop this policy, and I also hope that at some point the Germans will learn to do without their swastika ban. I should note that the pivotal point in the rise of Hitler in 1924 came during the period when NSDAP was banned. Wnt (talk) 23:42, 3 April 2013 (UTC)

I am not a communist (though I was briefly in my youth). I have written an article Ford Hunger March about a historical topic related to communism. Through that effort, I became aware of Portal:Communism, which is emblazoned with red banners and stars, and the hammer and sickle. Communist parties are legal in many countries, and still run several. Communists are welcome to edit Misplaced Pages, as long as they comply with our core policies. I regret that the IP editor takes offense, but this is a worldwide project, not a Hungarian one. Cullen Let's discuss it 00:03, 4 April 2013 (UTC)