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talk:Misplaced Pages Signpost/2013-10-09/News and notes - Misplaced Pages

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Nitpick: why do Signpost articles not show external links as such but as plainlinks? Maybe a div in Misplaced Pages:Signpost/Template:Signpost-article-start needs closing? -- Michael Bednarek (talk) 13:40, 10 October 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for the comment. As the Signpost includes many more external links than normal Misplaced Pages articles, our pieces have been formatted like this for years so that there isn't a forest of external link notations throughout the text. Regards, Ed  13:43, 10 October 2013 (UTC)

It's a bit unclear from the article what the community's reaction is. What are we doing about it? Are there going to be IP blocks? an ArbCom case? SPat 14:29, 10 October 2013 (UTC)

wow. I had no idea the scope of the abuse stemming from the newpages bug. We really need to fix that. Bawolff (talk) 15:12, 10 October 2013 (UTC)

Adding to the list of previous coverage: Misplaced Pages:Wikipedia_Signpost/2009-06-15/News_and_notes#Paid editing (the Nichalp/Zithan case). Regards, HaeB (talk) 15:22, 10 October 2013 (UTC)

Tilman, thanks, added. Tony (talk) 15:34, 10 October 2013 (UTC)
  • OK, I'm going to set the cat among the pigeons for a moment. Obviously Wiki-PR's behaviour is disgraceful, and really they must have known that they were violating Misplaced Pages's norms in doing it. But I think they're a symptom of a much broader disease. People (and big, successful, easily notable companies run by intelligent people) don't know how to engage with Misplaced Pages. There's no simple process for requesting an article; AfC last time I looked was horribly backlogged and submissions that would easily survive AfD were being arbitrarily rejected (though what reviewers there were were doing their best), and WP:RA is mostly a pile of links and not much happens there (it's well-intentioned and a good idea, but there's no mechanism for interacting with the people making the suggestions). Add to that the inconsistent and often combative approach to editors with a conflict of interest and Wikipedians' tendency to dismiss enquiries with instructions like "read WP:COI" rather than engage in discussion, and it's no wonder that people feel they have no other option but to pay unscrupulous people like Wiki-PR to create and monitor articles for them. If we had a proper process for working with notable subjects who want an article but want to comply with our policies and norms, there would be no market for these kinds of companies. HJ Mitchell | Penny for your thoughts? 16:52, 10 October 2013 (UTC)
    • How could we possibly manage that when we have such loose notability standards that many millions of people qualify for an article? There are over 600,000 active tenured professors in the US that pretty much get automatic notability, not even counting the retired ones, which probably brings us to 1 million articles, just for "notable" professors. And that's just the US. World wide, there's probably several more million "notable" professors. FIFA says there's 113,000 active registered professional soccer players world-wide... those get automatic notability too, regardless of whether a source anywhere other than a raw statistic book cared to write about them. And they get automatic notability forever, so lets just say at least 1 million more people who have ever played soccer professionally even once. And that's just one sport. I don't think I'd be far off to guess that our current notability standards qualify at least 25-100 million people as "notable".
    • Until we get some sanity in our notability standards and require actual secondary-source biographical coverage to exist, not just some proof of accomplishment, we are only going to face larger and larger problems. Gigs (talk) 18:23, 10 October 2013 (UTC)
I don't know about soccer players, but a quick look at Misplaced Pages:Notability (academics)#Criteria shows that tenure is not one of them. An academic actually has to be "noted". StarryGrandma (talk) 22:58, 10 October 2013 (UTC)

Serious response by WMF needed

This looks like the tip of the iceberg to me. As far as I can tell, almost all editors are against paid undisclosed advertising and associated practices on Misplaced Pages, with the only opposition to clear policies and practices on this coming from interested parties. After all, undisclosed advertising is against the law in the US and we need to take serious action against it.

The WMF should take several actions against undisclosed advertising by paid editors, as soon as possible. These might include:

  • Reporting this incident to the FTC. The law on undisclosed advertising has been broken and the FTC is the policeman.
  • Banning all owners, employees and contractors of Wiki-PR from the site, whether we can identify the user names or not.
  • Making a serious private investigation into Wiki-PR to determine the extent of the particular problems caused by them. Volunteers can only do so much. Wiki-PR has left a trail of dissatisfied clients and misinformed and unpaid editors as well as public advertising for their "services." This private investigation should include both publicly available input as well as confidentially gathered input, and public conclusions. No way can we sweep this under the rug. I'll just note that one of the volunteer investigators noted above has said that he would leave Misplaced Pages because of the frustrations involved in the case.
  • Taking legal action against Wiki-PR, e.g. for defamation of Misplaced Pages by claiming in their ads that Misplaced Pages Administrators are on their staff. I am not a lawyer, so of course potential actions should be considered by legal experts, but I'm sure that aggressive legal action should be considered by the board.
  • Formulating policy for all WMF sites, e.g. in the terms of use, that would clearly inform all potential undisclosed advertisers that anything like this is prohibited and that legal action might be taken against them.
  • Laying out basics for policy on individual project's prohibitions on paid editing. After the individual encyclopedias and other projects formulate these policies, I believe that they should be voted on in a format similar to the voting for arbcom or the board seats. The RfC format for making this type of policy clearly fails here - only a few hundred editors, at most, can wade through the extensive verbiage on the RfC page, and a determined small group can always muddle the issues, make the process as unpleasant as possible, and keep the RfC from accomplishing anything.

If the WMF does not take these or similar actions, it will only encourage paid advocacy and undisclosed advertising on WMF projects. PR folks will say "they had a obvious clear case of extensive abuse, and all they did was block a few accounts. Looks like they are open for business-as-usual." Smallbones(smalltalk) 16:46, 10 October 2013 (UTC)

I'm in agreement about reporting this to the FTC. Can someone weigh in on why this hasn't been done, it's potential impact, or if it has already been done? Perhaps User:Geoffbrigham? --Jackson Peebles (talk) 18:31, 10 October 2013 (UTC)
What's the FTC, for those of us not from the US (I'm assuming from the context that it's a US-specific thing?)? HJ Mitchell | Penny for your thoughts? 16:55, 10 October 2013 (UTC)
Federal Trade Commission
Smallbones(smalltalk) 17:36, 10 October 2013 (UTC)
I'd point people to the Misplaced Pages Weekly podcast we recorded on Tuesday, which discussed the FTC and what the WMF could do in this area. You can skip to 23 minutes into the podcast to hear the exact segment where we talked about it. Youtube video of Misplaced Pages Weekly episode #103 -- Fuzheado | Talk 19:00, 10 October 2013 (UTC)
@Smallbones and Jackson Peebles: There are a variety of ways the Wikimedia Foundation and the community can work together on this issue. Geoff and the Legal team are aware of current events, and staying on top of the issue. But there are also other problem areas that need to be addressed on the topic of paid editing and article creation. Those include the somewhat murky state of policy on this incident (where does the effectiveness of SPI and sockpuppetry policy end, and the COI guideline begin?), and technical limitations. Template:Bug is a critical one mentioned in the Signpost article, and it's not the only method we could use to help detect skullduggery on the part of paid agents not acting inline with community policy and guidelines. In short: yes, the Foundation can possibly do things on this issue, but the responsibility is very much shared with the community, as the primary stewards of English Misplaced Pages content and social policy. Steven Walling (WMF) • talk 23:52, 10 October 2013 (UTC)

My quotation, used above in the article, can be easily misinterpreted. At WikiExperts.us we are appalled by the tactics reportedly used by Wiki-PR. We provide Misplaced Pages visibility services ONLY to notable companies an individuals, and strictly abide by Misplaced Pages content rules. We consider Misplaced Pages to be one of the greatest achievements of the Internet Age, respect its founders and volunteers, and only critique policies which we see to be endangering Misplaced Pages's ongoing success. My compete statement at CREWE can be seen at https://www.facebook.com/groups/crewe.group/permalink/433836930054893/ AKonanykhin (talk) 17:09, 10 October 2013 (UTC)

What is there to misinterpret? There are PR people who work within the community with transparency. There are people like you who try to hide their activities. Our goal has never been to write "problem free articles", especially not when the problem you want to fix are not editorial problems, but PR problems for your clients. Gigs (talk) 18:01, 10 October 2013 (UTC)
Gigs, We've been very open about our work and our code of ethics since launching www.WikiExperts.us in 2010 - see the media coverage there. As for client disclosure, I find it unethical. Here's why:

At www.WikiExperts.us we stand for ETHICAL Misplaced Pages visibility work, and therefore AGAINST "COI disclosure". COI disclosure would be UNETHICAL as it would prejudice our clients, exposing them to unfair persecution by Wikimedia, which founder had repeatedly pledged to ban Misplaced Pages accounts of all paid editors. At least some other Wikimedia staffers and Misplaced Pages admins are similarly aggressively anti-PR. If revealed, our clients would be discriminated upon. Specifically, they would be the ONLY group banned from direct editing; the only group which would have to wait, often a long time and sometimes in vane, for some anonymous editor with unknown qualifications to act on the request we made on their behalf in the Talk page. Misplaced Pages is written by individuals many of whom have strong biases. The disclosure rule proposed by Wikimedia would allow a corporate profiles to be edited by competitors, disgruntled employees, bitter ex-spouses, and cyber-vandals, but not the representatives of the company. Allowing for such discrimination would be unfair an unethical. Misplaced Pages has no effective customer support to address corporate grievances, and its volunteers predictably fail to create problem-free profiles for many notable corporations, including the largest. Misplaced Pages visibility professionals are therefore the only defenders of valid corporate interests in Misplaced Pages. Wikimedia uses a false pretext for its "disclose COI" demand: it claims that commercial COI is a danger for neutrality. In reality, the bias of a paid Misplaced Pages visibility professional is much weaker than many other biases Misplaced Pages content review system is successfully dealing with. We believe that Wikimedia request is instead designed to maintain a large army of free contributors, who find proliferation of paid editing on Misplaced Pages demotivating. We believe that it's unethical of Wikimedia to prejudice all notable businesses and individuals solely to avoid paying for content development. We also deem unethical soliciting $42 million dollars in donations per 2013 instead of using commercial model. Much of that money could have been instead donated to the noble causes which cannot self-finance. We are proud to be be contributing daily in development of quality content on Misplaced Pages while facilitating business of our clients. AKonanykhin (talk) 18:28, 10 October 2013 (UTC)

That's not how ethics works, and you didn't need to paste your post from facebook to here. That's like saying it's unthical to have a speed limit while driving, because the people who break the law can drive as fast as they want, so it would be discriminatory against people who follow the law. You've really developed some convoluted logic to rationalize your behavior. Gigs (talk) 18:32, 10 October 2013 (UTC)
Correct me if I'm wrong. AKonanykhin argues that Misplaced Pages is unethical for accepting unpaid editorial contributions from volunteers, and that it is unethical for Misplaced Pages to accept voluntary monetary contributions rather than take paid ads. Reality check: what's wrong with people voluntarily getting together to try to give every single person on the planet free access to the sum of all human knowledge, without the potentially corrupting influence of both paid and unpaid (and undisclosed) advertising?
If AKonanykhin thinks this is wrong, I suspect he and his employees completely misunderstand Misplaced Pages and all its rules. They likely break the rules on a regular basis simply because they do not understand the logic behind the rules. And they will argue ad naseum against any restrictions against paid advocacy on RfCs and policy discussions. Time just to tell these folks that they are not wanted here. Smallbones(smalltalk) 19:57, 10 October 2013 (UTC)
Re: "COI disclosure would be UNETHICAL as it would prejudice our clients, exposing them to unfair persecution by Wikimedia, which founder had repeatedly pledged to ban Misplaced Pages accounts of all paid editors"; Nonsense. Utter hogwash. I work with ethical COI editors on a regular basis. See User talk:Guy Macon/Archive 2#Your help? for an example. Nobody has ever retaliated against me, against the COI editor, or against the article. (If they did, they would get a quick lesson about what behavior gets you blocked). --Guy Macon (talk) 09:17, 11 October 2013 (UTC)

This is a great article. Thanks, Signpost! Please do let us know what enforcement action is taken. Also, can you include an article next week on the status, if any, of the investigation into supposedly agenda-pushing or paid admins? -- Ssilvers (talk) 18:48, 10 October 2013 (UTC)

Coverage of paid editing (advocacy) within WP:COI

The statement "... a full conflict of interest guideline was developed in response to the perceived threat of paid editing." is, to my mind, unclear, particularly for a (current) guideline that began solely focused on "vanity" biographical pages. Something like this would be better: " ... the conflict of interest guideline was significantly expanded in 2012 to more fully respond to the perceived problems of paid advocacy."

(That suggested wording is based on a comparison of the guideline at the end of 2011 version versus the version at the end of 2012. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 19:47, 10 October 2013 (UTC)

CREWE, CIPR and WMUK

I note that the article mentions the guide for paid editing but appears to miss the background of this document being created in long term partnership with Wikimedia UK. Though drafted in cooperation with members of the UK chapter and supported by Wikimedia UK, the document is draft and has yet to be agreed with the English Misplaced Pages community, which is the only Wikimedia project it addresses. With regard to current sock puppet investigations and assertions about who might be working with PR agencies, it is worth comparing any names to the public list of 10,500 CIPR members (which include a large proportion of global affiliates), this flat list may be handy, as CIPR has an excellent complaints process with a Professional Practices Committee which has a duty to enforce their code of conduct, including the guidelines for paid editing of Misplaced Pages. Various detailed discussions about this case and the WMUK Secretary's on-going conflict of loyalties by becoming the CEO of CIPR are available at the WMUK Water cooler. --Fæ (talk) 15:50, 11 October 2013 (UTC)

How Much is Misplaced Pages Worth?

Let's assume just for fun that we sold Misplaced Pages for $6,600,000,000 and distributed the money to the editors. There are various ways the loot could be divided.

So far we have made 655,271,926 edits. If we distributed that 6.6 billion dollars by edit, you would get ten cents for every edit you have made. Our top 100 editors would get between $132,234 and $14,449.

We have created 31,277,369 pages fo all kinds. That's $211 per page created.

We have 19,858,961 registered users. That's $332 per registered user.

We have created 4,346,517 articles. That's $1,518 per article created.

We have 127,156 active editors. That's $51,905 per active editor.

We have 1,431 administrators. That's $4,612,159 per administrator.

Or we could use it to fund the US government for a third of a day. :( --Guy Macon (talk) 21:23, 10 October 2013 (UTC)