Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2021-09-26/Disinformation report

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• Readers might want to know that the folks at enwp Conflict of interest noticeboard had to clean up many of the Kosinski articles and sort out fraudulent Articles for creation approvals. Several ended up draftified or deleted. ☆ Bri (talk) 22:52, 26 September 2021 (UTC)
• Is it just me or did anyone else read "promotional" as "p*rnotional" and do a double take? I really need to avoid the internet before 9:00 AM (not that it will make any big difference in how alert I am, haha). As for the response by "This!", (King George III impression as in Hamilton) Awesome, wow. Is that sort of response common from people and companies that try to pull off this sort of BS? Tube·of·Light 03:18, 27 September 2021 (UTC)
  • I haven't really asked that many. I tried sending something similar to Burger King, who had replaced the entire lead of the Whopper article with adverting text that was meant to be read by Alexa or some home bot set off by a 30 second TV commercial. There wasn't a direct email address available for the head marketing guy, so he may have never got the message, but he didn't answer when the story got into Adverising Age and about 10 similar publications. The advertising industry gave him an award. Some folks think "I don't care what you say about me as long as you mention my product and spell my name right." I consider that to be a testable hypothesis. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 00:35, 28 September 2021 (UTC)
    • Wow, turns out BK just loves controversial advertising (link to USA Today). I really don't know what is the most surprising part to me, the fact that BK thought this would be even remotely okay, or the fact that even Google was taking action against this, or the fact that BK got an award for this. BTW, did you use 5 tildes instead of 4 when signing, Smallbones? Tube·of·Light 03:48, 28 September 2021 (UTC)
• The Kosinsky case is a sad breach of trust of the community, and raises questions about whether the best-intentioned users involved in such projects or perhaps Wikimidians-in-residence may fall into a Stockholm syndrome-like situation or simply lower themselves to corrupt opportunism when placed in such key positions. I'm not sure what exactly we can do other than encourage community oversight of people in these positions. -Indy beetle (talk) 10:20, 27 September 2021 (UTC)
• I don't think it's accurate to say that the YouTube comments, instead of "blaming Wikipedia for being unreliable, easily manipulated and totally corrupt", had "quite a positive bent". The top comment, with 4.2K upvotes (ten times as many as the comment quoted by the Signpost above), says, "I can hear some teacher from my school now saying 'I told you, Wikipedia doesn't count as a source.' I can feel the sound waves." --Andreas JN466 19:48, 27 September 2021 (UTC)

That's true, but I really would have expected all comments tk be negative, in the vein of "you trust what you read on Wikipedia?" That anyone at all in YouTube comments came to our defense was quite unexpected for me, already. Zarasophos (talk) 23:01, 27 September 2021 (UTC)

Agreed. It was a much more positive set of comments than I've come across about Wikipedia elsewhere. The top comment is one of the largest cliches about Wikipedia, but not one of the most wrong. (And of course, the response is: no, you can't cite Wikipedia as a secondary source in a serious work, but you can use it as part of the research process, particularly as a way to find reliable references.) — Bilorv (talk) 14:08, 29 September 2021 (UTC)

• I'll just note that Bri really wanted the blurb to be "Schmutziges Wikipedia-Geheimnis", ("filthy wiki-secret") which is a quote from the comedian. If I could have figured out a way to properly attribute the quote in a video in a foreign language in a blurb (on the Table of contents page) to avoid BLP/quote attribution problems, I'd have seriously considered it. Now that's a schmutziges Wikipedia-Geheimnis. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 00:02, 28 September 2021 (UTC)

German proposal

• The German WP has been much more friendly that we are to declared paid editors--and I can understand why, because some of them are excellent and know how to do NPOV work, which is rarely the case at enWP. I'm glad they've acknowledged that there is a corresponding part below the surface. We should adopt their statement that

edits made by PR service providers for pay to be not permitted. Ceding a verified account to a PR service provider to this end is not permitted either. This is valid for all namespaces. Rule breaches will lead to a permanent ban of the used accounts upon becoming known. PR service providers means persons or organisations that offer the creation or editing of a Wikipedia article for pay as a service to customers.

I don't see how it could we could word it better. DGG ( talk ) 03:22, 29 September 2021 (UTC)

• Paid editors (minus Wikipedians in residence and limited other educational work) are parasites who we would be better off without. It doesn't matter whether it's a relatively good company like This! or a human rights-violating one like fast fashion and food brands: we should be writing the article about them, with complete independence. Unfortunately, we cannot be free from paid editing, any more than we can be free from vandals. Each Wikipedia's goal with paid editing rules should be to minimise the amount of infestations that occur, and be able to deal with them as quickly as possible with as few side effects as possible when detected. On en.wiki that might mean compromising and letting through some of the tidiest and least overtly promotional content, so rules on disclosing COIs aren't simply ignored... any more than they will be anyway. I hope de.wiki finds the right solution for them. — Bilorv (talk) 14:08, 29 September 2021 (UTC)

I'd support the basic German proposal here. But one problem is that we don't have "verified accounts" here. My understanding of this is that celebrities, paid editors and perhaps others submit contact information to the German VTRS, which they verify, perhaps via email or maybe even a phone call. That could solve many, many problems here, e.g the Philip Roth case. But it could also cause a few very difficult problems - think of what might happen if a movie star changes agents, or just the general Brittny Spears case. And would our VTRS volunteers even be willing to do the work? I'd support creating verified accounts if it was clear what VTRS or ordinary editors could do with them. I'd suppose the usual thing to happen would be something like this: a verified account goes to an article talk page and states e.g. "my client categorically denies that ..." to which the proper response should be - "get that fact reported in a reliable source, at at least issue a press release with their name and your contact on it, which we can quote."

This brings me to my basic complaints about paid editing. Other than the basic dishonesty of most paid editors (trying to slip in unnoticed an advert into an educational resource without paying for it), the main problem is that we "allow" them to publish unsigned, unverified press releases in the encyclopedia. Paid editing is like a press release in that it is a message (paid for by the company) by the company's representative (with an inherent COI) intended to promote the company (yes, that's why they have to pay for it), but we don't require that paid editors prove that they actually represent their presumed client. All real press releases will have contact info for further contact and detail. Of course they are usually useless to us. But an unconfirmed press release via a paid editor is even more useless. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 15:03, 29 September 2021 (UTC)

Zach Horwitz pled guilty today [1] and will be sentenced on January 2, 2022. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 00:26, 6 October 2021 (UTC)