Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2023-05-08/In the media

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Presidential candidate / paid editing

Jhofferman has provided some interesting context on their user talk page:

I agreed to take the job because I had done a previous revision of the page in June 2022, and his assistant asked if I could make a few updates. I was hired and began the revision in January, before he declared his candidacy (which I found out about the same way as everyone else). It mostly involved adding information about his books and about Strive Asset Management, but there were also some excisions made, including details about Roivant subsidiaries and some other past activities that seemed to be cluttering the narrative without adding anything substantive. Apparently, some of the requested deletions may have been less innocent. While I frequently had to explain to him and his press secretary about Wikipedia's guidelines and why I couldn't do some of the things they wanted, I guess I wasn't as diligent as I should have been. I wasn't hired to delete material about the Soros Fellowship and his Covid-era role, but it's not inaccurate to say that he "paid to have it scrubbed." Needless to say, I regret my role in this.

Assuming this is a truthful summary, this may also serve as a cautionary tale for other editors who find themselves being asked to make supposedly "uncontroversial" or "straightforward" changes for pay.

Regards, HaeB (talk) 04:44, 8 May 2023 (UTC)

That's interesting context, and given that it's the sort of statement that could easily jeopardize future paid gigs, I can't help but respect it. The most interesting thing here is I frequently had to explain to him and his press secretary about Wikipedia's guidelines and why I couldn't do some of the things they wanted. - I imagine as the election cycle continues to pick up, this is only going to become more common. ThadeusOfNazereth(he/him)^{Talk to Me!} 14:52, 8 May 2023 (UTC)

• In case anyone was wondering the ANI thread on Jhofferman was archived, with no action taken. Firestar464 (talk) 22:37, 8 May 2023 (UTC)

Online safety

• It seems to me that most of these "online safety" efforts are at best poorly thought out and, at worst, actively malicious. ThadeusOfNazereth(he/him)^{Talk to Me!} 14:54, 8 May 2023 (UTC)

Open the Knowledge Journalism Awards

• I think there's a large proviso if the Signpost is going to complain about the contest being English-language only. It's important that such contests offering money have good judging. One of the classic problems with WMF initiatives in the past has been unleashing contributors in some area but not closely monitoring the results, even when the initiative is in English. To be sure, if the WMF has some reserve of French/Arabic/Afrikaans/etc. speakers they trust to fairly read & judge such articles, then sure, allow submissions in languages with enough trusted judges too, but if they don't, it's better to do nothing than to pay people for "bad" content (whether worthless machine-translated churnalism, or even worse, yellow journalism / promotional pieces).
• (As a side note, and this is not the main focus of my comment because obviously expanding to more languages would be great if possible, but I think the Francophonie map as well as mapping "by area" are a bit misleading as to the true prominence of French. File:Proportion of French speakers by country (1-50% gradation).svg is probably more helpful - it's mostly the Congos & Tunisia that have a high proportion of French speakers, but it really isn't that common in a lot of countries theoretically part of the Francophonie.). SnowFire (talk) 22:04, 11 May 2023 (UTC)