Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/Single/2019-05-31

Comments

The following is an automatically-generated compilation of all talk pages for the Signpost issue dated 2019-05-31. For general Signpost discussion, see Wikipedia talk:Signpost.

Arbitration report: ArbCom forges ahead (1,337 bytes · 💬)

← Back to 2019-05-31

Discuss this story

• It's worth noting that the essay I wrote was written well before my resignation, and did not make up a majority of my reason for resigning. ~ Rob₁₃^Talk 16:15, 31 May 2019 (UTC)

• You don't have to tell us, but if you are willing to, we would all like to know the reasons. Even a vague overview like "80% personal reasons" or "50% disagreement with certain directions the committees is going" or "if you refuse to use the oxford comma, I refuse to work with you" would be interesting. Just a suggestion. "I choose to get into my reasons" is fine too. --Guy Macon (talk) 18:06, 1 June 2019 (UTC)

  I do not think it would be particularly productive to share my reasons, so I'm declining to do so. The only things I've said/will say is that it's not personal, and that the community's conduct toward arbitrators has played a role (though a minority one) in my decision-making. ~ Rob₁₃^Talk 04:39, 2 June 2019 (UTC)

Discussion report: Admin abuse leads to mass-desysop proposal on Azerbaijani Wikipedia (1,734 bytes · 💬)

← Back to 2019-05-31

Discuss this story

Surprise me about admin corruption. Tony (talk) 01:44, 31 May 2019 (UTC)

Pythoncoder, thank you very much for this summary. The azwiki proposal page has reached a size that, combined with the chaotic history, makes this Signpost article a welcome overview. ~ ToBeFree (talk) 02:49, 31 May 2019 (UTC)

Thank you Pythoncoder and The Signpost for this excellent summary. I think it effectively lays out some reasonably contentious debates both locally and globally. StudiesWorld (talk) 10:19, 31 May 2019 (UTC)

Great summary.--Vulphere 13:33, 1 June 2019 (UTC)

I'm not surprised about this corruption at all. Many people are made about corrupt administrators, illegally blocking and threatening people. All corrupt administrators should be fired! If I had it my way administrators should be required to renew their position every year. I think that would help to weed out corrupt administrators.Catfurball (talk) 18:50, 5 June 2019 (UTC)

• While I wouldn’t have the renewals quite so often (because it'd get a bit inefficient, maybe 1.5-2 years?), I support your idea. Remagoxer (talk) 16:50, 7 June 2019 (UTC)

Essay: Paid editing (15,626 bytes · 💬)

← Back to 2019-05-31

Discuss this story

• In stating "if you are being paid for your contributions to Wikipedia... you should not directly edit mainspace" this essay goes too far, and continues to devalue the contributions of people like me: a university professor who, as part of my job, is expected to perform some level of community service, who chooses to do that service updating Wikipedia, and whose raises and promotions depend (in a very minor way) on that service, but who is not directed by anyone to edit specific articles. You should be more careful in distinguishing people who edit Wikipedia for self-serving reasons from people who edit Wikipedia as a form of public service, regardless of which of either of those two groups of people are paid for it. —David Eppstein (talk) 02:16, 31 May 2019 (UTC)
  • User:David Eppstein we have this Q and A which addresses your situation [1]. It specifically says for professors "you are only required to comply with the disclosure provision when you are compensated by your employer or by a client specifically for edits and uploads to a Wikimedia project". The paid editing discussion above does not appear to apply to you as your employer is not directing your edits. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 05:06, 31 May 2019 (UTC)
    • The paid editing policy may not apply to me, but this poorly-worded paid editing essay fails to make that clear. —David Eppstein (talk) 05:12, 31 May 2019 (UTC)
      • It begins with if you are being paid "in exchange for creating or editing a Wikipedia article for an individual or entity". In this case best practice is not to edit directly in mainspace. We need to keep seperate those involved with paid promotional editing and those who are a WiR with a like minded organizations or are doing community service on Wikipedia. Muddying the two just protects those who would do Wikipedia and by extension our readers harm. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 05:06, 31 May 2019 (UTC)
        • It may begin that way, but the part I explicitly quoted in the comment above, the one you replied to, uses a different and more vague definition of paid editing. —David Eppstein (talk) 05:16, 31 May 2019 (UTC)
          • In my opinion, that first bit continues to be implied throughout the rest of the piece. But yes maybe it could have been clearer. Have taken the liberty to emphasize this. The author of the piece is free to revert if they have concerns. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 05:23, 31 May 2019 (UTC)
            • ​This piece was actually republished from Wikipedia:Paid editing (essay) (WP:PEW). — Newslinger talk 15:33, 31 May 2019 (UTC)
• WP:COI states "... you are very strongly discouraged from editing affected articles directly". This is fair enough, and has been the stance we've held for many years. The policy is not "you should not directly edit mainspace" as was written here. While it is discouraged, and it can create problems, if a paid editor has fully disclosed their relationship to the client they are not prevented from editing mainspace, even though we might rather they didn't. - Bilby (talk) 03:10, 31 May 2019 (UTC)
  • @Bilby: Not disputing that is what COI states and that what is written above is incorrect, but in practice, there is a consensus (in terms of actions, not necessarily discussion) that paid editors shouldn't directly edit articles. This is distinguishing between an employee of a company who edits their article in their free time and at nobody's request, with someone being paid specifically to create content, often with a promotional angle. There does seem to have been a shift in opinion in recent years that we would prefer paid editors work to be reviewed prior to being in mainspace. SmartSE (talk) 12:44, 31 May 2019 (UTC)
    • I am concerned the the above signpost article is, as you say, incorrect. If we are going to give advice - especially through something like the Signpost - it seems important that we are accurate. If the practice is now to ban paid editors from directly editing articles, (something which has always been opposed by the community when it has been asked of them, or at least something which has failed to find consensus), then the guideline needs to be changed, rather than simply giving people advice which does not match current policies or guidelines, especially when the incorrect claim states outright that it is "per the WP:COI guideline" when this is clearly false. Those writing this should know better. - Bilby (talk) 14:51, 31 May 2019 (UTC)
      • @Smallbones: Can you please correct this? The WP:PAY part of WP:COI says you are very strongly discouraged from editing affected articles directly. SmartSE (talk) 15:17, 31 May 2019 (UTC)

@Smartse and Bilby: There seems to be a couple of misunderstandings in these latest comments.

• First, This is an essay from Wikipedia's current collection of essays, not something written specifically for The Signpost. It's at Wikipedia:Paid editing (essay). I was hoping that would be clear from the introduction:

Paid editing is a topic that comes to the forefront every six months or so, after the latest horrendous disclosures. This essay is part of our continuing series of influential essays on Wikipedia. It was begun in January 2011 and 38 editors have contributed to it. - S

It wouldn't do any good for me to edit this page - the essay itself would be unchanged. But, of course, you can change the essay itself, the same as anybody can.

• 2nd - the disputed text has always been difficult for most people to parse. What is the difference between "You should not ..." and "You are strongly discouraged from ..." or even "You cannot ...". Not much, in most everyday discussions IMHO. Perhaps the difference changes when we are talking about policies vs. guidelines vs. essays. "Should not" seems natural and accurate in this essay IMHO.
• 3rd - this type of fine-parsing of the text does not actually define the policy - according to Wikipedia policy! Policy really depends on the generally accepted practice of what the policy writers were trying to express. I think Jimbo's "bright line rule" (which is not even a written policy, but a "best practice") is the actual policy followed by ethical paid editors these days. A couple of months ago there was a kerfuffle about a declared paid editor doing too much "editing" or was it "too much armtwisting"? All the editors in the discussion, including the named paid editor and a couple of other paid editors just accepted the bright-line rule as the starting point of the discussion. It looks like an accepted policy to me at this point. Maybe it's time to get it into the written policy. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 16:16, 31 May 2019 (UTC)

Fair enough. A link would have helped and I hope you don't mind that I've added one. I've also changed this and the essay - while I can see where you are coming from, if anythiing is presented as "per a guideline" it seems logical that this should not misrepresent the guideline. As I mentioned before, whether this is what is done in practice is neither here nor there and this is probably not the place to decide whether it really should be forbidden or just strongly discouraged. SmartSE (talk) 16:39, 31 May 2019 (UTC)

The bright line rule is a dead letter

The Huffington Post ran an article about Wikipedia paid editing (I would suggest reading an archive to avoid giving creepy permissions). It led to an AN thread that led to nothing, even though I noted that the editor had been directly editing mainspace per his own interpretation that the policy only discourages changes to the "text", not the sources. The argument is that for paid editors to ask others to look over their work is a burden on them, and someone will say just go ahead and do it, and since the paid editing must go on, this means the bright line rule has to yield. I posted a request for clarification to the policy page that was archived without action nor comment after 24 days. So the "bright line rule" is so full of holes and so ignored as to be meaningless. Note that disclosure is also full of holes - the policy as written gave paid editors three different ways to announce their role, so that no one of them is genuinely guaranteed to spot all the influence even if everything is disclosed. And seriously, we're talking about a Wikipedia that proudly displays one Square Enix ad per every 180 days like clockwork as "Today's Featured Article" for the past decade. Who is kidding who here? The question is only how much complaining we can do about paid editing before the paid editors have us thrown off their site. Wnt (talk) 09:52, 1 June 2019 (UTC)

@Wnt: While I'm perhaps naively optimistic that we can control paid editing, I have to say that you've defined the ultimate problem quite well in your last sentence. "The question is only how much complaining we can do about paid editing before the paid editors have us thrown off their site." An economic analysis of the situation would show that Wikipedia is worth billions to advertisers (in actual dollars) who will be willing to spend much of those billions to defend their position here. Of course Wikipedia is also worth billions to volunteer editors and to our readers - but this value is spread out among very many people. One individual can't do much about the situation, and most individuals don't have the money needed to defend their position. I'm sure somebody will come along and accuse me of "assuming bad faith." Not exactly - I'm just outlining what I believe is the standard economic analysis of situations like this. It does assume that most people are "economic men" (or people) who maximize their own utility - that assumption doesn't have much to do with "assuming good faith".

I don't think that paid editors would actually kick us off "their site." They would only assert near-complete control in the areas of business and biography. Having a real encyclopedia appended to the business/bio content would actually be good business for them most of the time. Of course sometimes having actual facts in articles like global warming, health and medicine, science in general, and surprisingly (in at least one case) mathematics gets in the way of business. So we'd have to bow down to business interests in these cases as well.

Smallbones_(smalltalk) 12:58, 2 June 2019 (UTC)

We don't need Nostradamus to predict the direction paid editing has taken us. Many of us have already seen the writing on the wall at WP:NPP and WP:AfC. Our volunteer services are being sold by PR/Marketing/Advertising firms whose staff becomes the "overseers" of their clients business/corporate/BLP articles. Their only concern is looking out for the best interests of their clients and reducing friction/disruption the easiest way possible without compromising their clients. Such activity is already dipping into the coffers of the WMF but they don't realize it, yet - perhaps one day soon they will and only then will they attempt to put more safeguards into place before we find ourselves dealing with Wnt's prediction above. Perhaps it's already too late. ^Atsme _Talk 📧 00:09, 4 June 2019 (UTC)

• IP editing. My observation is that much undeclared paid editing is done by hit-and-run IPs. One example in the long history here [2][3] but there are others. A step in the direction of controlling such conduct would be to increase the ease of applying indefinite semi-protection to affected articles, which current Wikipedia policy misguidedly deprecates. This would corral the behavior into registered accounts which would be easier to deal with. Xxanthippe (talk) 02:19, 6 June 2019 (UTC).

• Wish I could say there's a slam-dunk answer like that. Unfortunately a quick glance at Category:Wikipedia sockpuppets of Orangemoody is a good demonstration of inefficacy of just turning off anonymous editing. ☆ Bri (talk) 03:54, 6 June 2019 (UTC)

The data is amazing. I wonder how many IP addresses he used. My suggestion would far from cure everything but might might help at the edges. Xxanthippe (talk) 04:11, 6 June 2019 (UTC).

I'd like to share experiences from the German language WP: We have a small number of companies, who regularly update data like revenue, employees, expansion to a new European country and the like according to their officially filed reports. I, personally, appreciate this, as I consider those (published) data uncontroversial and am grateful to them updating their articles, as no volunteer needs to spend his or her time on it. I watch some articles, where this happens more or less regularly so I can see an IP coming along and updating the article and I would interfere, if other - potentially controversial - content would be edited alongside. So far, they behave very well. --h-stt !? 13:15, 6 June 2019 (UTC)

From the editors: Picture that (22,380 bytes · 💬)

← Back to 2019-05-31

Discuss this story

I'm still waiting on a steward to act on my request at Steward requests/Global... The accounts of the users who did this still aren't locked.. –MJL ‐Talk‐^☖ 02:17, 31 May 2019 (UTC)

@MJL: thanks for working on the case. I suppose this is fast breaking news, so the stewards haven't seen all the evidence yet, but it would be hard for them to miss this with all the on- and off-wiki evidence. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 02:29, 31 May 2019 (UTC)

@Smallbones: [Thank you for the ping] Considering all that is linked in the request... I am of the belief no one wants to be the one to actually to pull the trigger. It's a little controversial over at Commons right now. –MJL ‐Talk‐^☖ 02:37, 31 May 2019 (UTC)

It looks like 13 accounts, some quite old, have now been globally locked [4] Smallbones_(smalltalk) 00:49, 5 June 2019 (UTC)

• This makes me so irate. I thought North Face's ad agency was just adding some photos into articles until an editor showed how they had photoshopped in some of their products into otherwise beautiful photographs. I think that paid editors can work ethically on Wikipedia if they abide by the rules and don't try to sneak in surreptitious plugs for products. I think that we were lucky they were so oblivious and bragged about their act so it was easy to find out about and address. I think if this happens again, the marketing agencies won't be so stupid as to admit what they were doing. This will require more vigilance from us all. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 02:43, 31 May 2019 (UTC)

• It's not clear from the Signpost article whether these images were copyright/license violations themselves (in addition to their uploading and use in articles violating PAID policy). From the deletion logs and global-lock request it seems like they were, which is a whole additional can of worms that I think should be highlighted as well. DMacks (talk) 03:07, 31 May 2019 (UTC)

  I wonder if we could slap them with a copyright suit. Daß Wölf 21:22, 31 May 2019 (UTC)

• Thanks to the editors who first caught this and realized the trickery in progress. And yes, North Face should apologize on behalf of their company. Randy Kryn (talk) 03:18, 31 May 2019 (UTC)
• Irony: Under the "all publicity is good publicity" maxim it's likely that the coverage of this incident in the media, and indeed right here in the Signpost, will end up being better advertising for TNF than the original photos themselves...  — Amakuru (talk) 08:20, 31 May 2019 (UTC)

  There's a limit to how far that maxim goes; being more familiar TNF and also hating it is not likely to cause Wikipedians to buy their stuff. Per the marketing expert quoted by the NYT's article, the stunt was "wildly misguided" and "They completely, absolutely, egregiously violated just about every principle you can think about with respect to trying to maintain consumer trust." - Sdkb (talk) 17:41, 31 May 2019 (UTC)

• Someone has added a see-also link to the incident to The North Face's page, - it could use writing into a proper section since there is now proper coverage. I'd do it but I suspect I'm too annoyed at this moment in time. Even neutrally written it should act as an ongoing piece of negative coverage. Nosebagbear (talk) 10:06, 31 May 2019 (UTC)

  No, that would be WP:UNDUE. I'm not even sure what purpose the see also link serves. This isn't really an important thing in a summary of The North Face.  — Amakuru (talk) 11:58, 31 May 2019 (UTC)

  @Amakuru: - I don't see how a few lines would be UNDUE - a quick look at the first page of a google search shows 12 articles on it, 9 of which are reliable sources, including the NYT, BBC, Guardian and Drum) Nosebagbear (talk) 22:19, 1 June 2019 (UTC)

  @Nosebagbear: well what we have now is not just a few lines, but an entire section, which by my calculation is occupying around 31% of the whole article. And this for a company that has existed since 1968. Perhaps it is a bigger story for them than I had first thought, there is a bit of coverage here and there, but I imagine it will blow over and to have this huge section looks like both WP:RECENTISM and WP:NAVEL to me. Thanks  — Amakuru (talk) 22:26, 1 June 2019 (UTC)

The North Face could use a major expansion, since it was barely longer than The South Butt before the controversy was added. The section could be trimmed a bit but it's about what I would expect if the rest of the article were fully developed. –dlthewave ☎ 22:54, 1 June 2019 (UTC)

Now there's a section it's reasonable. Personally I think one or two of the lines provided by them might be worth including, but the % coverage is relatively good. Nosebagbear (talk) 20:22, 2 June 2019 (UTC)

• A popular saying in my language goes "cheap things will always turn out expensive"; as a buisness administration student with a enthusiasm on companies and marketing I hate instances like this because it just mislead people to think companies are greedy. -Gouleg (Talk • Contribs) 13:43, 31 May 2019 (UTC)

  There's nothing misleading about the idea that companies are greedy. Boing! said Zebedee (talk) 14:42, 31 May 2019 (UTC)

  ^^^. Sdkb (talk) 17:35, 31 May 2019 (UTC)

• One group of perfectly legal Paid Editors have very sucessfully managed to control pages like Kosmos Energy. Their stratergy is nicely asking form multiple edit request. It basically whitewashed the entire article. User:16912 Rhiannon and his co workers at Beutler Ink have been very busy working below the rader. --Salix alba (talk): 17:23, 31 May 2019 (UTC)
• North Face should donate money to apologize Forgiveness is not for sale, and there is no price to pay to make up for intentional wrongdoing, but I do think it would be an appropriate show of goodwill and a fitting apology if North Face would make a financial donation to the Wikipedia community of editors to protect its integrity. Words are fine but they went in their direction by leveraging their financial power to hire people to deceive the volunteer community of editors and Wikipedia's readers. It would be proper for them to donate money to the Wikipedia community to develop infrastructure to help prevent others from replicating what they did. Their offense is against Wikipedia's community of editors and readers. Personally, I think it would be appropriate to start a conversation with them donating to wiki community moderation approximately the same amount of money as they spent on the ad campaign. Blue Rasberry (talk) 18:21, 31 May 2019 (UTC)

I fully understand the value that a donation from TNF would bring - talk is cheap, an apology is nice, but actions speak louder than words. OTOH, there is a downside to asking for a donation. Talk is cheap, but so is a million dollar donation for a company that size. The real nasty downside is that somebody would almost inevitably take a request for $1 million (or whatever amount) as being some form of extortion, something like "you don't pay us, we'll drag your name through the mud until you do." Unfortunately, some non-profits have acted that way in the past, and also some CEOs could, in good faith, misinterpret our motives.

So what would speak louder than money? Some sort of commitment on their part to address the problem in a creative way. The creative part dictates that they'd have to think of it themselves, but here are a few thing that might point them in the right direction.

• Forming a "Corporate friends of Wikipedia" not to donate money but to get businesses involved in suggesting ad agencies to avoid, or photos and records they might donate to Commons or WikiSource, or writing a general code of practice in business's dealings with Wikipedia. Recruit other businesses into "CFW"
• In their non-Wiki corporate charity work, e.g. with GLAMS, orchestras, athletic events (5Ks and the like), parks and natural sites, suggest a Wiki component to the activities funded. The Wiki component might be a photo contest (without logos!), an edit-a-thon, or some other educational component that might be tied to Wikipedia.

Money might leave a bad taste in everybody's mouth, but a commitment to engage in Wiki-friendly activities could help everybody. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 19:52, 31 May 2019 (UTC)

Or the money should be spent on improving our anti-spam tools, which are unfit for purpose. MER-C 20:12, 31 May 2019 (UTC)

Good idea. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 20:19, 31 May 2019 (UTC)

• This kind of subversive action is what makes me tempted to support an outright ban on all paid editing. However, Smallbones's suggestion about an encouragement of corporate "Wiki-friendly activities" is a good one, and the proposal of a "Corporate friends of Wikipedia" is a particularly creative idea. Since North Face has proven they have the resources to send professional photographers to exotic natural landmarks, I think an apt form of apology would be if they had said photographers take good photos of such places—without the advertising—and donate them to Wikimedia Commons. We would get good content, and they would get to say that they are promoting awareness around the great outdoors, something which they already say they care about. It would be a win-win. -Indy beetle (talk) 20:53, 31 May 2019 (UTC)

@Indy beetle: I would prefer them doing the Material on this page is licensed CC-BY-SA 4.0-thing for their website that Smallbones talked about here for baseball companies. They could also create an internal company policy for any future editing that occurs on company time or propriety. What I mean to say is, asking them to create to list themselves at WP:SIP and creating an Incident Response Team would go a long way to towards committing themselves to best practices. ^{naming and firing the people responsible wouldn't hurt as well... just saying.}–MJL ‐Talk‐^☖ 21:34, 31 May 2019 (UTC)

• I don't remember the details, but there was a public relations code of conduct regarding Wikipedia at one point that got a lot of attention. If North Face were to lead on creating a corporate code of conduct regarding Wikipedia that they would adhere to and encourage fellow corporations to adhere to, that would be a good move on their part. SchreiberBike | ⌨  21:30, 31 May 2019 (UTC)

  @SchreiberBike: you might be interested in my response above. –MJL ‐Talk‐^☖ 21:35, 31 May 2019 (UTC)

• For most difficult-to-solve problems there is a simple, obvious solution that does not work. This is one of those problems. Everyone who talks about changing some rule to make it so that what North Face did would be forbidden misses the fact that what North Face did was already forbidden. New ways to detect new and innovative advertising techniques will help. New rules, not so much. So lets look at it from another perspective: You are a company that wants a better presence on Wikipedia. You know nothing about Wikipedia's rules or the harm that will come to your reputation if you hire an unethical undisclosed paid editor and it comes out in the press. So how do we at Wikipedia get you, the business owner, in contact with an ethical consultant who will honestly tell you what can't be done (PR, whitewashing by your employees) what can be done (adding information that is missing even though well sourced and relevant simple because nobody cared enough to add it, removing obvious lies added by your competitors or disgruntled ex-employees, fixing obvious errors like not listing the new CEO you got five years ago or listing a discontinued product as current) and who always follows Wikipedia:Best practices for editors with close associations to the letter? How do we get the "hire the sleazeballs and you get hurt, hire the ethical consultant and you won't get even half of what you want but you will get an improved article on Wikipedia" message to these business owners in Wikipedia's voice? Can we create a list of declared ethical paid editors who we have never caught cheating or hiding their activities, ever? How do we make it super easy for the business owner to do the right thing? --Guy Macon (talk) 17:47, 1 June 2019 (UTC)
  • That list already exists and I am the de facto curator. But it wasn't created as a how-to for corporations looking to "manage their Internet presence" or whatever euphemism. ☆ Bri (talk) 22:11, 1 June 2019 (UTC)
    • Then we need something that is, and we need a way to get its existence into the minds of the business owners. "Managing their Internet presence" isn't a euphemism. It is something that businesses -- including a certain non-profit business called The Wikimedia Foundation -- have to do now. I know that some here are very much anti-business, but do we really expect a business owner to sit and do nothing as some idiot makes it so that Wikipedia contains lies about them and nobody bothers to fix it? We need to help the ethical business owner to [A] recognize what is ethical on Wikipedia and what is cheating, and [B] tell the difference between the sellers of sleaze paid editing services and full disclosure paid editors who follow the rules. --Guy Macon (talk) 06:13, 2 June 2019 (UTC)
      • I agree that it would be useful to improve the process by which a non-tech savvy business owner can correct errors and out-of-date information. For this particular situation, though, I don't think it would have helped. The company treated Wikipedia as just another search engine optimization target. An ethical consultant isn't required to know that inserting your branding into an encyclopedia (and then bragging about it) is poor behaviour. isaacl (talk) 06:27, 2 June 2019 (UTC)
• I took a look at the images before they were deleted. Some of them were easily salvageable with minimal cropping (one had a small black backpack with North Face logo at the very bottom of the image) and most of them can be reused with copious cropping. They were deleted because there's question over authorship and copyright. But if the authorship is established (and I think it has been, based on news release), I think the images (with advertising cropped out) can be reused. So I echo with Smallbones' views about reusing the images they uploaded, but we can do the cropping on a volunteer-basis to shield WMF away from being viewed as an "office action". OhanaUnited^{Talk page} 22:09, 1 June 2019 (UTC)
• Paid editing really affects my livelihood ... I'm not getting paid enough! Us Paid Editors™ need to form a union to demand equality and a raise. Seriously, you think pre-teens and high-school students added all this content? GUYWAN ( t · c ) 23:50, 1 June 2019 (UTC)
• Warning: Invisible elephants in the room?:

• My first potential invisible elephant is the unmentioned disappearance of our usual Humour article. Two months ago the Humour article got blanked (with my support, incidentally) after being deemed offensive to transsexuals. Last month's editorial mentioned that dispute, and got some flak for what it said about it. This month we have no Humour article, and seemingly no mention of this in the editorial, so instead I seemingly end up having to post this brief comment about this rather strange state of affairs in the middle of yet another discussion of paid editing. On the other hand, my thanks to GUYWAN, for their above comment that seems to be trying to fill the void created by the disappearance of the Humour piece, even if I can't entirely avoid wondering whether this just might be a case of 'many a true word is spoken in jest'.
• My second potential invisible elephant is this: Including this editorial, we have no fewer than 3 major items about paid editing in this issue. I'd rather like to see some clear explanation in this editorial as to why this should be the case, so this seeming absence counts as my second invisible elephant. Admittedly, as with some of the other potential elephants here, there might conceivably be a sensible explanation hidden away in there somewhere (for example, to give a speculation obviously far too implausible to be believable, one might find a claim that an anniversary next month of a historic vote to introduce a self-evidently unenforceable ban requires 3 articles this month), but if life is far too short to be wasted on wild goose chases, then it is presumably not long enough to be wasted on invisible elephant chases either.
• My third potential invisible elephant is the community's strange apparent belief in apparent fairy tales about Wikipedia being almost entirely created by an army of totally pure and unsullied and objective amateur editors. I am of course one of the arguably foolish and/or deluded members of that army (as a look at my relatively unproductive rate of editing would indeed suggest ), and it is presumably a grave violation of WP:AGF and WP:NPA for any editor to publicly doubt this (indeed even to doubt it solely in the secrecy of one's inner soul would seem to be a violation of WP:AGF ). But common sense suggests that vast numbers of Wikipedia pages have been largely created by various kinds of vested interests (including paid editors, but not confined to them), and that there is no way of preventing this, and it's not particularly obvious that it would be desirable to prevent it were that possible (since it's not obviously desirable to lose all the pages they have created), provided the editors do a competent job, including trying to ensure that the resulting articles are not counter-productively overtly POV.
• My fourth invisible elephant is our ignoring here the apparent logical impossibility of knowing how we've been affected by paid editing when we have no way of knowing whether the editors who are making our life a misery are doing so because they are secretly being paid, or because they are doing so for other reasons (and of course seemingly necessary rules like WP:AGF and WP:NPA make it almost impossible to even raise the issue in any particular case).
• And quite likely there are a few more potential invisible elephants that I've just been too blind to notice. Tlhslobus (talk) 02:15, 3 June 2019 (UTC)

• One solution is to discourage search engines from giving Wikipedia articles a "rankings boost" compared to the exact same content appearing on a random blog merely because it is on Wikipedia. davidwr/(talk)/(contribs) 19:54, 13 June 2019 (UTC)

• What we need are some regular down to earth chubby Wikipedia editors willing to take and upload photos involving North Face products. Companies pay a pretty penny to have models model their products, so ordinary people modelling their products should be like putting their tongue to the hot iron. Wnt (talk) 12:00, 27 June 2019 (UTC)

In the media: Politics, lawsuits and baseball (1,400 bytes · 💬)

← Back to 2019-05-31

Discuss this story

As a baseball fan, albeit of the proper team, I can't get too worked up about it. First off we all know who really owned the 9th, and there are many much more ill-intentioned edits I'd worry about before standard fanboyism. That said, good people nipped that at the bud so said Yankee washout didn't get too much credit! The Blade of the Northern Lights (話して下さい) 03:13, 1 June 2019 (UTC)

When the fanboys do it - at least half a dozen times a month it seems - I can say to myself "ordinary Wikipedia vandalism" - and forget about it. When it looks like sport writers are doing it themselves, because they can't bother coming up with a good story without vandalizing Wikipedia - I say someday I'll catch one of these bozos, but getting proof is pretty difficult. When the team itself tweets, in effect, "go vandalize Wikipedia" I say "that's why we have the 'Gobbler of the month'!" Somebody needs to call out the turkeys. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 19:53, 2 June 2019 (UTC)

News and notes: Wikimania and trustee elections (555 bytes · 💬)

← Back to 2019-05-31

Discuss this story

There was a discussion on why this year's Wikimania travel guide plagiarized contents from the Stockholm page in Wikivoyage and didn't even link back to the Wikivoyage article. OhanaUnited^{Talk page} 22:18, 1 June 2019 (UTC)

News from the WMF: Wikimedia Foundation petitions the European Court of Human Rights to lift the block of Wikipedia in Turkey (2,177 bytes · 💬)

← Back to 2019-05-31

Discuss this story

Good. It's about time we summoned a bigger fish than Erdogan! Whoop whoop pull up ^{Bitching Betty | Averted crashes} 03:36, 31 May 2019 (UTC)

I don't expect success -- the ECHR will surely rule your way, but just as surely Erdogan's regime will ignore it. Nonetheless, that will be an important step toward disengaging from Turkey and its government, and toward permitting the victims - Kurds, Armenians, Greeks, and others - a chance to fight back on fair terms. Wnt (talk) 23:25, 31 May 2019 (UTC)

@Wnt: "permitting the victims - Kurds, Armenians, Greeks, and others - a chance to fight back on fair terms." Your comment seems to go against WP:NOTBATTLEFIELD. Please explain. Chris Troutman (talk) 17:18, 23 June 2019 (UTC)

I was not speaking about Wikipedia. The more Turkey distances itself from Europe and NATO by ignoring human rights standards, the less outside financial and military support their government will have, no? Wnt (talk) 23:40, 23 June 2019 (UTC)

I'm not sure about your geopolitical assertions. If your point was that having Turkey ignore ECHR's ruling in favor of Wikipedia would ultimately put pressure on Ankara, I missed it. Chris Troutman (talk) 00:07, 24 June 2019 (UTC)

Good luck WMF. --Vulphere 14:09, 1 June 2019 (UTC)

Recent research: Wikipedia more useful than academic journals, but is it stealing the news? (10,328 bytes · 💬)

See also: Meta:Research talk:Newsletter

This nonsense needs to be taken in the context of very successful pushes to try to come up with whole new levels of copyright or related craziness in Europe - see Julia Reda's leadership for information, or Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market for our version.

The idea that ordinary proles could speak directly to one another about events that affect their lives has become highly, highly controversial. Nonetheless, even in that awful legislation, Wikipedia was granted theoretical exemptions on account of its influence. Thus the desire of some for some kind of new prong of the assault. Every eyeball belongs to that single Master who owns the Company that owns All, and every deviation of those eyeballs from unending observance and meditation on his perfection is an inexcusable theft that can never be forgiven. Wnt (talk) 04:46, 31 May 2019 (UTC)

On the other hand, we do take expensive journalism work product which volunteers would ordinarily have no way to produce on their own, and strip it of the advertising intended to pay for it (in ways that Google generally does not but Microsoft and Apple certainly do -- but with compensation.) Journalists, their editors, and publishers aren't upset about that because they think you're a prole or that you and your peers shouldn't be talking among yourselves. They're upset about it because it cuts into their pay. Readers will prefer a Wikipedia article for breaking news not just because they know that dozens of sufficiently competent editors have already read through the commercial news and picked out all the most important parts for them, but also because they know they won't have to look at the ads that are supposed to pay for the work in the first place. I'm not saying it's legally or technically wrong in any way, but there is an unavoidable moral argument that we've been biting the hand that not only feeds us, but that was one of our strongest defenses against corruption and abuse of power. EllenCT (talk) 06:41, 31 May 2019 (UTC)

EllenCT, I think that it is an interesting point that is raised, but then we should ask ourselves: What should we do about it? I think that as it stands there is no clear solution to the problem because either we force ourselves to be out of date and inaccurate or we don't cover recent events. One solution would be to somehow pay for the use of the articles. I like this idea because it would benefit the journalists and encourage them to cooperate with Wikipedia. However, it would require a very large grant. StudiesWorld (talk) 10:46, 31 May 2019 (UTC)

Every so often I propose doing something that would work to keep journalists and other content creators gainfully employed, but nobody ever goes for it, because it's not about one guy controlling all the news and all the readers in the world. It's not my fault that copyright is an unfair system that can't work, which relied only on the physical difficulty of copying things to impose taxes on the act of readership via a tax farming system. But for the record, there is no reason why we could not enact some legislation whereby a certain percent on top of a person's annual income tax had to be paid via a funding mechanism in lieu of any copyright or patent royalties. The individual taxpayer would get to choose what organizations would disburse this funding in the form of grants to content creators those organizations desire. (In theory, individuals could choose their own recipients, but to prevent back-scratching arrangements the sum going to any one recipient would have to be kept very small, making this difficult) Because copyright is almost infinitely inefficient, a mechanism where authors get paid the same as they are now would be one where people have access to vastly more information, at no added cost; indeed, at a reduced cost because a lot of bean counting and copy protection and encryption and obfuscation would no longer be "needed". My suggestion is by no means the only way to do funding, but it is workable, whereas the of copyrighting facts and individual words is not workable and will not preserve the jobs of journalists: to the contrary, it will ensure that each and every remaining journalist is replaced by a stenographer as the "marketplace of ideas" is replaced by a marketplace of licenses to write about them. Wnt (talk) 22:16, 31 May 2019 (UTC)

@Wnt: I'd support that and it would be great to see the Foundation pushing it. Who do we even ask? EllenCT (talk) 06:55, 1 June 2019 (UTC)

The WMF would have a hard time "pushing" an idea like this (or political ideas of any kind) in a general sense. However, when people talk about what can be done to save journalism, or how Wikipedians displace paying jobs in the encyclopedia industry, it is applicable incidentally.

I should add that -- though the temptation to use them could readily become overwhelming -- it is possible to hybridize the idea with more traditional politics, i.e. by imposing funding directives by sector. For example, if a congress were worried that too many individual taxpayers would choose to put all their creativity funding toward hip-hop, they could order that the allocations for popular music (or even hip-hop per se, with all the unpleasant racial politics connotations such a specific restriction might carry) would be diminished by some factor or to a specific relative or absolute level, in order that the funds be redirected to comparably expand the allocations to cancer research. The extreme case of this is of course the current situation where the government simply funds NIH and NSF certain amounts and you don't get a choice of which sector or which agency you want your money to be applied toward. This system lacks the flexibility of a taxpayer-directed system, but it can be argued that in technical sectors the voter simply wouldn't know what to fund and would fall prey to organizations that market themselves (yet despite this impression and the overall disrepute of charities in the U.S., major independent funders like American Cancer Society are strikingly honest and effective in their funding choices). In music, obviously the taxpayer knows what he likes. News might be argued to be between these extremes since people get duped every day, yet are often reasonably canny and can find good sources despite the obvious conflicts of interests imposed from above by advertiser funding in the present system. Wnt (talk) 09:29, 1 June 2019 (UTC)

Wnt says "we force ourselves to be out of date and inaccurate or we don't cover recent events" as if not covering recent events was a Bad Thing. If we simply deleted everything regarding any event of any kind until three days had passed and announced this new policy on the main page and any articles affected along with a suggestion to go to Wikinews for anything late-breaking it would reduce the amount of conflict and rapidly mutating pages by 80%,^{[Citation Needed]} would greatly reduce the number of errors in Wikipedia,^{[Citation Needed]} and would force the "this just in!" editing addicts to quit their habit cold turkey.^{[Citation NOT Needed]} We would simply train our readers to expect Wikipedia to be silent for three days and then to suddenly give them better information than available from any of the "late breaking news!" sources. What's so bad about an encyclopedia that is an encyclopedia instead of a twitter feed? --Guy Macon (talk) 19:05, 1 June 2019 (UTC)

Hmmmm, I don't know. Why do you suppose it might be better to have most of the people editing the encyclopedia write about something while they are reading it and following it and interested rather than after they have forgotten about it and moved on? More to the point though, with many stories the best source is the first source, followed by hundreds or thousands of echoes, newspapers running the same thing with less facts and less attribution. Often the longer you wait to research, the harder it is to find detailed and accurate information. Wnt (talk) 17:33, 2 June 2019 (UTC)

I disagree with EllenCT's assertion that we strip journalism of the advertising intended to pay for it (although I imagine this was stated as devil's advocate). How journalism (or any other media we cite) is paid for is not our concern. We have a fundamental right to be able to discuss current events without paying anyone a fee. Just as you have a right to discuss current events with the person sitting next to you without paying a fee. No one should be able to "own" the facts surrounding current events (or any events for that matter). This drum-beating about how journalism will die unless we give media companies special copyrights is both disingenuous and dangerous. Journalism isn't going anywhere (despite claims to the contrary for the past dozen years) and owning facts only gives corporations a tighter stranglehold on our ability to actually communicate with each other, which should be held as a fundamental human right more important than the survival of a particular economic model. Kaldari (talk) 15:18, 9 June 2019 (UTC)

"Generating Wikipedia by Summarizing Long Sequences"

Page 15 of [5] tells you everything you need to know about that paper. EllenCT (talk) 07:03, 31 May 2019 (UTC)