Two policies in conflict?: Paid-contributions disclosure vs. outing
Both English Wikipedia policy and the Wikimedia Foundation's terms of use require any paid editors to disclose on Wikipedia who is paying them, who the client is, and any other relevant role or relationship. It's a rule often broken, and enforcing it is fraught with practical difficulties.
Wikimedia Foundation Legal Counsel Stephen LaPorte: “It is not a violation of the Wikimedia privacy policy for editors to post links to public information about other editors ... It's up to community consensus here to decide when the harassment policy should allow editors to reasonably link to public information on other sites.”
Dealing with undisclosed paid editors is a Sisyphean and often invidious task for Wikipedia volunteers.
In this issue
Discuss this story
Very thoughtful and well written, Wikipedia needs to do more to stop undisclosed payed editing. The actions against Jytdog are entirely out of line with the aim of writing an unbiased encyclopaedia. Carl Fredrik 💌 📧 19:22, 4 July 2016 (UTC)[reply]
I know that, being an op-ed, this article is intended to advocate for the particular point of view held by its author, but I'd like to bring up a few points that Doc James either doesn't mention or that he presents differently here than others have done in the other discussions going on about this.
A fluffernutter is a sandwich! (talk) 20:04, 4 July 2016 (UTC)[reply]
The overarching point I've been trying to make in these discussions is that when we talk about linking to an offsite account, we need also to consider what type of content and details have been posted by the person to that offsite place, because by providing the link you're encouraging people to click it and read what the account behind it has done/said; it's not enough to say "well, it's just a resume, people distribute resumes all the time" or "oh, it's just a reddit account, those are anonymous" and ignore that a resume usually includes significantly more personal (and sometimes private) detail than most people would be comfortable sharing on a website where all edits are permanently and publicly stored (and where it's being linked to in a threatening or retaliatory context), and a reddit account, exactly because it's pseydonymous, often includes comments or posts on topics that would be incredibly TMI or personal if they were connected to a specific individual (for instance, by someone on Wikipedia saying "here's this editor's profile on reddit [link]"). A fluffernutter is a sandwich! (talk) 20:44, 4 July 2016 (UTC)[reply]
I believe we need to do more to protect those like the thousands of students who were harmed when our content was corrupted in this case of paid editing[1]
Jytdog was in good faith attempting to address undisclosed paid promotional editing such as this. He make a mistake in that the link he added to the person's talk page was simply not needed as the case was so obvious. That this minor infraction and one he has given assurances he will not repeat has resulted in an indef block is unfortunate for our project. It also sends a chill through those working in a difficult area who already get plenty of threats due to the work they do.
During the Rorschach ink blot controversy a fellow editor who disagreed with my position dug through my imagine uploads and wrote a letter of complaint to my licensing body claiming that because one of my images was of a patients who had a congenital condition that is occasionally associated with intellectual disability that the person in question could not have given informed consent. The patient was in fact a highly educated professional. I forwarded this to arbcom around the time it happened and more important got a lawyer. The editor was never blocked. That was actual harassment.
Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 21:11, 4 July 2016 (UTC)[reply]
I remember when Jytdog said I was wrong for suggesting that a supposedly neutral editor's claim that a fake literature review of the effect of neonicotinoids on bees commissioned and paid for by Bayer Cropscience by researchers-for-hire was a high-quality source suggested bias and reeked of the epitome of paid advocacy, disclosed or otherwise. That still seems like a mistake to me, but on balance I thought he generally upheld the reliable source criteria well, and would like to petition for his unblocking. EllenCT (talk) 21:57, 4 July 2016 (UTC)[reply]
There will always be a conflict between the concept of producing a high-quality encyclopedia and the concept of permitting anonymous editing. This was less of a problem in past years, because initially the goal was not really to produce a high-quality encyclopedia, but a rough-and-ready encyclopedia that would have at least some minimal usefulness. But regardless of our original modest intentions, the public--even parts of the public such as the Library of Congress devoted to archiving proven reliable information about authors--are using us as a source. Journalist do, courts do. Studies have shown that in at least some field this is not ridiculous, because our quality in those fields compares with more traditionally reliable sources. In other fields it does not. These fields are ones that attract inexperienced editors, and also those fields which attract people having a conflict of interest. While we never will be able in our system to deal adequately with advocates of a cause (unless they are greatly outnumbered, the increasing and most currently significant problem is the financially motivated editing of articles on commercial and non-commercial organizations, and the people associated with them. Those of my colleague who have said otherwise are probably not familiar with the current inflow of such articles. I think there is a purpose in a non-anoymous open content free encyclopedia as a complement to WP, but there is no plausible way WP itself is likely to develop into this, nor would I even advocate that, for there is also a need for the sort of encyclopedia that we do have here.
But I think it has been shown both by experience and by our current practice that we need to make some compromises with the concept of anonymity in order to maintain the quality that is expected of us. We do have our terms of use, even if we lack mechanisms for enforcing them. We do have ways of communicating private information to those who are authorized to deal with it,and we do have ways of taking this into account in dealing with particularly troublesome editors. The actual question is whether we ought to compromise it further. My experience from years of patrolling new pages and drafts and articles for deletion is that we need to do two additional things.One,which I think nobody disagrees with, is to find a better way to communicate to well intentioned new editors what is expected of them. The difficulty is to deal with those not so well-intentioned. We can in fact deal with them, once we figure out who they are--that's the difficulty that brings us to this discussion. The current method pretty much relies upon (occasionally) people making obvious and transparent errors that reveal their status and intentions, and (much more often) guesswork. It's easy to say we should judge by the article, but the flood of promotional articles in some areas is so great that even disinterested volunteers often copy the style, thinking that it's what we want, and we have a unfortunate record of finding false positives and discouraging or driving away potentially good editors. There are paid editors who boast outside WP about their success in evading the terms of use and avoiding detection--some of this is probably mere puffery, and they remain here because of our lack of ability to question those producing what are likely to be paid articles. It's been claimed there are no cases where its needed--such a claim can have no basis, because we only know what we have actually detected.
I am not clear just what rules we should have, and I therefore have not made any specific proposals. It would be easier to find workable rules that would not overly offend the anonymity-absolutists if we did not regard this as a taboo subject where any questioning of the rules is denounced as subversive of our values. (It should be obvious from discussions elsewhere that I am writing in a personal capacity, and that few of my colleagues at arb com or functionaries see the issue the way I do--I certainly welcome Fluffernutter's ability to see the need for at least some changes. And to respond to a question elsewhere, while the matter is unresolved I will enforce the rules in the conventional manner.) DGG ( talk ) 22:08, 4 July 2016 (UTC)[reply]
A few thoughts:
WP:CORP has said (for years) that you can write an article about your business, org, or product if you can scrape together two (2) newspaper articles about it, at least one of which must not be your own local neighborhood newspaper. (As a side note, I'm amazed how often established editors(!) complain about that very minor restriction, and insist that their favorite school/restaurant/business/non-profit/academic organization must get an article even though the only publication that ever wrote anything about it is the newspaper owned by their next-door neighbor.)
But if we really wanted to reduce the flood of COI marketing, we would go in the opposite direction, and say that if you want anything more than a barebones list entry on a List of non-profits in My City or List of windows manufacturers (or whatever), then you need to have coverage amounting to a minimum of a thousand words, from at least four unrelated publishers, and spanning multiple years. And then we could start something like {{subst:BLPprod}} project for such subjects, and specify that if the article doesn't actually cite sources that comply with the minimum requirements within a month or two, then we'll delete it (without prejudice to re-creation in a compliant form, of course). I think that a system like this would discourage the promotional COI stuff. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:18, 6 July 2016 (UTC)[reply]
You're probably right that not all small-town or neighborhood newspapers pay more attention to the people they know than to people they don't. However, I can't think of a single newspaper where that's not been true in my (more than trivial) experience. Perhaps it's just the small American papers that have this very human quality? Or maybe there's a reason that we've had editors declare those papers to be "reliable" (in the sense of getting their facts straight) for years, but also "indiscriminate" (in the sense of not being a good indicator of "attention by the world at large", to quote the nutshell at WP:N, precisely because they do tend engage in neighborly promotion and civic boosterism). WhatamIdoing (talk) 05:54, 7 July 2016 (UTC)[reply]
While writing for the Wikimedia Research Newsletter, which is published first on meta, but then republished by Signpost, on occasion I have might have identified a number of researchers/educators, connecting the dots between, for example, a teacher who has described in their academic article that "students in my class have edited articles X and Y", their course wiki page, and the course creator's (i.e. said teacher's) Wikipedia userpage, even through said userpage may not even exist. In my review I would not hesitate to clearly state that "John Smith, whose course page was at... and who seems to edit as User:XXX....", even through said user page mage not mention their real name, link to their course page, nor would their research article mention their user name. I have never thought this may be outing, as it seems to me that by engaging in certain actions like teaching a course on Wikipedia and publishing an article about it people are abandoning their anonymity, by pretty much saying in a public forum intended for dissemination that "I created this Wikipedia article", which in turns means for anyone with basic wiki skills "this is my Wikipedia username". I do think that similar "connections" are habitually made by other reviewers, as well as on blogs by Wiki Education Foundation and such (ex. [3] mentions a real name of a user who does not use it on her userpage on Wikipedia, even trough she links to said article). In [4], we again see the real name of a user who does not reveal their name of their userpage, through they link to their course page where said name is present, through that page was not created by them, but by a Wiki Ed helper. Isn't Wiki Ed "outing" teachers? Could a reviewer like myself out somebody by reviewing their paper and mentioning their user account (or should I just link their wiki course pages, and let people see who created it or is listed there as the instructor...? Seems stupid, really). And how what Wiki Ed / I have been doing is different from what is discussed here? --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 18:53, 6 July 2016 (UTC)[reply]
All of the above just being my random thoughts. But at the end of the day, the penalty has to fit the crime. A paid editor should be blocked and indeffed from editing wikipedia. But even a paid editor does not deserve to be outed or harassed offline. Montanabw(talk) 19:59, 8 July 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Slippery slope argument.
Come on, User:Doc James. You know better than to use a slippery slope argument, don't you? "By extension are we going to say that linking to pubmed, a well-known database of biomedical abstracts, is disallowed because such links could have the real names, employment, or location of Wikipedia editors which those editors may not have disclosed previously on our sites?" Please stop torpedoing your own reputation by continuing to defend and associate with this bullying. --Elvey(t•c) 09:04, 23 July 2016 (UTC)[reply]