Paid editing, finally gets a full discussion Options

[thekohser]

Oh, right--I forgot that you seem not to like me ... because why exactly? I don't dislike you. I disagree with some of your opinions but I think you're fine as a person. And I don't waste my time writing Wikipedia articles for companies.

Do you have some keyword ideas, or no? The answer to that question shouldn't be contingent on seeing the list of my existing keywords.

[EricBarbour]

Oh, right--I forgot that you seem not to like me ... because why exactly? I don't dislike you. I disagree with some of your opinions but I think you're fine as a person. And I don't waste my time writing Wikipedia articles for companies.

Maybe you should, because corporate WP pages tend to be either crap, or battlegrounds.

Do you have some keyword ideas, or no?

Have you added Wikipedia subculture words, like "editwar", "revert", "admin", "arbcom", and "abusive"?

[Milton Roe]

Hmmm. If you look at user:80.169.89.66 on WP it says it's just one outlet IP port of COLT Telcom GmbH, which is a proxy-server. Ironic that Jimbo is using one (since users are generally not supposed to), but I don't necessarily thing it puts him in the Colt Telcom offices. Anymore than I'm in Reston, VA when I use Comcast.

And you trust Fabrictramp (T-C-L-K-R-D) to have come to that conclusion responsibly? It seems far more likely that that information was provided by someone who sought to conceal Freud's involvement. It's fairly clear from RIPE records that that IP address is assigned to Freud, who gets their transit service from COLT's UK division, along with IP neighbors Comac Capital LLP and Fragomen GB Limited, both also UK corporations. Also, the .66 address is the second IP (out of 64) in the range allocated to Freud. Freud is using a 3com device, possibly a 3036, as their gateway device, at 80.169.89.65, so .66 is the first available IP on their address block and is likely used either as the PAT address for the internal network or for an internal HTTP proxy server. Their email is outsourced to Frontbridge and their web hosting to Publicis Technology of Paris, France, so they probably have no public services on the 80.169.86.64/26 network, making that allocation a waste of at least 48 and arguably as many as 63 perfectly good IP addresses.

The statement that the IP is a "proxy server" is probably technically correct, as is the statement that the IP belongs to COLT Telecom. It's just that the proxy server is owned by Freud and used only by Freud, and the IP, while "owned" by COLT is being leased to Freud for their exclusive use. Exactly the sort of "truth" I expect from a marketing firm. The idea that a PR firm would attempt to conceal by misdirection their involvement in Wikipedia is, of course, completely unfathomable. And we've had plenty of demonstrations from people (such as the esteemed Alison) of the general incompetence of Wikipedia's administrators at interpreting forensic IP evidence.

Thank you. Fascinating! So as I read you, we can with reasonable certainty conclude that Jimbo cannot have posted from that IP address by simply using COLT somewhere else in the UK. He's posting from a block assigned permanently to Freud, and while the IPs may rotate fromwhat within that, if they come out to the net at 80.169.89.66, as Jimbo's just did, they have to go IN from a computer connecting to the net via a Freud-owned company server. Which would mean that Jimbo at least was in the Freud company offices someplace, using their WiFi from his laptop to access the net from their company.

I think Tarantino is right-- this sort of doesn't pass the sniff test for somebody who has been up on their high horse about paid editing on WP. Particularly not with a firm that has already been caught doing it wrong.

So Jimbo's talking to a really big PR firm in London, one that has already been caught getting paid to edit articles for clients on WP years ago (yeah, sure, they've stopped doing that, I bet). So, do we think Jimbo's in their offices to do some kind of business with them? It's not like WMF to pay money to anybody if they can get it for free or by trading something for it. What sort of informal deal do you suppose WMF and Jimbo are doing with Freud?

LOL. This reminds me again how "informal" this really could be, whatever else it was. In March 2010, Jimbo probably was posting from Freud Communications from Kate Garvey's office computer there. Since she was apparently... em... working directly under him on the WMF account there. Mystery solved.

[melloden]

Oh, right--I forgot that you seem not to like me ... because why exactly? I don't dislike you. I disagree with some of your opinions but I think you're fine as a person. And I don't waste my time writing Wikipedia articles for companies.

Do you have some keyword ideas, or no? The answer to that question shouldn't be contingent on seeing the list of my existing keywords.

Well, would it be helpful if all the keywords I gave you were ones you already had? I'm not sure why you're so unwilling to provide this list to me--or maybe because you just don't like me?

[thekohser]

Do you have some keyword ideas, or no?

Have you added Wikipedia subculture words, like "editwar", "revert", "admin", "arbcom", and "abusive"?

These give me some good ideas, Eric -- thanks!

[Gruntled]

or maybe because you just don't like me?

Nonsense. Everyone loves melloden!

[thekohser]

or maybe because you just don't like me?

Nonsense. Everyone loves melloden!

You can't love anyone until you love yourself, they say.

[melloden]

or maybe because you just don't like me?

Nonsense. Everyone loves melloden!

You can't love anyone until you love yourself, they say.

Poor Greg, he doesn't even love himself

[thekohser]

Poor Greg, he doesn't even love himself

Leave it to you, mello, to bring paid editing all the way around to onanism.

[Somey]

Well, would it be helpful if all the keywords I gave you were ones you already had?

As confirmation of his having made good choices, sure - why not?

I'm not sure why you're so unwilling to provide this list to me--or maybe because you just don't like me?

Isn't it obvious? If the list were to become public, angry Wikipedians might Google-bomb the listed terms with anti-MWB material. Do you think they wouldn't?

Right now, for example, if you do a Google search on "wikipedia editing service," the very first non-WP result is entitled "Dangers of Hired Wikipedia Editing," and mentions Greg Kohs by name, right there in the summary. These are not idiosyncratic or unusual "jargon" terms, these are common words used in everyday conversation.

[Abd]

Right now, for example, if you do a Google search on "wikipedia editing service," the very first non-WP result is entitled "Dangers of Hired Wikipedia Editing," and mentions Greg Kohs by name, right there in the summary. These are not idiosyncratic or unusual "jargon" terms, these are common words used in everyday conversation.

I'm as interested in what pops up for Wikipedia in that search.

Wikipedia:Paid editing (policy) is shown as a Failed Policy. This is part of what failed:

Paid editing on Wikipedia is defined as writing or editing on Wikipedia in return for money, or similar inducements. This includes inserting or deleting content to the advantage of the editor's employer or client into or from an article, talk page, or policy. Many, but not all, types of paid editing are forbidden. For example, paid editing of a talk page is generally acceptable, but undisclosed paid editing of a policy page is forbidden. All paid editors are required to disclose their paid status on both their user page and on the affected article's talk page.

Wikipedia:Paid editing (guideline) is also a "Failed proposal."

Wikipedia:Paid editing simply says "Wikipedia does not currently have an official written policy or guideline on paid editing." That page links to some stuff, such as Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Paid editing What fun? Great comment from Thekohser there, and some really rich comments from some, the usual Wikipedia hostile lunacy. I prefer crazy friends who are nice. I loved this from Greg:

Experience shows that most POV pushers are loners (with some notable exceptions in easily-identifiable topics regarding clashes between ethnic or religious groups). There may be two or three editors supporting a fringe POV, but they have no particular motivation to organize off wiki. By contrast, some large corp would undoubtedly have weekly or even daily meetings regarding their latest promotional campaign, and if one team member reports they are having trouble getting a POV to stick in Wikipedia, the response will be "What can we do about it?", and the answer will be exactly what Novickas said above. The only long-term defense Wikipedia has is the shame for the corporation of being found to be in breach of a policy regarding how paid editing may occur ("no paid editing unless such-and-such conditions apply"). Johnuniq (talk) 00:16, 21 July 2009 (UTC)

I'm thinking of someone who is quite the expert on group dynamics and ethical social behavior, and he would have had quite an instructive response to anyone who foolishly thinks that "shaming" is an effective social construct upon which to achieve progress and knowledge. But, you all ran him off the project, too. -- Thekohser 02:39, 21 July 2009 (UTC)

My response to Johnuniq would be, "So, Wikipedia should damage the "sum of all human knowledge" in order to punish someone? What sort of process would make this determination? Of course, no policy was accepted. Did he think Wikipedia would have subpoena power?

The really nutty thing here matches my life experience. I've found it far easier to deal with people who were motivated by money than those who were motivated by "doing good." Landlords who thought they were doing my organization a favor were awful, tendentious, and quick to sue and to refuse to negotiate, landlords who were just out for a buck were much saner. People on nonprofit boards would stab each other in the back and lie and cheat much more easily than seems to be the case in most ordinary business, etc. Something about "doing good" makes people crazy.

I've been reviewing certain situations on Wikipedia and found that editors whom I thought were relatively "reasonable," when I looked carefully, were serious POV pushers who took every opportunity to get anyone banned who disagreed with them. The reasonableness was a pretense. I have someone in mind, and he's not being paid. If he were, I doubt that he'd be what he is.

More power to Greg. Reading that RfC, I got the impression of someone who truly understands ethical business, in a modern environment, where being unethical is, long-term, stupid. No wonder he was banned. Unethical is stupid and it seems that stupid may be unethical.

In the land of the unethical, the ethical are outlaws.

Ah! I get it! If I'm doing good, and you oppose me, you must be Bad. Therefore whatever I do to stop you is Good The ends justify the means. The end is Good, i.e., what I do. Go away, you Bad Person.

[thekohser]

Take a look at Slide 11 of this research output that was (obviously) intended to be delivered orally by the presenter, Judd Antin. Antin is a research scientist in the Internet Experiences Group at Yahoo! Research.

"Do you think Wikipedia would be different if people got paid?"

"Oh yeah, I think there'd be a lot of bullshit in there. I think people would just throw a lot of stuff in there thinking, 'I'm getting paid so it really doesn't matter what I'm putting down!' [The way it is now] I think people really put their heart and soul into it because they like doing it."

Where do these crazy notions come from?

This post has been edited by thekohser: Tue 7th June 2011, 3:21pm

[Abd]

Take a look at Slide 11 of this research output that was (obviously) intended to be delivered orally by the presenter, Judd Antin. Antin is a research scientist in the Internet Experiences Group at Yahoo! Research.

"Do you think Wikipedia would be different if people got paid?"

"Oh yeah, I think there'd be a lot of bullshit in there. I think people would just throw a lot of stuff in there thinking, 'I'm getting paid so it really doesn't matter what I'm putting down!' [The way it is now] I think people really put their heart and soul into it because they like doing it."

Where do these crazy notions come from?

That was an older truck driver. Or I'd have said that the ideas come from some kid in a basement somewhere who never worked for a living.

Why in the world would one imagine that someone would pay for a pile of bullshit?

And isn't "putting their heart and soul into it" an indicator of possible bias?

It all depends on what one is being paid for. Anyone being paid to vandalize Wikipedia?

If the payer is a government or large corporation, they might be paid to harass opposing editors.

But if the client is small, paying for a wikiwar would be way expensive. Rather, they will pay for skilled editing, designed to satisfy Wikipedia guidelines, albeit with a possible slant. If they start a war, any slant will get buried in the avalanche. Not what a skilled editor will do.

Wikipedia is full of slant promoted by editors who imagine themselves neutral. To recognize slant is easiest when one has an opposing POV, that's why diversity in editors is so important, and why the failure of Wikipedia to encourage real consensus-formation is so telling.

[thekohser]

With all of the grace of a bison in a crystal shop, Jimbo tries to clearly portray how he feels about paid editing. Jimbo even comes down rather firmly against the Campus Ambassadors program, funded by the Wikimedia Foundation via a Stanton grant:

If those [student] editors edit as paid advocates (whether paid by money or course credit), then that's wrong, and banned.

-- Jimbo Wales

The "community" has begun its familiar process of conveying to Jimbo -- without themselves getting banned for saying so -- that he is mostly an idiot.

[The Joy]

With all of the grace of a bison in a crystal shop, Jimbo tries to clearly portray how he feels about paid editing. Jimbo even comes down rather firmly against the Campus Ambassadors program, funded by the Wikimedia Foundation via a Stanton grant:

If those [student] editors edit as paid advocates (whether paid by money or course credit), then that's wrong, and banned.

-- Jimbo Wales

The "community" has begun its familiar process of conveying to Jimbo -- without themselves getting banned for saying so -- that he is mostly an idiot.

Certainly better than being a complete idiot, I assume?

It's been said before and it will be said again: Who cares about paid editing as long as the information is correct and of high quality? Wikipedia is supposedly an "encyclopedia." I want good, current, high quality information from my encyclopedia. Who cares how the sausage is made?

[Zoloft]

<snip> Who cares how the sausage is made?

Ingredients:
Mechanically separated paraphrases, filler, UCE, BLP (some content may be verifiable but not factual), stubs, coloring, obsession, paraphilia, cruft, and natural flavors (no more than 2% of: ottava, malleus, giano, high fructose porn syrup). Processed in a facility where nuts may be present.

[Kelly Martin]

So what this tells us is that Jimbo pays no attention to what WMF is doing. Anybody here surprised by this?

[EricBarbour]

Not I.

Wanna see a prime chunk of "slant"?

Try Best_of_the_Super_Juniors (T-H-L-K-D). 85k bytes of massive detail and beautiful charts about a Japanese professional wrestling tournament that very few people outside Japan have ever heard of. And proof that young male douchebags edit Wikipedia obsessively. Have a look at one of the guys who did the Super Juniors page.

(I'd say something about the Best Buy article, but that's your problem.)

[milowent]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Jim...days_of_the_web

i don't think was posted here yet (but feel free to delete if it has ...), jimbo posted this to his talk page ...

----

A story from the early days of the web

(This ended up being a bit of a mini-essay, but it's worth being really clear about my position here.)--Jimbo Wales (talk) 11:53, 31 August 2011 (UTC)

This is just a story related to the discussion of paid editing, up above.

In the pre-Google days there was great competition between Yahoo and Altavista and several others. One of the questions out there was the question of algorithmic search versus human curated directories. Algorithmic search won out for the most part, in the long run, but my story is not about that.

Yahoo hired teams of editors to review websites and list them in their directory. I don't remember now exactly how many people this was, but I think it safe to say it was in the hundreds. These editors could find websites any old way, of course, and include whatever in their judgment was worth including, but there was also the possibility of submitting your site to Yahoo.

Yahoo at the time was incredibly powerful and so of course the submission queue was voluminous - to the point that it was nearly useless.

Someone at Yahoo then had the idea of "paid submission". It still exists today. It costs $299 annually(!) for most sites, $600 annually for "adult content and/or services".

Yahoo insisted that paying for expedited review of your website was not a compromise on the editorial neutrality of the directory. But the public perception was very strongly negative.

Once they took that step, the obvious incentive structure means that it's in Yahoo's interest to give a favorable review. Let's say I have a movie website, and I pay to get one page of it reviewed by Yahoo. If that page is rejected, I won't submit again. If my page about Clint Eastwood is accepted, and the amount of traffic I receive is worth it, I'll pay again and again. Maybe I'll submit 1000 pages, and pay $300,000. That's real money.

Acceptance of a really crappy page might be bad for Yahoo, of course, but notice that the cost/benefit analysis has shifted for Yahoo. They have a strong financial incentive to list my site as long as I don't do more than $300,000 per year in damage to the Yahoo brand.

Yahoo liked to insist that this wouldn't happen, but the public trust in Yahoo was diminished. Today, of course, Yahoo is no longer regarded as a dominant leader, and I think that shortsighted moves like this are a big part of the reason why. (That algorithmic search turned out to be the right answer in most cases is of course also a part of it.)

If you want to buy Google today, well the total market value of the stock is 174 billion. Yahoo, one tenth of that at 17.4 billion.

Now let's apply this line of thought to newspapers. We all know that newspapers make money from advertising, and that quality newspapers do take steps to isolate the editorial department from the advertising department. It's not perfect, but the system does mostly work.

Now imagine that the New York Times announced a program. For a $10,000 fee, you can pay them to send around a reporter to write a story about you. Imagine that it is claimed that this is no guarantee of the story actually being published. It still has to go through the normal processes and procedures, it is said. How would that impact the credibility of the newspaper?

My view is that it would be incredibly destructive. As per what I outlined above, simple financial incentives suggest that large companies would give it a try a few times, and if it resulted in favorable coverage they wouldn't have gotten, they'd do it again and again. And if it was a waste of money, they wouldn't do it again.

With advertising we worry about the indirect influence of the money on the editorial staff. That's problematic enough. But when connection between pay and getting coverage is made direct in this fashion - bleh.

Now imagine that you're a member of the general public and you read a story in the newspaper about Wikipedia. Two possible story lines. In one version, it's "Wikipedia announces paid submission program" - in a sudden change of heart and policy, Wikipedia has decided to allow a formal program whereby experienced Wikipedia editors are paid by PR companies to write articles for Wikipedia. Oh no, we insist, nothing changes about our editorial policies, of course not. People would rightly be deeply concerned about that. Suddenly people would read articles in Wikipedia and wonder - how tainted is this by the formal acceptance of Wikipedians being paid to write on behalf of companies? In the other version, it's "Wikipedia reiterates its stance against PR firms editing Wikipedia". The story is that Wikipedia editors have firmly rejected the concept of allowing people to come into Wikipedia as paid advocates to edit articles, due to the wrongness of the financial incentives, and the blurring of the passionate pursuit of the truth that has been a hallmark of the Wikipedia community.

For me, this has been, and continues to be, an absolute principle. Paid advocacy is banned from Wikipedia.

The objections that are often raised are not remotely compelling. Claiming that banning it only pushes it underground doesn't make sense, as there seems to be virtually no evidence for it. Most responsible PR firms understand that editing Wikipedia on behalf of clients is forbidden, and they have rules in place internally to prohibit it. Of course, this is a big place, and everything goes on to some extent - the goal is not to achieve perfection, but to have the right principles in place.

Another response to this objection is that it ignores that PR firms have a perfectly valid way to interact with Wikipedia, well-respected by the community, totally above-board and ethical. And that's to post to the talk page, declaring your conflict of interest, and asking people to take another look at something. That's the ethical approach, and it works. It completely prevents the question of whether or not what ends up in Wikipedia ended up that way because the Wikipedians themselves are corrupt.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 11:52, 31 August 2011 (UTC)

[thekohser]

The objections that are often raised are not remotely compelling. Claiming that banning it only pushes it underground doesn't make sense, as there seems to be virtually no evidence for it. Most responsible PR firms understand that editing Wikipedia on behalf of clients is forbidden, and they have rules in place internally to prohibit it. Of course, this is a big place, and everything goes on to some extent - the goal is not to achieve perfection, but to have the right principles in place.

Another response to this objection is that it ignores that PR firms have a perfectly valid way to interact with Wikipedia, well-respected by the community, totally above-board and ethical. And that's to post to the talk page, declaring your conflict of interest, and asking people to take another look at something. That's the ethical approach, and it works. It completely prevents the question of whether or not what ends up in Wikipedia ended up that way because the Wikipedians themselves are corrupt.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 11:52, 31 August 2011 (UTC)

Thank you, Jimbo, for being so completely wrong about multiple claims made in these two paragraphs of yours.

Also, your imaginary story about why Google outperformed Yahoo! is also amusing.