QUOTE(rhinoroars @ Thu 9th February 2012, 11:55am)
A sock is asking about Wikipedia expenses and Wikiexperts came up.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Jim...ey_and_expenses Wikiexperts seem to been controlling articles
http://www.wikiexperts.us/servicesandbenefits.html'
''Article Monitoring and Repair: When someone edits your article, WikiExperts are instantaneously alerted. Our staff immediately reviews the article to check whether it is still objective, representative and above all, not damaging to your brand’s image. If needed, the changes are reversed.'''
Is any Admin or established user involved ?
Maybe, maybe not, depends on who is asking.
The service is an obvious one to offer. It's not very sophisticated. Bad sign:
QUOTE
WikiExpertsâ„¢, your save haven in Wikipedia
They make sure that everything in your article is properly speled, too.
There would be nothing wrong with a service that monitors your article, and little wrong if it promises to revert vandalism. The problem is a claim that they will protect against text being "damaging to your brand's image." That could run into conflict with "objective" and "representative." And they made protection be the highest value.
A lawyer may act to protect your reputation, etc., but does so under rules of the court, which prohibit, at least in theory, abuse of the law. Exceptions abound, i.e., lawyers who do violate court rules, and the system doesn't very actively seek out and sanction them, except when violations are blatant, like suborning perjury.
If Wikipedia had sane structure, editors could offer services like this by disclosing the COI and following COI rules, but the insane structure makes this practically suicidal, so paid editors do not disclose it. Whether or not they act ethically, then, is entirely up to them and there is only supervision when some leak, some mistake, exposes the COI. And my guess is that this doesn't happen very often. COI discovery happens when, say, an officer or employee of a company edits from company IP, paid editors, of the kind advertising on wikiexperts, mostly will not do that. They may get interrupted if they edit disruptively, and blocked, and then their IP becomes "hot," and if they, again, act without skill, there can be long-term difficulties, but a sane client would generally drop such an "expert."
A skilled paid editor would establish a reputation by doing general Wikipedia maintenance, by staying out of trouble, by helping administrators and building connections, and showing care in how the editor handles a client's pages. He or she would follow guidelines rigorously, and cautiously. Revert warring? Never.
A skilled paid editor would appear disinterested, would never be uncivil or even present a possible appearance of incivility, if it was decided to use tactics like that, they would be employed by another editor, with a throwaway account, totally independent and not editing from related IP. And they might report that account. While, seeing the behavior of such an account, I might suspect it, that I would even look hard at the account would be unlikely.
Wikipedians are utterly naive about what powers they have. There is no protection against the manipulation of Wikipedia, given the structure that was set up. There is only protection against certain forms of naive and unsophisticated manipulation, which get Wikipedians very exercised. If they even start to realize it, the danger of sophisticated manipulation, they immediately conclude that there is no use getting upset about what you can't do anything about, so then they redouble their efforts to whack the mole who is toying with them.
But there is something that could be done. Research and develop reliable decision-making methods, that can accommodate and take advantage of crowd sourcing, and then test them and study the results.
Efforts have been made, there were experiments, which were immediately crushed before they could even be tested, or when anything at all didn't work perfectly. See, it's impossible! Waste of time! Kill it! Nuke it! Salt it!
I knew that a nerve had been touched when the MfD for Esperanza was full of terms like Nuke and Salt. When editors were So Concerned about the possibility that other editors might -- voluntarily -- Waste Their Time. Not Allowed! Back to Work!
Esperanza, as a project, did not know how to make itself bulletproof, it could have. I suspect that the editors simply had no clue how ugly the "Wikipedia community" could be. So they lost the opportunity. Esperanza structure was far from ideal, it was, itself, naive. But it could have been fixed.
This post has been edited by Abd: 
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