"Advocacy Articles" Options

[Herschelkrustofsky]

There is a new debate about what might more accurately be described as POV Battleground articles, and it is to be found at Wikipedia:Advocacy articles (T-H-L-K-D). The good news is that they are actually trying to formulate some sort of response to the problem, and among the suggestions are various types of disclaimer labels that warn the reader to expect opinion, not fact. That, IMO, would be a step in the right direction. In other words, abandon the pretense of being an "encyclopedia."

[Michaeldsuarez]

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=...oldid=475380264:

Also an interesting topic, but a different topic. The idea that since there is unpaid advocacy, we should ignore the solvable problem of paid advocacy is a total non sequitur.--[[User:Jimbo Wales|Jimbo Wales]] ([[User talk:Jimbo Wales#top|talk]]) 11:48, 6 February 2012 (UTC)

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=...oldid=475407006:

I agree. That's why it is important and valuable to clarify policy around paid advocacy - it's achievable and it will work. Unpaid advocacy is a different problem, also worthy of attention, but usually when people make your point they are asking the community to either lump the two together or to give up in despair. I see zero relevance. They are different problems, and they need different solutions.--[[User:Jimbo Wales|Jimbo Wales]] ([[User talk:Jimbo Wales#top|talk]]) 15:25, 6 February 2012 (UTC)

How's paid advocacy more "solvable" than unpaid advocacy? Both unpaid and paid editors will use anonymity to game the system. Are they simply going to going to put up a sign that says, "Paid advocacy isn't allowed." How will that solve anything? It'll only force paid editing to go underground (i.e. into anonymity), just as banning the drug trade only forced the drug trade to go underground rather than eradicate it.

Jimbo's second comment is in response to the anon's comment of "Paid advocates, by contrast, are usually doing a job, and often have a reputation to protect." What about anonymous paid editors? Will outing and invasion of privacy be tolerated?

This post has been edited by Michaeldsuarez:

[Abd]

url=http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Jimbo_Wales&diff=475380975&oldid=475380264]http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=...oldid=475380264[/url]:

Also an interesting topic, but a different topic. The idea that since there is unpaid advocacy, we should ignore the solvable problem of paid advocacy is a total non sequitur.--[[User:Jimbo Wales|Jimbo Wales]] ([[User talk:Jimbo Wales#top|talk]]) 11:48, 6 February 2012 (UTC)

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=...oldid=475407006:

I agree. That's why it is important and valuable to clarify policy around paid advocacy - it's achievable and it will work. Unpaid advocacy is a different problem, also worthy of attention, but usually when people make your point they are asking the community to either lump the two together or to give up in despair. I see zero relevance. They are different problems, and they need different solutions.--[[User:Jimbo Wales|Jimbo Wales]] ([[User talk:Jimbo Wales#top|talk]]) 15:25, 6 February 2012 (UTC)

How's paid advocacy more "solvable" than unpaid advocacy? Both unpaid and paid editors will use anonymity to game the system. Are they simply going to going to put up a sign that says, "Paid advocacy isn't allowed." How will that solve anything?

Jimbo's comment is amazingly naive. The problem isn't "paid" or "unpaid," the problem is advocacy that leads to editing outside the bounds of consensus and neutrality.

It is no easier to "solve the problem" of paid editing than to solve the problem of advocacy editing that isn't paid. The "paid" is actually irrelevant. Someone who behaves as an advocate can be identified as that from the editing. "Paid," if not voluntarily disclosed, requires outing. If "paid" were irrelevant, "outing" would become unnecessary, except possible as to identifying socks, which is a form of outing. And that might, itself, be made irrelevant by better decision-making structure.

"Paid editing" is not actually a problem, except that there is an assumption that a paid editor will *improperly* advocate. Thus the real problem is improper advocacy, and that problem damages the project whether the editor is paid or not, and, my sense, unpaid editors as advocates generally do far more real damage to the project than paid ones. If "paid editors" were to disclose COI, and if that disclosure was protective, provided they behaved within reasonable COI boundaries, the problem of "paid editing" would disappear. The problem of advocacy editing is more difficult, and Wikipedia tends to get it wrong, banning editors for advocacy.

Yet it has lots of editors within the administrative cabal, and protected by the cabal, who do advocate, but who escape sanctions, because their advocacy doesn't fall into a neat, easily provable domain.

The fundamental problem is lack of efficient and sane and fair decision-making structure, and Jimbo is not showing any interest in solving that problem, he seems to be waiting for the "community" to come up with it, but the community that was created is structurally incapable of solving the problem, it will, by its nature, resist the necessary changes. That's been obvious for a long time.

Going after paid editors only seems doable. Sorry, under present conditions, a paid editor has a high motivation to keep it private, thus necessitating, if you are going to go after it, a huge waste of time, and conflict with privacy policy, etc. I think that there is, involved here, a dislike of paid editors, that they are somehow inferior to volunteers, which turns the whole "professional" concept on its head. As I've written, through extensive experience with nonprofits *and* with for-profit business, the most cutthroat behavior, I've seen has been in nonprofits, where people can believe that whatever they do is justified as being "for a good cause." People will sacrifice their lives for a "good cause," they will kill for it, but only a few will do these things for pay, mostly sociopaths who will do practically anything, they might kill you for a cigarette.

I'll also point out that Jimbo seems to be assuming that Wikipedia is successful in detecting paid editing. Probably not. It only detects the clumsy ones. It's entirely possible that there are paid administrators, and there is no way to tell. Sophisticated paid administrators would not behave as it seems the naive expect. They would only act improperly when they have sufficient cover. Otherwise they would behave as pillars of the project. (It's even possible, then, that they would do more good than harm. Depends on who is paying them and for what.)

Unpaid advocate administrators would be more likely to persist beyond this point, since they believe they are right. They will more readily fall into incivility and tendentious debate. It is possible that there are a few advocate administrators, with a serious nonprofit agenda, who have concealed that. More often, the agenda is quite visible, all that it takes is examining the history. JzG, for example, was blatantly acting-while-involved, as was shown beyond doubt in RfAr/Abd and JzG. He didn't stop, by the way, ArbComm's sanctions, like many sanctions, were effectively useless for lack of enforcement. JzG's agenda was personal, it came out of, I suspect, a desire for revenge for perceived humiliations. But he thought of it, I'm sure, as getting rid of those biased POV-pushers, and other enemies; he'd think they were enemies of the project, and, of course, anyone who became his enemy must be an enemy of the project, since le projet, c'est moi.

(Note that in these case names, including RfAr/Abd-William M. Connolley, the matter was treated as if it were a personal conflict between myself and JzG. The belief that conflicts are necessarily personal (on both sides) infects a lot of ArbComm decisions. It was only because I was actually neutral as to the facts of that first case, my involvement only arose post-facto, and because the evidence was crystal clear and easily understandable, that ArbComm was easy on me. The revealed email discussions showed that, if they had had sufficient cover, I'd have been toast with that RfAr. I was, myself, naive. I thought they were simply responding rationally, and imagined that ArbComm was more trustworthy, wiser and deeper, than it actually was. So I proceeded with the belief that a fair decision was likely from ArbComm. Mistake.)