Talk:Partners In Health

Arcade Fire support/association?
Is it perhaps worth mentioning the efforts of the musicians Arcade Fire in raising awareness and funds for the organisation? William Golder (talk) 16:52, 2 January 2008 (UTC)

Why should it be relevant? Lots of people raise lots of fund and such for many organizations and unless it is particularly notable, I think not.

== "we quickly scaled up our plans."

so this is how wikipedia is built? people writing glowing account of themselves? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 130.76.64.109 (talk) 20:28, 3 August 2011 (UTC)

I am also changing the test to state the co-founders of PIH as including Ophelia Dahl and Jim kim. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Mistsrider (talk • contribs) 16:55, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

Objective critiques? Ever make important mistakes?
PIH overall seems to be working wonders, but wouldn't a list of criticisms be useful? Wikipedia has a tendency on "company pages" to sound like a house organ of the company. Not too different here?Moabalan (talk) 06:22, 14 April 2018 (UTC)

PR
This page seems very biased and almost promotional. Genetikbliss (talk) 02:19, 30 January 2019 (UTC)

Discussion and Process Used In Removing Undisclosed Paid Editing Tag
I've read the discussion at Sockpuppet_investigations/VentureKit/Archive, and could provide here a way that people can access 87 of the pages tagged by Blablubbs due to the results of the investigation.

One can go to https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Contributions/Blablubbs&offset=20201210151938&limit=500&target=Blablubbs which brings up contributions starting at December 10, 2020, and then search for the string, "Undisclosed paid".

As Blablubbs said at Sockpuppet_investigations/VentureKit/Archive it's altogether possible that a PR firm or some other entity carried out the edits with the multiple accounts. I haven't seen any evidence that any particular person or organization for any of these 87 articles ever knowingly paid to have any Wikipedia articles edited.

Also, as Blablubbs said, the edits tended to be "WikiGnoming". Quoting from WikiGnome:

...useful incremental edits without clamoring for attention. WikiGnomes work behind the scenes of a wiki, tying up little loose ends and making things run more smoothly.

As of yet I haven't seen anything which is grandiose or false in any of the editing from the confirmed sock puppets

I've also seen the tag now removed from some of those 87 articles.

and there are likely others. I haven't gone through them all.

I don't know precisely what was done in the three cases mentioned above; however, I can talk about what I did.

Process: Review and Vet the Edits from the Sockpuppets
So I wrote this simple Python script:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1TlmBlPPSbNoJBe7yPMhR2Cn4sw0RAmWT/view?usp=sharing

Running the Python script one can see the edits that were made by VentureKit and also the confirmed sock puppet accounts for a particular article.

Then I just went through and checked the edits to see if there was anything that I found problematic.

I visited the article published by The Miami Herald, and then also the one published by The Haitian Times. I also specifically checked the Wikipedia article on The Haitian Times to see if there was anything there suggesting a possible problematic source, but I don't think such is the case.

For The Miami Herald it's a newspaper that I've heard of, and as far as I know is fine.

For any particular algorithm or process there's naturally going to be a tradeoff between how much vetting one does and how much volunteer time is expected or expended carrying out that process. So I haven't read the full articles, but as Blablubbs said it looks to be mostly WikiGnoming.

Alternate Process: Revert
There was another process that was used in the case of:

Premier, Inc., Revision History for Premier, Inc., Reverted by MER-C 19 December 2020.

which was to revert the edits from those particular accounts.

Which is another option. People might be inclined to do that for articles in which there haven't been any further edits from presumed regular editors on top of the ones from sockpuppets. But if these are generally WikiGnoming Wikipedia may lose some "good" edits (or accurate edits) even if they actually were from undisclosed paid editing.

Reading User:Bri/What's_wrong_with_undisclosed_paid_editing and in particular User:Bri/What's_wrong_with_undisclosed_paid_editing I get the sense that this issue and similar issues has been debated before, but I just wanted to make that point.

(One can go to contributions from MER-C starting at January 2, 2021 and search for "revert UPE sockpuppet". Apparently, reversion was used by MER-C for six other articles for a total of seven articles where this was done:


 * Lochlann Quinn
 * Omnicare
 * Azimut Yachts
 * Premier, Inc.
 * Virta Health
 * PharMerica
 * McLaren Health Care Corporation

)

Discussion Location and Disclosure that I'm a monthly donor to Partners in Health
Perhaps just to close on a technical point regarding discussion location. Further discussion and work would perhaps be best at Sockpuppet_investigations/VentureKit/Archive since this is a larger issue which encompasses more than the article on Partners in Health. I don't know whether I'll have a lot of time to work further on it, but I think more work could be done, and I hope that I'll be able to do so.

I could add that I am a monthly donor to Partners in Health at an amount of $15.67 per month as I am at similar amounts for various other organizations as well. Sometimes I make additional donations as well which is what I was in the process of doing when I checked the Wikipedia article and saw the undisclosed paid editing tag. I checked on Wikipedia about two other organizations the same day. From time to time I've read materials from PIH on their work, but I receive a lot of materials in the mail or through email, and I just read a few of them. Beyond that I don't have any ties to the organization.

Jjjjjjjjjj (talk) 20:54, 18 January 2021 (UTC)


 * Hi . Since I opened the SPI, let me expand on what this farm is about and my reasoning for tagging pages.
 * VentureKit is certainly a UPE sockfarm. The likelihood of a sockmaster being unpaid, editing only from 9 to 5, Monday to Friday, and only company, NGO and BLP pages approaches 0.
 * I indeed cannot, from this, infer knowledge about which specific edits are paid for and whether they are paid for by proxy or directly. Which is part of the reason why the edits need review.
 * While many VentureKit edits may appear benign, they usually edit articles that are edited by less sophisticated UPE accounts inserting promotional content, which is then gnomed by VentureKit and company. Hence, just examining VentureKit edits won't necessarily reveal the actual problems with an article.
 * While I'd usually leave more complete explanations for UDP tags in non-obvious cases, the sheer volume of edits involved here (across the farm, we're talking of thousands), makes it impossible to do so. My approach, then, is to look for pages with high VentureKit and SPA activity or other clear signs of COI editing and flag them for review by other editors or myself. This inevitably does generate some false positives (WhatsApp comes to mind, and Goldman Sachs turned out to be fine too – I sincerely apologise for any bad calls I may have made; I tracked this farm for weeks, and it wasn't easy because there was almost zero overlap, which may have led to overzealous tagging in a few cases). However, it strikes me as a net benefit – it's imperative that we review these articles if there's reasonable suspicion that there was undisclosed paid editing going on.
 * For this specific article, it seems apparent that there were in fact promo issues going on: The lead is mainly a lengthy regurgitation of their mission statement, which strikes me as inappropriate and undue. "Stated goals" are far less important than actual activities as described in reliable secondary sources. Multiple single-purpose accounts making promotional edits are immediately visible, but not all edits can be assessed individually because large parts of the history were revision-deleted for being copyright violations – I don't know of what specifically, but that is also a frequent sign of (unsophisticated) COI editing. See, for example and, who are clearly here to promote the organisation and its founder. Those edits concern me far more than those by VentureKit proper, but VentureKit functions as a canary in many cases.
 * I have no issues with tag removal if uninvolved editors determine that articles are problem-free after a thorough examination. In this case, I think it was premature – see those two accounts (there are probably more, I took only about a minute to look for accounts to use as examples) and the general promo and due weight issues.
 * Reversion, as applied by MER-C, is a useful tool because it disincentivises sockpuppetry: In UPE cases, blocks are cheap. What clients care about is that the edits stick, not the accounts. Reversion leads to the edits not sticking, which provides an incentive for clients to employ disclosed paid editors – hence following our terms of use and in some cases the law.
 * I hope this makes sense. Best, Blablubbs | talk 22:18, 18 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Addendum: Discussion should not take place in the SPI – SPI archives are not meant to be edited. Blablubbs | talk 22:23, 18 January 2021 (UTC)

Wikipedia Ambassador Program course assignment
This article is the subject of an educational assignment at Syracuse University supported by WikiProject United States Public Policy and the Wikipedia Ambassador Program&#32;during the 2011 Spring term. Further details are available on the course page.

The above message was substituted from by PrimeBOT (talk) on 16:19, 2 January 2023 (UTC)