User:JzG/EL abuse/Econlib

Liberty Fund is a libertarian think-tank. It publishes the Library of Economics and Liberty (aka. EconLib / econlib.org) and a blog, EconLog. One of the bloggers there is free-marketeer Bryan Caplan.

Vipul Naik, by open admission user:Vipul, founded Open Borders, a website arguing for open borders from a free market libertarian perspective. He and Caplan have at the very least a mutual admiration society, and it looks to me very much as if they are actually associates.

Vipul wrote or re-wrote a large number of articles, and paid for even more. Every article where a link could plausibly be included to Caplan, Econlib or the others above, then they were. This among a huge number of other spammy links such as companies selling premium visa services in articles on visa types. Vipul does SEO work, and it s unlikely that his SEO perspective was absent here.

In cleaning up, I discovered:
 * Upwards of 5,000 links to the domains, often multiple links to multiple domains on a single article, many of them on high-level topics where the view of economics (libertarian or otherwise) is not relevant.
 * A large number of articles where there were multiple External Links to econlib. This is plain old-fashioned WP:LINKFARMing. Most of these articles' EL sections were packed with all kinds of junk. Pruning EL sections is almost always valid, especially when they run into dozens of links lovingly curated into perspectives. ELs are for sources that would be included if it was ever a great article, we are not DMOZ.
 * A large number of articles where classic texts (e.g. the work of Adam Smith) were cited to copies of the sources on econlib or libertyfund, rather than a neutral repository of out of copyright work (Wikisource, Gutenberg or whatever). This is a problem for three reasons. First, think tanks will not offer full text of sources that are not ideologically consonant. A disparity in availability, with sources matching one ideology linked and disfavoured sources not, creates an inherent bias (see FUTON bias). Second, partisan websites often editorialise with footnotes and callouts. Third, even if the text is presented exactly as it should be, the rest of the site is promoting an agenda. Analogy: you want the text of Roe v. Wade. Would you link to it from either the National Right to Life Committee or Marie Stopes International? No, because neither of these is neutral in respect of the source material. Free content should be linked to ideology-free sites. This is WP:REFSPAM. Examples from :
 * Online Library of Liberty
 * Ethical Writings of Cicero: De Officiis (On Moral Duties); De Senectute (On Old Age); De Amicitia (On Friendship), and Scipio’s Dream, trans. Andrew P. Peabody (Boston: Little, Brown, and Co., 1887). 3 volumes in 1. See original text in The Online Library of Liberty.
 * Letters of Marcus Tullius Cicero: with his Treatises on Friendship and Old Age, trans. E. S. Shuckburgh. And Letters of Gaius Plinius Caecilius Secundus, trans. William Melmoth, revised by F.C.T. Bosanquet (New York: P.F. Collier, 1909). See original text in The Online Library of Liberty.
 * The Political Works of Marcus Tullius Cicero: Comprising his Treatise on the Commonwealth; and his Treatise on the Laws. Translated from the original, with Dissertations and Notes in Two Volumes. By Francis Barham, Esq. (London: Edmund Spettigue, 1841–42). 2 vols. See original text in The Online Library of Liberty.
 * The Orations of Marcus Tullius Cicero, trans. C.D. Yonge (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1913–21). 4 vols. See original text in The Online Library of Liberty.
 * See how each of those ends with a bit of text actively promoting the "Online Library of Liberty"? That is a seriously bad idea, and it seems that all these sources were available via the Gutenberg links already included in the article. Is that deliberate spamming? SEO? Naive promotion of a full text someone happened to find on the web despite having nothing to do with the site? Doesn't really matter. It's not really any different from a link direct to an Amazon sales page.


 * In some cases, these ELs were also deceptively identified. Two examples from the history of :
 * Smith's work was not published by the Liberty Fund or the Library of Liberty. Another from :
 * To identify this group as the publisher is unacceptable. It is no doubt an error on the part of a well-meaning editor, but it is still a misrepresentation of the source and of the think-tank's role in publishing it.
 * Smith's work was not published by the Liberty Fund or the Library of Liberty. Another from :
 * To identify this group as the publisher is unacceptable. It is no doubt an error on the part of a well-meaning editor, but it is still a misrepresentation of the source and of the think-tank's role in publishing it.
 * To identify this group as the publisher is unacceptable. It is no doubt an error on the part of a well-meaning editor, but it is still a misrepresentation of the source and of the think-tank's role in publishing it.


 * Many articles included self-sourced material from the EconTalk blog. Often this was of the form: "Bryan Caplan said X, source, Bryan Caplan saying X on EconTalk". Per WP:PRIMARY and WP:SPS, this should be avoided. We can use SPS for uncontroversial facts about a person in their own article, but using primary self published sources in other articles goes directly against WP:RS.
 * Many articles included links to an online encyclopaedia published by the Library of Economics and Liberty. This is a problem because economics is not a science: if you ask three economists you will get four distinct opinions, and we can't trust an organisation that exists to promote an agenda, to police the opinions in the materials it publishes. Academic publishing has peer review, and this may in some cases lead to promotion of an orthodoxy, but think-tanks have a bias, which is different. Peer review is not effective when carried out in an atmosphere of ideological heterodoxy. There are few objective facts in economics, and including items peer reviewed only by those with a specific opinion is not going to produce neutral content, so this is an issue per WP:NPOV.

Answers to common objections

 * Isn't this a hate campaign against libertarians?
 * No. Show me equivalent behaviour by any agenda group and I'll do the same thing, just as I have done it for predatory open access journals. I hate spammers, not libertarians.


 * It's reliable!
 * It may well be reliable as a description of the libertarian standpoint, but per WP:PRIMARY, WP:RS and WP:NOR, we should only include that when independent third parties say so. Thus, if the New York Times says that Bryan Caplan considers X to be good because Y, we can include that sourced to the NYT. That is fine, but Wikipedia editors are not qualified or permitted to make the judgment of significance and reliability directly form the primary source.


 * This link was not added by $SPAMMER!
 * Most of the links to OMICS Group journals were not added by OMICS employees, but we still clean them up.


 * You should replace this source with a better one!
 * Not really, no. I am removing spam, if you think a specific piece of text is of peerless value and must be included and sourced then feel free to find a reliable independent source for it, but I am not obliged to replace sources when removing one that fails the tests of RS. There are basically three options: find a better source, remove the text you now consider unsupported, or add cn. I remove text that is obviously unsupported by any other source, otherwise I just remove. There are many different opinions on Wikipedia of what the precisely correct approach is here, and numerous discussions lead me to believe that mine is broadly correct, but that people with subject knowledge may dispute what is "sky is blue" level stuff and what isn't. Happy to talk about this, but I am not bringing shrubberies for anyone.