Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2013-02-25/In the media

With a couple of exceptions, these are all stories on paid editing/COI editing. It's clearly time to get site-wide rules on this and make precisely clear to everybody what's allowed and what's not allowed. And then enforce those rules. Otherwise we'll become as commercial as Facebook. Not even the PR folks want that - it's only good for them to post their stuff here if Wikipedia has some credibility. Smallbones( smalltalk ) 06:09, 28 February 2013 (UTC)


 * I'm a bit astonished that the enormous(ly) critical discussion on this Index in the German Kurier has not been mentioned at all: de:Wikipedia_Diskussion:Kurier. With this information in mind, the Signpost article sounds a bit like an unreflected advertisement of this Index. I'm not sure if you wanted to intend this. —DerHexer (Talk) 23:49, 28 February 2013 (UTC)
 * Absolutely not, and I am grateful to you for bringing it up. The discussions in de:WP have indeed been voluminous, with "Bought articles: No thank you" sticker images produced and the suggestion made that outgoing Wikimedia board members should be barred for three years from commercial involvement in Wikipedia-related matters, among many other things. Pavel Richter, the head of Wikimedia Germany, defended Arne on the other hand. Perhaps in this case a brief reference to the copious discussions over on de:WP would have been warranted, but the brief for the "In the Media" part of the Signpost is really to review and neutrally summarise media coverage rather than related community discussion. Andreas JN 466 01:11, 1 March 2013 (UTC)
 * At least refering to the discussion would have been senseful imo, esp. since the Kurier was mentioned anyway. Cheers, —DerHexer (Talk) 23:23, 1 March 2013 (UTC)
 * I take your point. There was actually also a critical piece in the Kurier itself, right underneath the main article, and not just on the Kurier's discussion page. Then again, most Signpost readers don't read German. :/ There is also currently an informal poll on paid editing in the German Wikipedia; at present there is a two-thirds majority for the view that "only content counts", regardless of who adds it and whether they're paid or not. Cheers. Andreas JN 466 23:42, 1 March 2013 (UTC)
 * We also noted this in last week's NAN. Ed [talk] [majestic titan] 23:20, 2 March 2013 (UTC)
 * Well, it shouldn't be controversial, really. If the effect of the tool is to "improve [not just 'alter'] the way their company is described in Wikipedia", then by the law of averages 50% of the time the improvement will make the company come off worse. Right? You know: "Our article is OK, but according to the analysis tool there's really not enough coverage of our polluting those orphanages' water supplies -- lets fix that!" and so forth.


 * Oh, wait. Herostratus (talk) 11:05, 4 March 2013 (UTC)

As for Sarah Stierch's comments off-wiki, yeah! Wikipedia is stange and scary! To me, six years ago, not so much, since the wierdness and scaryness developed gradually during my participation, but newbie User:Thomas Craven discusses this topic well. His "Puzzleocracy" comment is part of it. We don't want people to think that we'll WP:BITE them if they trip over one of our complex guidelines, nerdy customs etc, but they do get barked at, partly by bots and partly by my fellow old-timers who are too darn eager to defend the gates from hordes of barbarians. Jim.henderson (talk) 18:20, 2 March 2013 (UTC)


 * It doesn't seem like anything nefarious is intended, but I think sometimes PRs interpret what "works" as being what's ethical and right, when the two are not necessarily synonymous. There is this theme for example that we saw in CIPR's work as well that making the edits in small chunks is somehow better than doing a lot at once, even if the edits are the same, just done incrementally. In another case I saw a PR share their "tip" that if you edit in other places first, your edits are less likely to be contested, which is really just dodging COI detection. Some PRs disclose on a Talk page that nobody is watching, then make overtly bad, self-serving edits on a page nobody is watching - is this ok and ethical because there was disclosure? CorporateM (Talk) 18:38, 4 March 2013 (UTC) (PR guys and frequent COI contributor)