Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2019-05-31/Essay

There seems to be a couple of misunderstandings in these latest comments. "Paid editing is a topic that comes to the forefront every six months or so, after the latest horrendous disclosures. This essay is part of our continuing series of influential essays on Wikipedia. It was begun in January 2011 and 38 editors have contributed to it. - S"
 * In stating "if you are being paid for your contributions to Wikipedia... you should not directly edit mainspace" this essay goes too far, and continues to devalue the contributions of people like me: a university professor who, as part of my job, is expected to perform some level of community service, who chooses to do that service updating Wikipedia, and whose raises and promotions depend (in a very minor way) on that service, but who is not directed by anyone to edit specific articles. You should be more careful in distinguishing people who edit Wikipedia for self-serving reasons from people who edit Wikipedia as a form of public service, regardless of which of either of those two groups of people are paid for it. —David Eppstein (talk) 02:16, 31 May 2019 (UTC)
 * User:David Eppstein we have this Q and A which addresses your situation . It specifically says for professors "you are only required to comply with the disclosure provision when you are compensated by your employer or by a client specifically for edits and uploads to a Wikimedia project". The paid editing discussion above does not appear to apply to you as your employer is not directing your edits. Doc James  (talk · contribs · email) 05:06, 31 May 2019 (UTC)
 * The paid editing policy may not apply to me, but this poorly-worded paid editing essay fails to make that clear. —David Eppstein (talk) 05:12, 31 May 2019 (UTC)
 * It begins with if you are being paid "in exchange for creating or editing a Wikipedia article for an individual or entity". In this case best practice is not to edit directly in mainspace. We need to keep seperate those involved with paid promotional editing and those who are a WiR with a like minded organizations or are doing community service on Wikipedia. Muddying the two just protects those who would do Wikipedia and by extension our readers harm. Doc James  (talk · contribs · email) 05:06, 31 May 2019 (UTC)
 * It may begin that way, but the part I explicitly quoted in the comment above, the one you replied to, uses a different and more vague definition of paid editing. —David Eppstein (talk) 05:16, 31 May 2019 (UTC)
 * In my opinion, that first bit continues to be implied throughout the rest of the piece. But yes maybe it could have been clearer. Have taken the liberty to emphasize this. The author of the piece is free to revert if they have concerns. Doc James  (talk · contribs · email) 05:23, 31 May 2019 (UTC)
 * This piece was actually republished from Paid editing (essay) (WP:PEW). —  Newslinger  talk   15:33, 31 May 2019 (UTC)
 * WP:COI states "... you are very strongly discouraged from editing affected articles directly". This is fair enough, and has been the stance we've held for many years. The policy is not "you should not directly edit mainspace" as was written here. While it is discouraged, and it can create problems, if a paid editor has fully disclosed their relationship to the client they are not prevented from editing mainspace, even though we might rather they didn't. - Bilby (talk) 03:10, 31 May 2019 (UTC)
 * Not disputing that is what COI states and that what is written above is incorrect, but in practice, there is a consensus (in terms of actions, not necessarily discussion) that paid editors shouldn't directly edit articles. This is distinguishing between an employee of a company who edits their article in their free time and at nobody's request, with someone being paid specifically to create content, often with a promotional angle. There does seem to have been a shift in opinion in recent years that we would prefer paid editors work to be reviewed prior to being in mainspace. SmartSE (talk) 12:44, 31 May 2019 (UTC)
 * I am concerned the the above signpost article is, as you say, incorrect. If we are going to give advice - especially through something like the Signpost - it seems important that we are accurate. If the practice is now to ban paid editors from directly editing articles, (something which has always been opposed by the community when it has been asked of them, or at least something which has failed to find consensus), then the guideline needs to be changed, rather than simply giving people advice which does not match current policies or guidelines, especially when the incorrect claim states outright that it is "per the WP:COI guideline" when this is clearly false. Those writing this should know better. - Bilby (talk) 14:51, 31 May 2019 (UTC)
 * Can you please correct this? The WP:PAY part of WP:COI says you are very strongly discouraged from editing affected articles directly. SmartSE (talk) 15:17, 31 May 2019 (UTC)
 * First, This is an essay from Wikipedia's current collection of essays, not something written specifically for The Signpost. It's at Paid editing (essay). I was hoping that would be clear from the introduction:

It wouldn't do any good for me to edit this page - the essay itself would be unchanged. But, of course, you can change the essay itself, the same as anybody can.
 * 2nd - the disputed text has always been difficult for most people to parse. What is the difference between "You should not ..." and "You are strongly discouraged from ..." or even "You cannot ...". Not much, in most everyday discussions IMHO. Perhaps the difference changes when we are talking about policies vs. guidelines vs. essays.  "Should not" seems natural and accurate in this essay IMHO.
 * 3rd - this type of fine-parsing of the text does not actually define the policy - according to Wikipedia policy! Policy really depends on the generally accepted practice of what the policy writers were trying to express. I think Jimbo's "bright line rule" (which is not even a written policy, but a "best practice") is the actual policy followed by ethical paid editors these days. A couple of months ago there was a kerfuffle about a declared paid editor doing too much "editing" or was it "too much armtwisting"?  All the editors in the discussion, including the named paid editor and a couple of other paid editors just accepted the bright-line rule as the starting point of the discussion.  It looks like an accepted policy to me at this point.  Maybe it's time to get it into the written policy. Smallbones( smalltalk ) 16:16, 31 May 2019 (UTC)


 * Fair enough. A link would have helped and I hope you don't mind that I've added one. I've also changed this and the essay - while I can see where you are coming from, if anythiing is presented as "per a guideline" it seems logical that this should not misrepresent the guideline. As I mentioned before, whether this is what is done in practice is neither here nor there and this is probably not the place to decide whether it really should be forbidden or just strongly discouraged. SmartSE (talk) 16:39, 31 May 2019 (UTC)

The bright line rule is a dead letter
The Huffington Post ran an article about Wikipedia paid editing (I would suggest reading an archive to avoid giving creepy permissions). It led to an AN thread that led to nothing, even though I noted that the editor had been directly editing mainspace per his own interpretation that the policy only discourages changes to the "text", not the sources. The argument is that for paid editors to ask others to look over their work is a burden on them, and someone will say just go ahead and do it, and since the paid editing must go on, this means the bright line rule has to yield. I posted a request for clarification to the policy page that was archived without action nor comment after 24 days. So the "bright line rule" is so full of holes and so ignored as to be meaningless. Note that disclosure is also full of holes - the policy as written gave paid editors three different ways to announce their role, so that no one of them is genuinely guaranteed to spot all the influence even if everything is disclosed. And seriously, we're talking about a Wikipedia that proudly displays one Square Enix ad per every 180 days like clockwork as "Today's Featured Article" for the past decade. Who is kidding who here? The question is only how much complaining we can do about paid editing before the paid editors have us thrown off their site. Wnt (talk) 09:52, 1 June 2019 (UTC)
 * While I'm perhaps naively optimistic that we can control paid editing, I have to say that you've defined the ultimate problem quite well in your last sentence. "The question is only how much complaining we can do about paid editing before the paid editors have us thrown off their site." An economic analysis of the situation would show that Wikipedia is worth billions to advertisers (in actual dollars) who will be willing to spend much of those billions to defend their position here. Of course Wikipedia is also worth billions to volunteer editors and to our readers - but this value is spread out among very many people. One individual can't do much about the situation, and most individuals don't have the money needed to defend their position.  I'm sure somebody will come along and accuse me of "assuming bad faith."  Not exactly - I'm just outlining what I believe is the standard economic analysis of situations like this.  It does assume that most people are "economic men" (or people) who maximize their own utility - that assumption doesn't have much to do with "assuming good faith".
 * I don't think that paid editors would actually kick us off "their site." They would only assert near-complete control in the areas of business and biography. Having a real encyclopedia appended to the business/bio content would actually be good business for them most of the time.  Of course sometimes having actual facts in articles like global warming, health and medicine, science in general, and surprisingly (in at least one case) mathematics gets in the way of business. So we'd have to bow down to business interests in these cases as well.
 * Smallbones( smalltalk ) 12:58, 2 June 2019 (UTC)
 * We don't need Nostradamus to predict the direction paid editing has taken us. Many of us have already seen the writing on the wall at WP:NPP and WP:AfC. Our volunteer services are being sold by PR/Marketing/Advertising firms whose staff becomes the "overseers" of their clients business/corporate/BLP articles. Their only concern is looking out for the best interests of their clients and reducing friction/disruption the easiest way possible without compromising their clients. Such activity is already dipping into the coffers of the WMF but they don't realize it, yet - perhaps one day soon they will and only then will they attempt to put more safeguards into place before we find ourselves dealing with Wnt's prediction above. Perhaps it's already too late. Atsme Talk 📧 00:09, 4 June 2019 (UTC)


 * IP editing. My observation is that much undeclared paid editing is done by hit-and-run IPs. One example in the long history here but there are others. A step in the direction of controlling such conduct would be to increase the ease of applying indefinite semi-protection to affected articles, which current Wikipedia policy misguidedly deprecates. This would corral the behavior into registered accounts which would be easier to deal with. Xxanthippe (talk) 02:19, 6 June 2019 (UTC).
 * Wish I could say there's a slam-dunk answer like that. Unfortunately a quick glance at Category:Wikipedia sockpuppets of Orangemoody is a good demonstration of inefficacy of just turning off anonymous editing. ☆ Bri (talk) 03:54, 6 June 2019 (UTC)
 * The data is amazing. I wonder how many IP addresses he used. My suggestion would far from cure everything but might might help at the edges. Xxanthippe (talk) 04:11, 6 June 2019 (UTC).

I'd like to share experiences from the German language WP: We have a small number of companies, who regularly update data like revenue, employees, expansion to a new European country and the like according to their officially filed reports. I, personally, appreciate this, as I consider those (published) data uncontroversial and am grateful to them updating their articles, as no volunteer needs to spend his or her time on it. I watch some articles, where this happens more or less regularly so I can see an IP coming along and updating the article and I would interfere, if other - potentially controversial - content would be edited alongside. So far, they behave very well. --h-stt !?  13:15, 6 June 2019 (UTC)