What else can we say?
Last week the Arbitration Committee made an unusual decision involving the policy on outing. An editor was topic-banned based on an article published in The Daily Dot which apparently outed the long time editor. The unusual part was that ArbCom specifically allowed editors to link to that article in discussions about conflict-of-interest editing. Some editors were delighted that an offender of our COI rules had been caught. Others fear that ArbCom was unilaterally changing a major protection against harassment. A discussion at WT:Harassment seems to indicate that the editors there don't like the idea of allowing linking to a reliable source that both names an editor's real name and their username. But it looks like they'll accept links to the Daily Dot article now since ArbCom has given special permission. The Signpost has a different take on the controversy.
We've been trying for years to report serious COI and paid editing problems while staying within the outing policy. We believe that it is outrageous that accused sex offenders like Jeffrey Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell, and Peter Nygard were apparently able to edit Wikipedia, either as COI editors or through paid editors, though we recognize that administrators were successful in catching or at least slowing down these editors.
We linked to The New York Times where they gave a username that they state was named by Epstein in an official document as an account that he used. Since we also had on-Wiki evidence of paid editing including the following edit summary, we believe we were following the current outing policy.
To be clear, the policy, as written, is convoluted, at times self-contradictory, and just poorly written. Violating the policy has dire consequences – up to an immediate ban that can be imposed by any administrator. We just wish that the community would write an easy-to-understand policy that would apply to everybody. We don't want to ask ArbCom for exemptions for specific stories, which would look like submitting our stories to pre-publication censorship.
Last month we reported that accused sex offender Peter Nygard apparently used paid editors to edit Wikipedia. The evidence included a story in The Guardian, which we linked to, that documented a UK court order requiring that the Wikimedia Foundation release the identities of editors. The court order could not be enforced, but there was strong evidence on-Wiki that Nygard, or more likely, his paid representatives, edited Wikipedia.
The essence of the outing policy is that an editor's username should not be connected to "personal information [including] legal name, date of birth, identification numbers, home or workplace address, job title and work organisation, telephone number, email address, other contact information, or photograph, whether such information is accurate or not," unless the editor has stated that information themself on the English Wikipedia.
When discussing COI or paid editing "workplace address, job title and work organisation", can be tricky but we believe that simply establishing a strong possibility that the editor behind a username is a paid editor does not out their workplace address or work organization. For example a COI or paid editor may work for an individual person, a company that is the subject of an article, or their lawyer, or a paid editing company. Or they may just be a friend or relative editing from their own home or workplace.
We request that the community – and ArbCom if they wish – take another look at some of the articles we've written in this series, and let us know what, if anything, they think violates the letter or spirit of our policy on outing. Then the community will have an idea of what needs to be clarified – or possibly changed – in the policy for us and other editors to be able to seriously discuss possible paid or COI editors inserting disinformation into Wikipedia. Not having a clear policy on outing will prevent Wikipedia from addressing these matters in a world full of disinformation.
Please review the following Signpost articles and let us know in the comments section below whether you believe we have violated the letter or spirit of Wikipedia's outing policy
Please note that we are not asking for a special rule for The Signpost. Outing policy should apply to all editors, whether they are editing at WP:COIN, at a sockpuppet investigation, on an article talkpage, and even in mainspace articles.
Given a clear rule The Signpost can continue to report on COI and paid editing, albeit in a somewhat less informative way if the rule is extremely strict. Really? What if the policy prohibited mentioning any real-world names, usernames, anything related to a specific workplace or even location, as well as the current prohibitions?
The following section presents a story, using the above super-strict rules, that we were going to report in the normal way in this issue. Please let us know in the comments section whether you think that a story presented in this way is useful and informative, or whether it violates the dignity of a fellow human being and shouldn't be allowed even under such strict rules.