Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2020-01-27/From the editor



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  • I oppose a moratorium on all new articles about businesses. I am an editor who has written several articles about notable businesses without having any conflict of interest other than being an occasional customer of those businesses. This is an encyclopedia with six million articles and we should be improving rather than curtailing our neutral coverage of notable businesses. I am all in favor of monitoring disclosed paid editors, blocking undisclosed paid editors, deleting spam and promotional content, and enforcing NPOV. But for Smallbones or anyone else to tell me that I am not allowed to write a neutral well-referenced article about a notable business is not acceptable to me in any way, shape or form. Cullen328 Let's discuss it 02:20, 27 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • Without supporting or opposing any particular action, less extreme alternatives would include things like limiting creation to extended-confirmed editors, or to those with a specific user right such as 'autopatrolled'. Sunrise (talk) 16:37, 27 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • I also oppose a total moratorium, but I understand the frustration with the crapflood of spam and puff. However, I did notice this portion: The WMF position is that they will only take action, based on requests made by the English Wikipedia community through its usual governing processes. How about we start an RfC to ask them to take action? Doesn't need to be complex, just "This group is banned by our community; they're openly defying the ban and have said as much in the media, please get Legal or whoever else is needed after them." At that point, they'll no longer have a "Well, nobody asked us to do anything" excuse. Seraphimblade Talk to me 02:30, 27 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • One thing we could do, short of a moratorium, is introduce higher sourcing requirements for businesses. For example, all articles about businesses would need multiple high-quality independent sources covering a period of at least one year (for the sake of argument); lower quality sources would not be included at all; and "me too" sources that were clearly the result of press releases would count as one source only. SarahSV (talk) 02:39, 27 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
    • that's the obvious answer. WP:NCORP specifically says independent sourcing, not barely-rechurned press releases, etc. The trouble is that it's too subjective to enforce collectively. The sourcing practices on cryptocurrency articles work well there, and might be usable if we can get the editors to collectively enforce something like that - David Gerard (talk) 10:46, 27 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • (edit conflict) Although I can't support a total moratorium, I understand the reasoning behind it. More articles don't necessarily make a better encyclopedia. Miniapolis 02:43, 27 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • It seems to me that if the WMF were to ban Status, then breach of this ban would infringe the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. All the best: Rich Farmbrough (the apparently calm and reasonable) 03:02, 27 January 2020 (UTC).[reply]
    • They already have, and it already does, but WMF Legal isn't willing to enforce it unless we make a request by our "usual governing processes." EllenCT (talk) 03:06, 27 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
    • (ec)Both the community and the WMF have banned Status Labs, the cease-and-desist order says it all and it just repeats the community ban. Smallbones(smalltalk) 03:11, 27 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
      • Sadly, though—in a view I express solely on the basis of personal anecdotal evidence at this time, but it's legit personally experienced professional anecdotal evidence—it would be a tough job to convince a currently sitting federal judge to allow a CFAA claim past the motion-to-dismiss stage based on a unilateral cease-and-desist order with respect to terms-of-use violations like this that don't involve stealing financial information, personal medical information, trade secrets, or something equally objectionable. I kinda-sorta do this stuff for a living IRL (and won't self-out any further) and these are crazy hard claims to move past the initial procedural-roadblock stage if no one has literally/tangibly/demonstrably/understandably suffered monetary damages. This stinks but federal judges tend to be way overworked and more inclined to pay attention to their criminal dockets than their civil ones, and it would take a really vibrant advocate in front of a really tech-savvy (and probably young) judge to be able to move forward with this. Long story short: We, as community members, are in the best position to make these buzzword-vocabularied spammers take their "bold solutions" else-the-heck-where. - Julietdeltalima (talk) 22:09, 12 February 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • I am also opposed to an outright moratorium. However, I do concur that this is a serious problem. I have long supported a no exceptions ban on paid editing. In the case of business related articles perhaps we might consider posting some sort of disclaimer or notice near the top of the page alerting readers that although the practice is prohibited, it is known that some articles dealing with business and finance are edited by parties attempting to slant the presentation of the subject, or words to that effect. -Ad Orientem (talk) 03:09, 27 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • Ad Orientem, the other positive point to a flat out ban on paid editing is that, if we had such a rule, organizations like Upwork have already told us that they would remove requests for Wikipedia writing since they won't accept requests which if fulfilled would breach another site's terms of use. Seraphimblade Talk to me 03:38, 27 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • Ought the rules be similar to WP:BLP? Jim.henderson (talk) 03:34, 27 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
    • I think there is merit in tightening the sourcing requirements for articles about existing businesses, making that similar to the policy for living persons: "All quotations and any material challenged or likely to be challenged must be supported by an inline citation to a reliable, published source. Contentious material about [existing businesses] that is unsourced or poorly sourced — whether the material is negative, positive, neutral, or just questionable — should be removed immediately and without waiting for discussion." -- John Broughton (♫♫) 03:47, 27 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support the moratorium on the grounds that, although its damaging to the project to stop making articles about businesses, its more damaging to have the current situation. Pissed that the Foundation won't do anything, since an RfC has no real chance of a supermajority (the Foundation knows this), because:
  1. Lot of people don't care, and since they don't care are inclined to be against something drasic like this
  2. Lot of people are of the mind "the solution is for editors to roll back individual bad edits, not to make blanket judgements; judge the edit, not the editor" which of course is naive
  3. This project attracts libertarians to a certain extent, and libertarians are of the mind that anything a business organization does (including this sort of thing) is both their right and usually a net benefit to society, overall
  4. There are probably plenty, or anyway some, accounts that are run by the spammers just for voting against solutions like this
But, you never know until you try. Herostratus (talk) 04:09, 27 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • I never understood to desire to have a Wikipedia article. Anyone can add controversial or negative sources that might otherwise be less visible (eg. Europe Business Assembly). See also this study:
  • "Crowd Governance", a study finds that after the creation of a Wikipedia article about a publicly traded company, its stock price drops. Apparently, insiders and institutional investors see an article (ie. transparency) as signifying they no longer have an edge on investing information.
Wikipedia can actually harm the prospects of businesses and people. We need to do more to protect living businesses and people from unethical sharks who charge money to create an article without their understanding the risks. We need a general purpose living people/entity policy, beyond BLP, something like a LE (Live Entity) policy. -- GreenC 05:37, 27 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • The enhanced sourcing requirements of BLP has not stopped spam about businesspeople, thought leaders, motivational speakers, etc - which is the second biggest category of spammed subjects. There's also a problem with enforcement - what good is a rule when there aren't enough editors with the patience to enforce it? MER-C 08:03, 27 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • I would support a moratorium for new users. And by "new", I mean users with less than 1000 edits and a year of experience. There have to be clear-cut rules to combat this spam avalanche. Individual investigations and case-by-case scenarios are not working. Renata (talk) 09:32, 27 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • Hear, hear. Just go to any random stub category about businesses, a good chunk of the entries are WP:CORPSPAM. Of course, moratorium won't fly, but we need more people policing this type of content. --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 09:36, 27 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • Let's have a bit more clarity here. I start plenty of new pages on historic businesses, and there is no reason for special measures to be taken here. So we are talking about existent businesses. I agree that it needs more people policing the area. I do a bit when I come across it because it really pisses me off. I also do my bit about corporate Wikipedia:Presentism, e.g. when a historically notable building or district is overly presented in terms of its contemporary corporate image and thus obscuring a more important historical narrative.Leutha (talk) 09:55, 27 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • I'd Oppose any moratorium - we'd be hitting a significant number of editors writing excellent articles and wilfully adding a hole into the encyclopedia. More pragmatically, it would just cause the PR companies to focus on corrupting current business articles, while we wouldn't have any guarantee that genuine editors, deprived of their focus, would shift to counter it. There are absolutely some possible routes, all still very controversial: creation of a business article (not NORG) could be limited to EC editors. Creating EC socks for UPE...individuals... takes much longer. Alternatively, some form of BLP-equivalent is possible "corporate inline sourcing" (CIS), however that would be a staggering task to handle - we'd be overwhelmed. Perhaps require for new articles as a trial, and slowly roll backwards if it works? A sourcing increase short of CIS is one possibility. I specifically refute expansion of DS/GS to cover the whole area. Nosebagbear (talk) 11:04, 27 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • Question I generally oppose any proposals to create new policy, as I believe the Wiki already resembles Nomic far too much. But in this case, I see a proposal without any backing by metrics. I read new wiki articles every day. When I have free time, I use the "Random Article" button on my mobile. I've read hundreds of articles since the start of the year and not one of them was corpspam. That may be because of the superhuman efforts of the admins, or maybe its just not the problem that is being claimed? Can anyone say, for instance, for every 1000 new articles, how many call into this category? Maury Markowitz (talk)
    • Very, very rough calculation: ~6,000,000 (articles) ÷ ~24,000 (in Category:Articles with a promotional tone) = 250. 1 in 250 is promotional = 4 in 1000. A substantial amount of articles may be untagged, but this will be offset a bit by articles in the promotional cat not covering businesses. The proportion of spammy articles may also be higher for new articles (and the calculation overlooks articles that are quickly deleted without being tagged). So, on the whole, the ratio is probably a tad higher. For reference, in the same sample of articles you could expect to encounter around one FA and five GAs. – Teratix ₵ 13:06, 27 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Useful. I change question to oppose then. I would consider extended-confirmed, but it seems that simply moves the administration load from one place to another, I question whether this would change anything. Maury Markowitz (talk) 13:59, 27 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • I've said my peace about how we can't any longer assume good faith in the face of constant spam; see Wikipedia_talk:Assume_good_faith#When_everybody_knows,_and_it_puts_us_at_risk,_can_we_still_assume_good_faith?. Bearian (talk) 14:27, 27 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • I don't know what the hell is going on here why is everybody so mad -Gouleg (Talk • Contribs) 15:00, 27 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
    @Gouleg: Agreed. –MJL ‐Talk‐☖ 17:34, 28 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • Today, an article about one of the BBC's 100 Women was deleted. The subject is the executive director of an NGO – Divers Clean Action – which is helping to clean the ocean of plastic waste. Is that the sort of company you want to suppress? If you want to read that article, you'll now have to go to one of Wikipedia's mirrors such as this. This and other cases such as this show that our deletion processes are out of control. I can give lots more examples and they indicate that we need a moratorium on deletions not creations. If all such content is driven elsewhere then this is an existential threat to the project as search engines will always take people to where the content is, not where it isn't. If there's a disreputable company doing bad things then it is better that we cover it in an impartial way rather than readers having to go to a churnalist site or the company's own website. Andrew🐉(talk) 15:14, 27 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • This is well written and merits consideration. Paid editing is a major time sink and distraction for Wikipedia community volunteer engagement, labor, attention, and brain cycles. I have an essay at Wikipedia:Measuring conflict of interest editing on Wikipedia calling for a conversation on the cost to volunteers of dealing with this low quality, low traffic, low impact content which is outside the scope of what volunteers want to support and what readers want to consume. I feel like a discussion on a moratorium should start with some consensus on the the cost of accepting this content. Paid editing is not something that we get for free, but something into which we invest our scarce money and labor. Corporations take undue advantage of this system which we designed for public benefit and general education. There is corporate exploitation here of Wikipedia, and if we had a conversation to determine how much we spend in this sector and compare that to our choices on other investments, then we could have a more informed conversation on how to respond to this exceptionally costly content. Blue Rasberry (talk) 15:58, 27 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • A moratorium won't solve the problem, it will just move the paid editors onto biographies of company employees or onto twisting the existing articles of rivals to make the new company seem more favourable. Perhaps we need a business equivalent of WP:BLP. From Hill To Shore (talk) 16:25, 27 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • If the Foundation is willing to take action on our say-so, it makes a lot of sense to ask. I don't see the connection to any moratorium. I do worry that on-wiki anti-spam activities drive away good possible editors interested in areas where spam is a problem more than the effectively control spamming. WilyD 17:20, 27 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • The Foundation needs to file a lawsuit. These companies are illegally profiting off of Wikipedia when they violate our ToS. These are literally fraudulent activities conducted to turn a profit. The WMF has every right to sue because that's the only way this type of editing will stop; when there are real monetary penalties to what they're doing. Admittedly this goes against the spirit of the WP:NOLEGALTHREATS policy but in this case these people are no longer editors; they have been permanently banned. They are now vandals actively harming Wikipedia for pay. Grognard Extraordinaire Chess (talk) Ping when replying 19:09, 27 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • Restrict article creation to extended confirmed editors forcing new articles to go through AfC before they show up in search results. This would get rid of the worst of the spam that I see at NPP while allowing good faith contributors to keep up what they're doing. buidhe 19:41, 27 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • When it comes to articles on businesses, the community could probably take a leaf out of the medicine WikiProject's books, specifically the WP:MEDRS guideline, which defines which sources are acceptable for medical articles. The obvious goal being to ensure that only accepted scientific information is presented, rather than quack doctors, tabloid (and other media) sensationalism, one-off studies, unproven herbal remedies, or other dubious content which could cause genuine harm to the public if taken as medically accurate. And by and large the guideline works, enforced with zeal by the regulars in that project. Our medical coverage is good and accurate. When it comes to businesses, particularly those that the public might trust with their money or security, we want to similarly present only mainstream accepted information, free from biased coverage, either pro or anti. Of course, even as I write this I realise that the body of research and sourcing on financial topics probably lacks the academic rigour and depth of the medical pantheon. But I'll hit save anyway, as there may be some mileage in tightening sourcing rules on a topic specific basis (and this would be preferable to outlawing new business articles altogether, which just creates an artificial boundary between the crappy content already here and possibly good content that may be written in future )  — Amakuru (talk) 19:44, 27 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • One more thing - if we can't deal with the typical Upwork freelance spam, which we can't already and is one level down in sophistication than Status Labs, then our chances of deterring state sponsored disinformation are precisely zero. MER-C 21:05, 27 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • Well said, Smallbones. I wonder how the German WP is going with its different approach. I recall that they've historically allowed companies to register a transparent username to edit their own articles. Does that system still protect us from the commercial leaches? Tony (talk) 06:18, 28 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support. This is a microcosm of democracy and its Achilles heel. Openness and transparency will inevitably be abused by those with the time and money to do so. Idealism becomes self-defeating, because to fight the problem we need resources we just do not have. The pragmatic solution is therefore to retrench. No shame at all in that. On the contrary. Rollo (talk) 07:18, 28 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • We are far too tolerant of dubious sources in business articles. I'm fairly certain that a number of supposedly reliable sources take payments to publish content from PR agencies. When an article about a company based in Dubai is nominated for deletion on 19 January 2020‎, an Indian newspaper has an article about them on January 27, 2020 5:28 pm (local time, 11:58 UTC). An IP then posts that as a source barely 6 hours later, 17:50 (UTC) But we still consider The Statesman (India) a reliable source. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Vexations (talk • contribs) 13:00, 28 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • We should have a much, much higher bar for inclusion. In general, but more so for for-profit organizations, and people. - Nabla (talk) 18:02, 28 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • Our problem of promotionalism has not been much with the mighty. The likes of General Motors and Samsung, and their top officers, are clearly notable and carefully watched. Same goes for stars of show business. They have little need for paid promotion and little chance of success with it. The big problem we've been having is with the little ones, the marginal artists, actors, politicians, corporate promoters and such who want to climb to the other side of the margin of name recognition. For those, the risk of bad publicity is minor; they have no reputation to lose and much to gain. A moratorium on new BLP, new corporate articles, new medical procedures would be rather a blunt instrument, depriving us of genuine contributions. Better to apply the principles that propel the existing biographical and medical rules. Jim.henderson (talk) 18:28, 28 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]