Re: [Wikimedia-l] Paid editing v. paid advocacy (editing)
Andrew sums up the situation in the UK very well. For some Wikimedian in Residence positions they are entirely funded by the chapter. Others involve funding from both the institution and the chapter. A third model involves a residency being funded by a third party. For example, there's a residency which is being announced later this week working with a leading health charity which is being funded by a third party. It's not announced publicly yet, so can't give details, but watch this space! Stevie On 12 January 2014 19:26, Erlend Bjørtvedt erl...@wikimedia.no wrote: In Norway, without exception; all 5 wikipedians in residence are either paid by the institution (3) or they are retired pensioners from their institution. No one paid by chapter or wmf. This means they 'belong' to the institution and feel quite a lot lotalty there. Erlend Den 12. jan. 2014 13:13 skrev Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk følgende: It varies. Some are essentially unfunded or self-funded; some are institutionally funded; some are funded by chapter-sourced grants; some are funded by third parties (I was!); and a mix of #2 and #3 is not uncommon. Andrew. On 12 January 2014 10:06, Andre Engels andreeng...@gmail.com wrote: On Fri, Jan 10, 2014 at 10:06 PM, Andreas Kolbe jayen...@gmail.com wrote: Which reminds me – I often think it odd that Wikimedia will fund a Wikipedian-in-Residence for some regional tourist attraction (think the Welsh Coastal Path project, or the York Museum), Wikipedians-in-Residence are not funded by Wikimedia, but by the organisation where they are working with. -- André Engels, andreeng...@gmail.com ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe -- - Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe -- Stevie Benton Head of External Relations Wikimedia UK +44 (0) 20 7065 0993 / +44 (0) 7803 505 173 @StevieBenton Wikimedia UK is a Company Limited by Guarantee registered in England and Wales, Registered No. 6741827. Registered Charity No.1144513. Registered Office 4th Floor, Development House, 56-64 Leonard Street, London EC2A 4LT. United Kingdom. Wikimedia UK is the UK chapter of a global Wikimedia movement. The Wikimedia projects are run by the Wikimedia Foundation (who operate Wikipedia, amongst other projects). *Wikimedia UK is an independent non-profit charity with no legal control over Wikipedia nor responsibility for its contents.* ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Paid editing v. paid advocacy (editing)
On Fri, Jan 10, 2014 at 10:06 PM, Andreas Kolbe jayen...@gmail.com wrote: Which reminds me – I often think it odd that Wikimedia will fund a Wikipedian-in-Residence for some regional tourist attraction (think the Welsh Coastal Path project, or the York Museum), Wikipedians-in-Residence are not funded by Wikimedia, but by the organisation where they are working with. -- André Engels, andreeng...@gmail.com ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Paid editing v. paid advocacy (editing)
On Sun, Jan 12, 2014 at 10:06 AM, Andre Engels andreeng...@gmail.comwrote: On Fri, Jan 10, 2014 at 10:06 PM, Andreas Kolbe jayen...@gmail.com wrote: Which reminds me – I often think it odd that Wikimedia will fund a Wikipedian-in-Residence for some regional tourist attraction (think the Welsh Coastal Path project, or the York Museum), Wikipedians-in-Residence are not funded by Wikimedia, but by the organisation where they are working with. Not so. Joint funding is common, and substantial funds from donations go to such projects. ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Paid editing v. paid advocacy (editing)
On 12 January 2014 02:58, MZMcBride z...@mzmcbride.com wrote: Craig Franklin wrote: I think it's actually foolish to try and split hairs over what is acceptable paid editing and what is unacceptable paid editing. The facts of the matter are that paid editing is taking place right now, and it will continue to take place regardless of whatever bright lines are drawn in the sand. The only question is whether it's done in a covert manner, or a transparent manner. Rather than arguing over the irrelevant question of whether it is desirable to have paid editing or not, we need instead to be talking about how we are going to handle it. To my view, that should be requiring that anyone editing for money be upfront about their intentions and their edits, and letting the community scrutinise those edits and deal with them just like they'd deal with them if they came from any other editor. Perhaps you're correct, though I'll note that in the recent oDesk case, you had both a real name and photo attached to the activities, along with a public profile describing (and rating!) the activities. That seems fairly transparent to me, yet it still resulted in an immediate departure. I was thinking more along the lines of a centralised disclosure list where people can say My name is X, my user account is Y, and I am doing paid editing on article Z. Such a thing would of course invite a lot more scrutiny on the articles in question, which would mean that they're less likely to devolve into hagiography. From what I can see this is already working quite well and without controversy at places like dewp. We already have rules (on enwp at least) about promotional language, spam, sockpuppeting, and the like; I don't see any compelling reason we need another separate bunch of rules to deal with these situations in the special case where someone is being paid to edit. Cheers, Craig ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Paid editing v. paid advocacy (editing)
Detail ;-). Probably the language of the project that the paid edits are occurring on, I'd imagine. Cheers, Craig On 12 January 2014 21:58, Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijs...@gmail.com wrote: Hoi, In what language does this disclosure have to be ?? Thanks, Gerard On 12 January 2014 12:29, Craig Franklin cfrank...@halonetwork.netwrote: On 12 January 2014 02:58, MZMcBride z...@mzmcbride.com wrote: Craig Franklin wrote: I think it's actually foolish to try and split hairs over what is acceptable paid editing and what is unacceptable paid editing. The facts of the matter are that paid editing is taking place right now, and it will continue to take place regardless of whatever bright lines are drawn in the sand. The only question is whether it's done in a covert manner, or a transparent manner. Rather than arguing over the irrelevant question of whether it is desirable to have paid editing or not, we need instead to be talking about how we are going to handle it. To my view, that should be requiring that anyone editing for money be upfront about their intentions and their edits, and letting the community scrutinise those edits and deal with them just like they'd deal with them if they came from any other editor. Perhaps you're correct, though I'll note that in the recent oDesk case, you had both a real name and photo attached to the activities, along with a public profile describing (and rating!) the activities. That seems fairly transparent to me, yet it still resulted in an immediate departure. I was thinking more along the lines of a centralised disclosure list where people can say My name is X, my user account is Y, and I am doing paid editing on article Z. Such a thing would of course invite a lot more scrutiny on the articles in question, which would mean that they're less likely to devolve into hagiography. From what I can see this is already working quite well and without controversy at places like dewp. We already have rules (on enwp at least) about promotional language, spam, sockpuppeting, and the like; I don't see any compelling reason we need another separate bunch of rules to deal with these situations in the special case where someone is being paid to edit. Cheers, Craig ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Paid editing v. paid advocacy (editing)
On Sun, Jan 12, 2014 at 12:29 PM, Craig Franklin cfrank...@halonetwork.netwrote: I was thinking more along the lines of a centralised disclosure list where people can say My name is X, my user account is Y, and I am doing paid editing on article Z. Such a thing would of course invite a lot more scrutiny on the articles in question, which would mean that they're less likely to devolve into hagiography. From what I can see this is already working quite well and without controversy at places like dewp. We already have rules (on enwp at least) about promotional language, spam, sockpuppeting, and the like; I don't see any compelling reason we need another separate bunch of rules to deal with these situations in the special case where someone is being paid to edit. this is exactly along the lines I've been thinking along, too. In the Daily Dot I was suggesting special tagging - a special flag for paid editors/accounts would allow for a much better social control of such edits (and those, who try to dodge the label would be treated like vandals/sockpuppeteers). This would address the language issues as well. dariusz pundit ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Paid editing v. paid advocacy (editing)
It varies. Some are essentially unfunded or self-funded; some are institutionally funded; some are funded by chapter-sourced grants; some are funded by third parties (I was!); and a mix of #2 and #3 is not uncommon. Andrew. On 12 January 2014 10:06, Andre Engels andreeng...@gmail.com wrote: On Fri, Jan 10, 2014 at 10:06 PM, Andreas Kolbe jayen...@gmail.com wrote: Which reminds me – I often think it odd that Wikimedia will fund a Wikipedian-in-Residence for some regional tourist attraction (think the Welsh Coastal Path project, or the York Museum), Wikipedians-in-Residence are not funded by Wikimedia, but by the organisation where they are working with. -- André Engels, andreeng...@gmail.com ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe -- - Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Paid editing v. paid advocacy (editing)
On Fri, Jan 10, 2014 at 8:35 PM, Ting Chen wing.phil...@gmx.de wrote: Hello Peter, I see the following two possibilities: Either the paid editing brings a higher quality and thus by that quality imposes itself as an authority and thus discourage further unqualified editing Or the paid editing does not bring a higher quality, then an unpaid volunteer editor will with right feel fooled and ask: Why does that person get paid and I not, it is obvious that my work is less valued and thus I will quit. In both cases I come back to my conclusion, and that is paid editing changes the collaboratory nature of our projects. The question to ask here is, what is the primary purpose of Wikipedia? Is it a social media site, or is it a project designed to build a free encyclopedia? It seems to me the Wikimedia Foundation measures its success primarily by the following metrics: 1. Number of page views. 2. Number of articles. 3. Number of editors. 4. Number of edits. These are the main metrics I see reported. They are all purely quantitative, social media-type metrics, focused on participation. Where are the metrics measuring the *quality* of the end product, the free information provided to the world in the shape of encyclopedia articles? Purely quantitative metrics may have been appropriate in the early years of the project, when building participation was crucial. But given Wikipedia's importance in the information landscape today, measuring and improving quality should be a far higher priority than it presently is, in my eyes. And it should be borne in mind that a high number of edits may actually be detrimental to article quality: if an article is heavily edited, saying one thing today and another tomorrow, this is very often a sign that something is wrong with the way the content is curated. Example: http://wikipediocracy.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/Klee-Irwin.gif Similarly, a high number of articles may be good for page views, but may prove detrimental to article quality, as the shrinking editor community is too stretched to curate such a large and increasing number of articles responsibly. I believe his point has been reached already, resulting in very large numbers of truly substandard articles that nobody is available to monitor and improve. Again, my feeling is that this focus on quantity, on participation for participation's sake, along with the attendant problems, is particularly pronounced in the English Wikipedia. Greetings Ting Am 10.01.2014 16:23, schrieb Peter Gervai: On Fri, Jan 10, 2014 at 1:40 PM, Ting Chen wing.phil...@gmx.de wrote: Wikipedia articles. So they pay 10.000 Dollar to Bryce DeWitt (I know, he is dead, I just don't want to name any living people) to write about field theory, or John Wheeler to write about general relativity, and so on and so on. I wonder if this happens, would there still be anyone who dares to change or write articles on topics about theoretical physics? If this I understand your intentions but the example was faulty, as you mix up paid editing with authority or celebrity status. If Albert Einstein wrote an article about relativity (not paid by anyone but because he really likes to share his knowledge) nobody really would dare to chime in. However John Doe, Jr., however he's paid isn't special and people will trim his advocacy way more than a normal one. In fact authority is not equal to article protection and humble silence: we had pleny of cases where notable academics went away in flaming anger because a nobody questioned their authority and requested, for example, external sources or proofs. I believe paid advocacy vs. paid article writing destinction is valid and important; as well as the general article writing vs. advocacy distinction, which may not be black and white but it's definitely a separate hue or brightness. :-) Peter ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Paid editing v. paid advocacy (editing)
Gerard Meijssen wrote: I want to open up the discussion even wider. The way things are stated is that paid editing is not acceptable. I'm not sure what you mean. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Paid_editing is still a very rough draft, but the first sentence is currently: --- Paid editing is fairly common on Wikimedia wikis. It takes various forms, with a few being widely accepted and a few being incredibly controversial. --- I would like Wikimedia to be explicit about what is and is not acceptable for editors. If Wikidata takes a different approach, we should document that as well. But the goal isn't to pr[oe]scribe, it's to describe. Some of the posts from this mailing list may be very helpful in expanding that page. I'm sure there are many other past discussions from the various wikis and mailing lists we can incorporate as well. Be bold. :-) If it's just the page title you'd like to change, I agree that the current page title (Paid editing) is not great. The Conflict of interest editing page has some related content, but that title also didn't feel right to me. MZMcBride ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Paid editing v. paid advocacy (editing)
I've looked at a great deal of detectable paid editing on the english WP. Only about 10% of it is of acceptable quality, with respect to both notability of subject and quality of contents. On similar topics, the quality of volunteer editing is considerably better--at least 30% is acceptable. (about half the enWP submissions have always been rejected at one stage or another, even with our relatively very undemanding standards). Like Andrew, I consider the work on non-profits, especially universities, to be even worse than the work on commercial businesses, both for paid and unpaid edits--this is partly enthusiastic alumni, but also the very low quality of most organizational PR departments) Unpaid advocacy is a much more difficult problem, because its much harder to sort out from honest attempts at NPOV. I see no solution to that one without our general framework. On Sat, Jan 11, 2014 at 2:15 PM, MZMcBride z...@mzmcbride.com wrote: Gerard Meijssen wrote: I want to open up the discussion even wider. The way things are stated is that paid editing is not acceptable. I'm not sure what you mean. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Paid_editing is still a very rough draft, but the first sentence is currently: --- Paid editing is fairly common on Wikimedia wikis. It takes various forms, with a few being widely accepted and a few being incredibly controversial. --- I would like Wikimedia to be explicit about what is and is not acceptable for editors. If Wikidata takes a different approach, we should document that as well. But the goal isn't to pr[oe]scribe, it's to describe. Some of the posts from this mailing list may be very helpful in expanding that page. I'm sure there are many other past discussions from the various wikis and mailing lists we can incorporate as well. Be bold. :-) If it's just the page title you'd like to change, I agree that the current page title (Paid editing) is not great. The Conflict of interest editing page has some related content, but that title also didn't feel right to me. MZMcBride ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe -- David Goodman DGG at the enWP http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:DGG http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Paid editing v. paid advocacy (editing)
Hi everyone, I'll try to elaborate on this topic :) First of all, in 2011 in Haifa I did a first talk about companies and Wikipedia. I did that because I was making a study (emphasis on the as I'm not keen to say it's a study and more of a detailed observation) of the state of the articles of the top 40 french companies. During that talk I explained how I believe companies could help us improve our projects. I won't get too much into that as, since then, the debate evolved from companies editing Wikipedia to Paid editing is evil. This year at Wikimania I gave two talks about this very topic, one about how third party organizations can help us and the second on a framework to have editing. Of course, as usual, some people were against it. But how can we, as a community, be against paid editing on one hand when on the other hand we seek paid editing from GLAMs, researchers from state organizations, etc. The question whether we allow, or not, paid editing is non-existent. Paid editing is allowed, we already allowed it, we even support it; Now, the question about paid advocacy. Again, one of our core principle is NPOV. We don't want people to push their POV. Whether they're paid or not, is not relevant. So, to me, the paid foobar question is not the one in debate here. The one we're actually debating about is do we want for profit organization to edit Wikipedia. So yes, paid organizations have an interest in editing Wikipedia, but just as much as GLAMs have an interest in editing our projects. In fact, when Wikimedian meets GLAMs one of the key arguments is look at (pick past project that got great coverage such as the bundesarchives, British Museum, etc). We show them they have an interest in committing resources, both financial and human, to improve Wikimedia projects. So the they have an interest in editing isn't an argument in the end, as, of course a lot of editors have an interest in editing. And we're using it. When we think or work on how researchers valorize their edits in their cursus, those researchers have an interest in editing Wikipedia. So, really what is that people working for a company have that makes it so we have to ban them to edit? If we already have people paid to edit, if we have people with interests (henceforth some sort of COI), what do they have the others don't? Now, why do I strongly believe we should encourage companies to edit Wikipedia. First of all, as I said some years ago I evaluated the quality of company articles on the French Wikipedia. Most of them were crap. Either outdated, incomplete or with wrong information, all those articles were poor; And we're talking about the top 40 french companies, such as Orange, L'Oréal, Renault, BNP, etc. The volunteer community isn't keen to improve and maintain those articles. Companies are willing to do it. So we prefer to have poor articles instead of good ones because there's a risk companies will act wrongfully (I hope I'm not the only one to see the irony in this situation where we prefer to ban editors because there's a risk they'll do wrong. We should do that for all the projects, Close them to editing because there's a risk people will do wrong.). Adapting our projects to provide a framework where companies can easily fit in and edit as a direct consequence, improve the quality of their articles. Companies that have the resources to commit to such things are, usually, big and sometimes old company. Imagine that in a few year, being involved with the Wikimedia projects is so natural for those companies that they release their archives on the Wikimedia Projects. What archives do you ask? Orange, for example, is the former organization in charge of the french telecom. They managed telephone for a very long time and have a long history in RD. Their archives must be astounding. Containing documents, pictures and videos about telecomunication that should be awesome. That are part of our history. Right now, those archives are dusting in some building. And in few years they might disappear. Our stance, being so opposed to companies making the first step (editing) prevent companies to go the next step, release. And in fact, indirectly, we're preventing knowledge to be freed. Awesome. Lastly, those companies have huge RD budgets and employ thousands of researchers and engineers. Imagine a company that employs 1 000 researchers. And imagine that company to do 2 things: 1/ that a company, as part of its CSR politic, says they commit 1 day per year per researcher to improve one article. And to provide to those researchers a one day training session about Wikipedia. This means 1 000 days of editing from specialized researchers and 1 000 researchers evangelized and trained to edit. 2/ that this company would commit 0.0001% of it's RD global budget to open a QA desk so wikimedians could ask their researchers for bibliography or proof reading articles Those things are not wild dreams, they could definitely happen
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Paid editing v. paid advocacy (editing)
Hello dear all, I would like to be more cautious about the difference between the good paid editing and the bad paid advocacy. There are two reasons why I don't want to separate in this way. First of there is no clear boundary between the good and bad like black and white. There is a gradient of grey between the two. And that gradient is not a narrow one but a very broad one. And it depends from the perspective of the people who look upon the matter. For one maybe a behavior is the dark white but for the other one it may be a bright black. Second I want to especially respond to the idea that Erik brought up: an organization that hire people to write qualified articles. I wrote in the other mail that I believe paid editing changes the collaboratory nature of our projects but did not really elaborate on why I think so. I want to do this now. Let me construct an example to emphasize why I think so. I will now take an example which leaves almost no room for interpretation about black and white: the theoretical physics. Let's say there is a charitable non-profit organization that hires reknowned theoretical physicists to write Wikipedia articles. So they pay 10.000 Dollar to Bryce DeWitt (I know, he is dead, I just don't want to name any living people) to write about field theory, or John Wheeler to write about general relativity, and so on and so on. I wonder if this happens, would there still be anyone who dares to change or write articles on topics about theoretical physics? If this becomes a model that many follow, I feel it will largely change the composition of our volunteers community and how the project will look like. This is basically an approach that the Nupedia tried at the beginning. It didn't work that time. Meanwhile Wikipedia gains such a reputation that the model may work. But I personally don't find the idea sexy. Greetings Ting Am 09.01.2014 03:22, schrieb MZMcBride: Frank Schulenburg wrote: [...] it is widely known that paid editing is frowned upon by many in the editing community and by the Wikimedia Foundation. No. Paid editing is not the same as paid advocacy (editing). This is a very important point. Suggested reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Dominic/FAQ https://blog.wikimedia.org/?p=25830 N.B. an example of paid editing that few would likely have an issue with in the first link and Sue's careful and correct wording in the second link. If we're going to have such a fine distinction, we should probably better document it to avoid misunderstandings. MZMcBride ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Paid editing v. paid advocacy (editing)
Thanks Christophe for your long ,but very good thoughts and experiences from paid editing from pro-profit organization. I fully support your approach and hope we can put energy, instead of just being against, to elaborate on how to best handle the reality that pro-profit organization do paid editing. Should we ask them to be be open with their userids relation to their companies/organizations for example, which I think is the (only) wish we should have (and paid editors from GLAM already do this) . Anders Christophe Henner skrev 2014-01-10 13:34: Hi everyone, I'll try to elaborate on this topic :) First of all, in 2011 in Haifa I did a first talk about companies and Wikipedia. I did that because I was making a study (emphasis on the as I'm not keen to say it's a study and more of a detailed observation) of the state of the articles of the top 40 french companies. During that talk I explained how I believe companies could help us improve our projects. I won't get too much into that as, since then, the debate evolved from companies editing Wikipedia to Paid editing is evil. This year at Wikimania I gave two talks about this very topic, one about how third party organizations can help us and the second on a framework to have editing. Of course, as usual, some people were against it. But how can we, as a community, be against paid editing on one hand when on the other hand we seek paid editing from GLAMs, researchers from state organizations, etc. The question whether we allow, or not, paid editing is non-existent. Paid editing is allowed, we already allowed it, we even support it; Now, the question about paid advocacy. Again, one of our core principle is NPOV. We don't want people to push their POV. Whether they're paid or not, is not relevant. So, to me, the paid foobar question is not the one in debate here. The one we're actually debating about is do we want for profit organization to edit Wikipedia. So yes, paid organizations have an interest in editing Wikipedia, but just as much as GLAMs have an interest in editing our projects. In fact, when Wikimedian meets GLAMs one of the key arguments is look at (pick past project that got great coverage such as the bundesarchives, British Museum, etc). We show them they have an interest in committing resources, both financial and human, to improve Wikimedia projects. So the they have an interest in editing isn't an argument in the end, as, of course a lot of editors have an interest in editing. And we're using it. When we think or work on how researchers valorize their edits in their cursus, those researchers have an interest in editing Wikipedia. So, really what is that people working for a company have that makes it so we have to ban them to edit? If we already have people paid to edit, if we have people with interests (henceforth some sort of COI), what do they have the others don't? Now, why do I strongly believe we should encourage companies to edit Wikipedia. First of all, as I said some years ago I evaluated the quality of company articles on the French Wikipedia. Most of them were crap. Either outdated, incomplete or with wrong information, all those articles were poor; And we're talking about the top 40 french companies, such as Orange, L'Oréal, Renault, BNP, etc. The volunteer community isn't keen to improve and maintain those articles. Companies are willing to do it. So we prefer to have poor articles instead of good ones because there's a risk companies will act wrongfully (I hope I'm not the only one to see the irony in this situation where we prefer to ban editors because there's a risk they'll do wrong. We should do that for all the projects, Close them to editing because there's a risk people will do wrong.). Adapting our projects to provide a framework where companies can easily fit in and edit as a direct consequence, improve the quality of their articles. Companies that have the resources to commit to such things are, usually, big and sometimes old company. Imagine that in a few year, being involved with the Wikimedia projects is so natural for those companies that they release their archives on the Wikimedia Projects. What archives do you ask? Orange, for example, is the former organization in charge of the french telecom. They managed telephone for a very long time and have a long history in RD. Their archives must be astounding. Containing documents, pictures and videos about telecomunication that should be awesome. That are part of our history. Right now, those archives are dusting in some building. And in few years they might disappear. Our stance, being so opposed to companies making the first step (editing) prevent companies to go the next step, release. And in fact, indirectly, we're preventing knowledge to be freed. Awesome. Lastly, those companies have huge RD budgets and employ thousands of researchers and engineers. Imagine a company that employs 1 000 researchers. And imagine that company to do
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Paid editing v. paid advocacy (editing)
A museum is a commercial entity. They live from ticket incomes from customers. Universities live from tuition fees from students who freely choose which university is most attractive to them. The difference between these institutions editing, and a private railway company when it comes to coi issues, is in my view non-existent. Erlend Den 10. jan. 2014 14:14 skrev Anders Wennersten m...@anderswennersten.se følgende: Thanks Christophe for your long ,but very good thoughts and experiences from paid editing from pro-profit organization. I fully support your approach and hope we can put energy, instead of just being against, to elaborate on how to best handle the reality that pro-profit organization do paid editing. Should we ask them to be be open with their userids relation to their companies/organizations for example, which I think is the (only) wish we should have (and paid editors from GLAM already do this) . Anders Christophe Henner skrev 2014-01-10 13:34: Hi everyone, I'll try to elaborate on this topic :) First of all, in 2011 in Haifa I did a first talk about companies and Wikipedia. I did that because I was making a study (emphasis on the as I'm not keen to say it's a study and more of a detailed observation) of the state of the articles of the top 40 french companies. During that talk I explained how I believe companies could help us improve our projects. I won't get too much into that as, since then, the debate evolved from companies editing Wikipedia to Paid editing is evil. This year at Wikimania I gave two talks about this very topic, one about how third party organizations can help us and the second on a framework to have editing. Of course, as usual, some people were against it. But how can we, as a community, be against paid editing on one hand when on the other hand we seek paid editing from GLAMs, researchers from state organizations, etc. The question whether we allow, or not, paid editing is non-existent. Paid editing is allowed, we already allowed it, we even support it; Now, the question about paid advocacy. Again, one of our core principle is NPOV. We don't want people to push their POV. Whether they're paid or not, is not relevant. So, to me, the paid foobar question is not the one in debate here. The one we're actually debating about is do we want for profit organization to edit Wikipedia. So yes, paid organizations have an interest in editing Wikipedia, but just as much as GLAMs have an interest in editing our projects. In fact, when Wikimedian meets GLAMs one of the key arguments is look at (pick past project that got great coverage such as the bundesarchives, British Museum, etc). We show them they have an interest in committing resources, both financial and human, to improve Wikimedia projects. So the they have an interest in editing isn't an argument in the end, as, of course a lot of editors have an interest in editing. And we're using it. When we think or work on how researchers valorize their edits in their cursus, those researchers have an interest in editing Wikipedia. So, really what is that people working for a company have that makes it so we have to ban them to edit? If we already have people paid to edit, if we have people with interests (henceforth some sort of COI), what do they have the others don't? Now, why do I strongly believe we should encourage companies to edit Wikipedia. First of all, as I said some years ago I evaluated the quality of company articles on the French Wikipedia. Most of them were crap. Either outdated, incomplete or with wrong information, all those articles were poor; And we're talking about the top 40 french companies, such as Orange, L'Oréal, Renault, BNP, etc. The volunteer community isn't keen to improve and maintain those articles. Companies are willing to do it. So we prefer to have poor articles instead of good ones because there's a risk companies will act wrongfully (I hope I'm not the only one to see the irony in this situation where we prefer to ban editors because there's a risk they'll do wrong. We should do that for all the projects, Close them to editing because there's a risk people will do wrong.). Adapting our projects to provide a framework where companies can easily fit in and edit as a direct consequence, improve the quality of their articles. Companies that have the resources to commit to such things are, usually, big and sometimes old company. Imagine that in a few year, being involved with the Wikimedia projects is so natural for those companies that they release their archives on the Wikimedia Projects. What archives do you ask? Orange, for example, is the former organization in charge of the french telecom. They managed telephone for a very long time and have a long history in RD. Their archives must be astounding. Containing documents, pictures and videos about telecomunication that should be awesome.
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Paid editing v. paid advocacy (editing)
But even they sell souvenires and books.. Den 10. jan. 2014 16:05 skrev Katie Chan k...@ktchan.info følgende: On 10/01/2014 15:01, Erlend Bjørtvedt wrote: A museum is a commercial entity. They live from ticket incomes from customers. Not all museum charges people entry... ;) -- Katie Chan Any views or opinions presented in this e-mail are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent the view of any organisation the author is associated with or employed by. Experience is a good school but the fees are high. - Heinrich Heine ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Paid editing v. paid advocacy (editing)
(Note these are my own personal views and in no way reflect any views of the WMF or anyone else) On Fri, Jan 10, 2014 at 7:34 AM, Christophe Henner christophe.hen...@gmail.com wrote: Now, the question about paid advocacy. Again, one of our core principle is NPOV. We don't want people to push their POV. Whether they're paid or not, is not relevant. So, to me, the paid foobar question is not the one in debate here. The one we're actually debating about is do we want for profit organization to edit Wikipedia. I'd take this one step further: *paid* advocacy isn't necessarily the thing we should be that much concerned about, as unpaid advocacy is just as bad for the integrity of our content. There's no difference between someone who inserts POV content because they're being paid to do so and someone who inserts POV content because of their religious beliefs or personal relationships or the like. On the other hand, a paid advocate may perhaps be more concerning from a community standpoint because it's likely that the paid advocate is going to have more time and resources to devote to inserting POV content (and to doing so in ways less likely to be caught) than most unpaid advocates. Even more generally, even paid editing without advocacy may give a stigma to the project even if the content really is fully NPOV. And, as mentioned elsewhere, even paid editing without advocacy might discourage non-paid contributions for various reasons. These reasons might be behind some of the opposition to all paid editing. ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Paid editing v. paid advocacy (editing)
Ting and Christophe, Glad to hear we are moving forward on finding more sophisticated ways of thinking about paid editing. At least for the English Wikipedians I've talked to, many are pleasantly surprised that the European editions are able to find a cooperative relationship with paid, corporate entities. The Signpost article out today details some of that, but it merits a comprehensive inventory and study to compare best practices. (Of course, the argument can always be made about English Wikipedia as a weird special case because of its profile and large community. I intentionally choose not to use the horrible word exceptionalism!) In last night's episode of Wikipedia Weekly podcast, we talked about this as well [1]. In general, there are multiple parameters regarding the issue of COI editing that goes beyond pay. 1. Pay 2. Neutrality 3. Advocacy 4. Transparency Even then, the term advocacy is an imprecise and nearly useless term. Are you advocating for a client? Are you advocating for the public good? Same word, completely different motivations. So paid advocacy as a phrase, uncontextualized, is not useful. That's why I really like the GLAM use of the phrase of choosing to work with like minded institutions. A national museum with editorial independence is a good like-minded institution for the Wikimedia community. A think tank that works to convince the public that global warming is a myth… not so much. If an institution is not like-minded, then the process of educating and working with them with appropriate strict guidelines is a viable solution. We see that this can work with the examples of Swedish and German Wikipedias (and, it seems, others) Back to the four factors above: You can have paid, neutral, transparent editors that advocate for something good -- like better public access to public records. GLAM Wikipedians-in-residence are a good example of this, where they ensure that the interests of the public and Wikipedia's principles come first. So their advocacy is for the principles of better public knowledge, and a full time employee is working on it. This is a 4x positive outcome, even though the words paid and advocacy are used. On the other hand, in the case of Wiki-PR: it's editing for pay, without transparency, without neutrality and advocating for a paying customer's benefit. That's a quadruple no-no. This type of activity must be banned. But if there is a middle way on this, in working with corporations in a straightforward way, we would be silly not to investigate this, as certain Wikipedia editions already show that it is possible. I've highlighted in the past that we have systemic problems in Wikipedia with unpaid editors resulting in persistent non-neutral content. The university and college articles are the best (ie. worst) examples of this -- these always read like brochures that brag about the top accomplishments and rankings of a university because the number of alumni and students that put in positive statements far outnumber anyone who could pull them back into neutral territory. Unpaid, non-neutral, alma mater-advocacy is rampant and persistent. I hope we can start a longer dialogue about this at Wikimania. I'd be happy to propose not just a session, but an entire track at Wikimania to address this, including brainstorming/sharing sessions to get more views from other language editions. -Andrew [1] Wikipedia Weekly episode 108 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0698SX41VsE Discussion of paid editing at 33 minutes into the podcast On Fri, Jan 10, 2014 at 7:40 AM, Ting Chen wing.phil...@gmx.de wrote: Hello dear all, I would like to be more cautious about the difference between the good paid editing and the bad paid advocacy. There are two reasons why I don't want to separate in this way. First of there is no clear boundary between the good and bad like black and white. There is a gradient of grey between the two. And that gradient is not a narrow one but a very broad one. And it depends from the perspective of the people who look upon the matter. For one maybe a behavior is the dark white but for the other one it may be a bright black. Second I want to especially respond to the idea that Erik brought up: an organization that hire people to write qualified articles. I wrote in the other mail that I believe paid editing changes the collaboratory nature of our projects but did not really elaborate on why I think so. I want to do this now. Let me construct an example to emphasize why I think so. I will now take an example which leaves almost no room for interpretation about black and white: the theoretical physics. Let's say there is a charitable non-profit organization that hires reknowned theoretical physicists to write Wikipedia articles. So they pay 10.000 Dollar to Bryce DeWitt (I know, he is dead, I just don't want to name any living people) to write about field theory, or John Wheeler to write about general relativity, and so on and so
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Paid editing v. paid advocacy (editing)
On Fri, Jan 10, 2014 at 1:40 PM, Ting Chen wing.phil...@gmx.de wrote: Wikipedia articles. So they pay 10.000 Dollar to Bryce DeWitt (I know, he is dead, I just don't want to name any living people) to write about field theory, or John Wheeler to write about general relativity, and so on and so on. I wonder if this happens, would there still be anyone who dares to change or write articles on topics about theoretical physics? If this I understand your intentions but the example was faulty, as you mix up paid editing with authority or celebrity status. If Albert Einstein wrote an article about relativity (not paid by anyone but because he really likes to share his knowledge) nobody really would dare to chime in. However John Doe, Jr., however he's paid isn't special and people will trim his advocacy way more than a normal one. In fact authority is not equal to article protection and humble silence: we had pleny of cases where notable academics went away in flaming anger because a nobody questioned their authority and requested, for example, external sources or proofs. I believe paid advocacy vs. paid article writing destinction is valid and important; as well as the general article writing vs. advocacy distinction, which may not be black and white but it's definitely a separate hue or brightness. :-) Peter ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Paid editing v. paid advocacy (editing)
A track about that \o/ It took me years to have 2 sessions and they were the only 2 tackling that issue last year :) -- Christophe On 10 January 2014 16:17, Andrew Lih andrew@gmail.com wrote: Ting and Christophe, Glad to hear we are moving forward on finding more sophisticated ways of thinking about paid editing. At least for the English Wikipedians I've talked to, many are pleasantly surprised that the European editions are able to find a cooperative relationship with paid, corporate entities. The Signpost article out today details some of that, but it merits a comprehensive inventory and study to compare best practices. (Of course, the argument can always be made about English Wikipedia as a weird special case because of its profile and large community. I intentionally choose not to use the horrible word exceptionalism!) In last night's episode of Wikipedia Weekly podcast, we talked about this as well [1]. In general, there are multiple parameters regarding the issue of COI editing that goes beyond pay. 1. Pay 2. Neutrality 3. Advocacy 4. Transparency Even then, the term advocacy is an imprecise and nearly useless term. Are you advocating for a client? Are you advocating for the public good? Same word, completely different motivations. So paid advocacy as a phrase, uncontextualized, is not useful. That's why I really like the GLAM use of the phrase of choosing to work with like minded institutions. A national museum with editorial independence is a good like-minded institution for the Wikimedia community. A think tank that works to convince the public that global warming is a myth… not so much. If an institution is not like-minded, then the process of educating and working with them with appropriate strict guidelines is a viable solution. We see that this can work with the examples of Swedish and German Wikipedias (and, it seems, others) Back to the four factors above: You can have paid, neutral, transparent editors that advocate for something good -- like better public access to public records. GLAM Wikipedians-in-residence are a good example of this, where they ensure that the interests of the public and Wikipedia's principles come first. So their advocacy is for the principles of better public knowledge, and a full time employee is working on it. This is a 4x positive outcome, even though the words paid and advocacy are used. On the other hand, in the case of Wiki-PR: it's editing for pay, without transparency, without neutrality and advocating for a paying customer's benefit. That's a quadruple no-no. This type of activity must be banned. But if there is a middle way on this, in working with corporations in a straightforward way, we would be silly not to investigate this, as certain Wikipedia editions already show that it is possible. I've highlighted in the past that we have systemic problems in Wikipedia with unpaid editors resulting in persistent non-neutral content. The university and college articles are the best (ie. worst) examples of this -- these always read like brochures that brag about the top accomplishments and rankings of a university because the number of alumni and students that put in positive statements far outnumber anyone who could pull them back into neutral territory. Unpaid, non-neutral, alma mater-advocacy is rampant and persistent. I hope we can start a longer dialogue about this at Wikimania. I'd be happy to propose not just a session, but an entire track at Wikimania to address this, including brainstorming/sharing sessions to get more views from other language editions. -Andrew [1] Wikipedia Weekly episode 108 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0698SX41VsE Discussion of paid editing at 33 minutes into the podcast On Fri, Jan 10, 2014 at 7:40 AM, Ting Chen wing.phil...@gmx.de wrote: Hello dear all, I would like to be more cautious about the difference between the good paid editing and the bad paid advocacy. There are two reasons why I don't want to separate in this way. First of there is no clear boundary between the good and bad like black and white. There is a gradient of grey between the two. And that gradient is not a narrow one but a very broad one. And it depends from the perspective of the people who look upon the matter. For one maybe a behavior is the dark white but for the other one it may be a bright black. Second I want to especially respond to the idea that Erik brought up: an organization that hire people to write qualified articles. I wrote in the other mail that I believe paid editing changes the collaboratory nature of our projects but did not really elaborate on why I think so. I want to do this now. Let me construct an example to emphasize why I think so. I will now take an example which leaves almost no room for interpretation about black and white: the theoretical physics. Let's say there is a charitable non-profit organization that hires reknowned
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Paid editing v. paid advocacy (editing)
Hi, I agree it's an important distinction. I personally think it could be worthwhile to think about a separate non-profit organization which receives payments and manages contracts to systematically expand Wikipedia coverage, with payment entirely or largely decoupled from specific articles (at most coupled to specific domains) and the organization's policies being developed transparently in partnership with the community. I suspect such an org could receive significant grants and public support in its own right. ... I'd love to see more experiments that are conducted in full awareness of the ethical issues involved, both with funding models for free content, and with other incentive structures. WikiMoney was actually quite popular for a short while, considering how much of a pain it was to actually administer! I agree with you that the Wikimedia Foundation is not in the best position to pay people to produce Free content. But there are many fields where it would useful to pay people to produce Free (as in freedom) content. For exemple, we could have a Free news website with paid journalists that could get to places forbiden to amateurs like in press conferences or get interviews with celebrities. We could have a Free photography agency that could send professionals to take pictures and videos all over the world, especially where amateurs won't be allowed like in war zones. We could have a publishing company that would pay specialists to write Free books about subjects where we lack tertiary sources. It would be a great way not to antagonize renowned scientists who might get bitten if they edit Wikipedia directly. Those Free texts, pictures, videos, etc. could then be used by the Wikimedia projects by amateurs. Best regards. -- Lionel Allorge April : http://www.april.org Lune Rouge : http://www.lunerouge.org Wikimedia France : http://wikimedia.fr ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Paid editing v. paid advocacy (editing)
On Fri, Jan 10, 2014 at 4:13 PM, Brad Jorsch (Anomie) bjor...@wikimedia.org wrote: On the other hand, a paid advocate may perhaps be more concerning from a community standpoint because it's likely that the paid advocate is going to have more time and resources to devote to inserting POV content (and to doing so in ways less likely to be caught) than most unpaid advocates. I've heard that before from Wikipedians. However, it does not match with what communication professionals keep telling me. Even larger companies with solid communication departments are usually not in a place to spend enough ressources to correct their articles beyond basic facts. Many of them tried (directly and/or through talk pages) but gave up at some point. For companies engaging with Wikipedia can be terribly time-consuming - especially if they want to do it right. Cheers, Arne -- Arne Klempert, http://www.klempert.de/ This gmail address is for mailing lists only. Please use surname@gmail.com for personal emails. ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Paid editing v. paid advocacy (editing)
Arne Klempert, 10/01/2014 17:51: I've heard that before from Wikipedians. However, it does not match with what communication professionals keep telling me. Even larger companies with solid communication departments are usually not in a place to spend enough ressources to correct their articles beyond basic facts. [...] That only means that their return on investment is too little for them, not that they wouldn't have enough resources. Usually, that's because what they're trying to do is impossible, so they keep hitting a wall. Wiki-PR's very reasonable prices show that the job can be very cost-effective and not so heavy, if one knows what can survive in the system. In my experience, every time you talk with a company's communication person you have to spend hours convincing them that every single thing they thought or wanted to do on Wikipedia is totally impossible, then after a complete mind-reset you can teach them the simple things they can do successfully. Things could be much smoother, but our approaches are too inefficient (or our resources insufficient by several orders of magnitudes with current approaches) for the necessary mass-education of communication professionals to happen and enable them to productive interaction. Nemo ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Paid editing v. paid advocacy (editing)
Martijn Hoekstra skrev 2014-01-10 20:12: I very much agree with this. Currently we just don't have the manpower to explain to 'the corporate world' Who do you refer to when you talk of we. I it a group of people or a language community. You are certainly not laking for all communities, as the community I work recognize the issues you take up, but we feel we can handle it OK (but still have severe problem with the hard POVer re racism etc) Anders ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Paid editing v. paid advocacy (editing)
On 10 January 2014 20:12, Martijn Hoekstra martijnhoeks...@gmail.comwrote: I very much agree with this. Currently we just don't have the manpower to explain to 'the corporate world' in an understanding and clear fashion that what they are trying to do is *all wrong*, and what it is they *can* actually do. As long as corporate spam outnumbers well-meaning Wikipedians who are willing to invest time and effort in explaining by roughly a factor 1 : 10, there is little we can do. Or, as is the case on the Dutch-language Wikipedia; as long as hardcore anti-anything-to-do-with-corporate-whatever Wikipedians can outgun well-meaning Wikipedians who are willing to invest time and effort in creating and maintaining content about corporate entities in the equivalent of AfD, there is little we can do. Michel ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Paid editing v. paid advocacy (editing)
Hello Peter, I see the following two possibilities: Either the paid editing brings a higher quality and thus by that quality imposes itself as an authority and thus discourage further unqualified editing Or the paid editing does not bring a higher quality, then an unpaid volunteer editor will with right feel fooled and ask: Why does that person get paid and I not, it is obvious that my work is less valued and thus I will quit. In both cases I come back to my conclusion, and that is paid editing changes the collaboratory nature of our projects. Greetings Ting Am 10.01.2014 16:23, schrieb Peter Gervai: On Fri, Jan 10, 2014 at 1:40 PM, Ting Chen wing.phil...@gmx.de wrote: Wikipedia articles. So they pay 10.000 Dollar to Bryce DeWitt (I know, he is dead, I just don't want to name any living people) to write about field theory, or John Wheeler to write about general relativity, and so on and so on. I wonder if this happens, would there still be anyone who dares to change or write articles on topics about theoretical physics? If this I understand your intentions but the example was faulty, as you mix up paid editing with authority or celebrity status. If Albert Einstein wrote an article about relativity (not paid by anyone but because he really likes to share his knowledge) nobody really would dare to chime in. However John Doe, Jr., however he's paid isn't special and people will trim his advocacy way more than a normal one. In fact authority is not equal to article protection and humble silence: we had pleny of cases where notable academics went away in flaming anger because a nobody questioned their authority and requested, for example, external sources or proofs. I believe paid advocacy vs. paid article writing destinction is valid and important; as well as the general article writing vs. advocacy distinction, which may not be black and white but it's definitely a separate hue or brightness. :-) Peter ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Paid editing v. paid advocacy (editing)
Hello Peter, I see the following two possibilities: Either the paid editing brings a higher quality and thus by that quality imposes itself as an authority and thus discourage further unqualified editing Or the paid editing does not bring a higher quality, then an unpaid volunteer editor will with right feel fooled and ask: Why does that person get paid and I not, it is obvious that my work is less valued and thus I will quit. In both cases I come back to my conclusion, and that is paid editing changes the collaboratory nature of our projects. Greetings Ting Am 10.01.2014 16:23, schrieb Peter Gervai: On Fri, Jan 10, 2014 at 1:40 PM, Ting Chen wing.phil...@gmx.de wrote: Wikipedia articles. So they pay 10.000 Dollar to Bryce DeWitt (I know, he is dead, I just don't want to name any living people) to write about field theory, or John Wheeler to write about general relativity, and so on and so on. I wonder if this happens, would there still be anyone who dares to change or write articles on topics about theoretical physics? If this I understand your intentions but the example was faulty, as you mix up paid editing with authority or celebrity status. If Albert Einstein wrote an article about relativity (not paid by anyone but because he really likes to share his knowledge) nobody really would dare to chime in. However John Doe, Jr., however he's paid isn't special and people will trim his advocacy way more than a normal one. In fact authority is not equal to article protection and humble silence: we had pleny of cases where notable academics went away in flaming anger because a nobody questioned their authority and requested, for example, external sources or proofs. I believe paid advocacy vs. paid article writing destinction is valid and important; as well as the general article writing vs. advocacy distinction, which may not be black and white but it's definitely a separate hue or brightness. :-) Peter ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Paid editing v. paid advocacy (editing)
Christophe's comment about Wikipedia's company articles not being very complete reminded me of a fun infographic: http://farm6.staticflickr.com/5474/11871822903_714f36a83e_h.jpg There is a strange, systemic hostility towards business at work in the English Wikipedia. Combined with a love for pop trivia ... On Fri, Jan 10, 2014 at 12:34 PM, Christophe Henner christophe.hen...@gmail.com wrote: Hi everyone, I'll try to elaborate on this topic :) First of all, in 2011 in Haifa I did a first talk about companies and Wikipedia. I did that because I was making a study (emphasis on the as I'm not keen to say it's a study and more of a detailed observation) of the state of the articles of the top 40 french companies. During that talk I explained how I believe companies could help us improve our projects. I won't get too much into that as, since then, the debate evolved from companies editing Wikipedia to Paid editing is evil. This year at Wikimania I gave two talks about this very topic, one about how third party organizations can help us and the second on a framework to have editing. Of course, as usual, some people were against it. But how can we, as a community, be against paid editing on one hand when on the other hand we seek paid editing from GLAMs, researchers from state organizations, etc. The question whether we allow, or not, paid editing is non-existent. Paid editing is allowed, we already allowed it, we even support it; Now, the question about paid advocacy. Again, one of our core principle is NPOV. We don't want people to push their POV. Whether they're paid or not, is not relevant. So, to me, the paid foobar question is not the one in debate here. The one we're actually debating about is do we want for profit organization to edit Wikipedia. So yes, paid organizations have an interest in editing Wikipedia, but just as much as GLAMs have an interest in editing our projects. In fact, when Wikimedian meets GLAMs one of the key arguments is look at (pick past project that got great coverage such as the bundesarchives, British Museum, etc). We show them they have an interest in committing resources, both financial and human, to improve Wikimedia projects. So the they have an interest in editing isn't an argument in the end, as, of course a lot of editors have an interest in editing. And we're using it. When we think or work on how researchers valorize their edits in their cursus, those researchers have an interest in editing Wikipedia. So, really what is that people working for a company have that makes it so we have to ban them to edit? If we already have people paid to edit, if we have people with interests (henceforth some sort of COI), what do they have the others don't? Now, why do I strongly believe we should encourage companies to edit Wikipedia. First of all, as I said some years ago I evaluated the quality of company articles on the French Wikipedia. Most of them were crap. Either outdated, incomplete or with wrong information, all those articles were poor; And we're talking about the top 40 french companies, such as Orange, L'Oréal, Renault, BNP, etc. The volunteer community isn't keen to improve and maintain those articles. Companies are willing to do it. So we prefer to have poor articles instead of good ones because there's a risk companies will act wrongfully (I hope I'm not the only one to see the irony in this situation where we prefer to ban editors because there's a risk they'll do wrong. We should do that for all the projects, Close them to editing because there's a risk people will do wrong.). Adapting our projects to provide a framework where companies can easily fit in and edit as a direct consequence, improve the quality of their articles. Companies that have the resources to commit to such things are, usually, big and sometimes old company. Imagine that in a few year, being involved with the Wikimedia projects is so natural for those companies that they release their archives on the Wikimedia Projects. What archives do you ask? Orange, for example, is the former organization in charge of the french telecom. They managed telephone for a very long time and have a long history in RD. Their archives must be astounding. Containing documents, pictures and videos about telecomunication that should be awesome. That are part of our history. Right now, those archives are dusting in some building. And in few years they might disappear. Our stance, being so opposed to companies making the first step (editing) prevent companies to go the next step, release. And in fact, indirectly, we're preventing knowledge to be freed. Awesome. Lastly, those companies have huge RD budgets and employ thousands of researchers and engineers. Imagine a company that employs 1 000 researchers. And imagine that company to do 2 things: 1/ that a company, as part of its CSR politic, says they commit 1 day per year
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Paid editing v. paid advocacy (editing)
Quite. Museums' self-interest in employing a Wikipedian-in-Residence is often quite evident from the way the position is described (raise our profile etc.) And what about, say, the Henry Ford Museum? Or the Volkswagen museum? Is that not knowledge? Is it evil, because it's part of a business? Which reminds me – I often think it odd that Wikimedia will fund a Wikipedian-in-Residence for some regional tourist attraction (think the Welsh Coastal Path project, or the York Museum), resulting in the creation of truly niche content that seems designed to benefit local tourism more than mass education, while baulking at the idea of paying legal, scientific or medical experts to look over the most viewed, most critical legal, scientific or medical articles, i.e. articles that are accessed by thousands of people each day. I'd rather see the money go to a trained expert working on those articles, much along the lines Ting (somewhat reluctantly) considered above, even it this were to result – shock! horror! – in a stable, authoritative Wikipedia article. At any rate, I am sure donors would rather see their money go towards improving the quality of key encyclopedic topics than see them spent on funding microcoverage of some tourist region. On Fri, Jan 10, 2014 at 3:01 PM, Erlend Bjørtvedt erl...@wikimedia.nowrote: A museum is a commercial entity. They live from ticket incomes from customers. Universities live from tuition fees from students who freely choose which university is most attractive to them. The difference between these institutions editing, and a private railway company when it comes to coi issues, is in my view non-existent. Erlend Den 10. jan. 2014 14:14 skrev Anders Wennersten m...@anderswennersten.se følgende: Thanks Christophe for your long ,but very good thoughts and experiences from paid editing from pro-profit organization. I fully support your approach and hope we can put energy, instead of just being against, to elaborate on how to best handle the reality that pro-profit organization do paid editing. Should we ask them to be be open with their userids relation to their companies/organizations for example, which I think is the (only) wish we should have (and paid editors from GLAM already do this) . Anders Christophe Henner skrev 2014-01-10 13:34: Hi everyone, I'll try to elaborate on this topic :) First of all, in 2011 in Haifa I did a first talk about companies and Wikipedia. I did that because I was making a study (emphasis on the as I'm not keen to say it's a study and more of a detailed observation) of the state of the articles of the top 40 french companies. During that talk I explained how I believe companies could help us improve our projects. I won't get too much into that as, since then, the debate evolved from companies editing Wikipedia to Paid editing is evil. This year at Wikimania I gave two talks about this very topic, one about how third party organizations can help us and the second on a framework to have editing. Of course, as usual, some people were against it. But how can we, as a community, be against paid editing on one hand when on the other hand we seek paid editing from GLAMs, researchers from state organizations, etc. The question whether we allow, or not, paid editing is non-existent. Paid editing is allowed, we already allowed it, we even support it; Now, the question about paid advocacy. Again, one of our core principle is NPOV. We don't want people to push their POV. Whether they're paid or not, is not relevant. So, to me, the paid foobar question is not the one in debate here. The one we're actually debating about is do we want for profit organization to edit Wikipedia. So yes, paid organizations have an interest in editing Wikipedia, but just as much as GLAMs have an interest in editing our projects. In fact, when Wikimedian meets GLAMs one of the key arguments is look at (pick past project that got great coverage such as the bundesarchives, British Museum, etc). We show them they have an interest in committing resources, both financial and human, to improve Wikimedia projects. So the they have an interest in editing isn't an argument in the end, as, of course a lot of editors have an interest in editing. And we're using it. When we think or work on how researchers valorize their edits in their cursus, those researchers have an interest in editing Wikipedia. So, really what is that people working for a company have that makes it so we have to ban them to edit? If we already have people paid to edit, if we have people with interests (henceforth some sort of COI), what do they have the others don't? Now, why do I strongly believe we should encourage companies to edit Wikipedia. First of all, as I said some years ago I evaluated the quality of company articles on the French Wikipedia.
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Paid editing v. paid advocacy (editing)
On Fri, Jan 10, 2014 at 3:13 PM, Brad Jorsch (Anomie) bjor...@wikimedia.org wrote: (Note these are my own personal views and in no way reflect any views of the WMF or anyone else) On Fri, Jan 10, 2014 at 7:34 AM, Christophe Henner christophe.hen...@gmail.com wrote: Now, the question about paid advocacy. Again, one of our core principle is NPOV. We don't want people to push their POV. Whether they're paid or not, is not relevant. So, to me, the paid foobar question is not the one in debate here. The one we're actually debating about is do we want for profit organization to edit Wikipedia. I'd take this one step further: *paid* advocacy isn't necessarily the thing we should be that much concerned about, as unpaid advocacy is just as bad for the integrity of our content. There's no difference between someone who inserts POV content because they're being paid to do so and someone who inserts POV content because of their religious beliefs or personal relationships or the like. That's the key point right here. The entire focus on preventing paid advocacy editing is like fitting a 12-inch steel door at the front of the house, while leaving open doors and windows for social entrepreneurs of all sorts on all the other sides of the building. On the other hand, a paid advocate may perhaps be more concerning from a community standpoint because it's likely that the paid advocate is going to have more time and resources to devote to inserting POV content (and to doing so in ways less likely to be caught) than most unpaid advocates. Even more generally, even paid editing without advocacy may give a stigma to the project even if the content really is fully NPOV. And, as mentioned elsewhere, even paid editing without advocacy might discourage non-paid contributions for various reasons. These reasons might be behind some of the opposition to all paid editing. ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Paid editing v. paid advocacy (editing)
On Fri, Jan 10, 2014 at 3:17 PM, Andrew Lih andrew@gmail.com wrote: Ting and Christophe, Glad to hear we are moving forward on finding more sophisticated ways of thinking about paid editing. At least for the English Wikipedians I've talked to, many are pleasantly surprised that the European editions are able to find a cooperative relationship with paid, corporate entities. The Signpost article out today details some of that, but it merits a comprehensive inventory and study to compare best practices. (Of course, the argument can always be made about English Wikipedia as a weird special case because of its profile and large community. I intentionally choose not to use the horrible word exceptionalism!) I suspect the difference is that the English Wikipedia listened for so long to Jimmy Wales, whose views on paid editing are well known, while the other projects just did what they thought made sense. No other Wikipedia I know has the same witch hunt mentality against business as the English Wikipedia. While the German Wikipedia verifies company accounts, to prevent impersonation, the English Wikipedia bans them on sight and asks the editors concerned to register alternative user names that bear no resemblance to the company name. Tens of thousands of company accounts have been banned that way, and asked to come back with an innocuous name. This way, transparency is lost, and it *looks* as though it is all done by volunteers, but the reality is the same as before. It is window dressing. And in the English Wikipedia, as in any other, practically any company article one looks into turns out on closer inspection to have been edited by employees of that company. http://wikipediocracy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=23t=262 Other Wikipedias accept this, and are upfront about it. The English Wikipedia is in a permanent hissy fit about it. In last night's episode of Wikipedia Weekly podcast, we talked about this as well [1]. In general, there are multiple parameters regarding the issue of COI editing that goes beyond pay. 1. Pay 2. Neutrality 3. Advocacy 4. Transparency Even then, the term advocacy is an imprecise and nearly useless term. Are you advocating for a client? Are you advocating for the public good? Same word, completely different motivations. So paid advocacy as a phrase, uncontextualized, is not useful. That's why I really like the GLAM use of the phrase of choosing to work with like minded institutions. A national museum with editorial independence is a good like-minded institution for the Wikimedia community. A think tank that works to convince the public that global warming is a myth… not so much. If an institution is not like-minded, then the process of educating and working with them with appropriate strict guidelines is a viable solution. We see that this can work with the examples of Swedish and German Wikipedias (and, it seems, others) Back to the four factors above: You can have paid, neutral, transparent editors that advocate for something good -- like better public access to public records. GLAM Wikipedians-in-residence are a good example of this, where they ensure that the interests of the public and Wikipedia's principles come first. So their advocacy is for the principles of better public knowledge, and a full time employee is working on it. This is a 4x positive outcome, even though the words paid and advocacy are used. On the other hand, in the case of Wiki-PR: it's editing for pay, without transparency, without neutrality and advocating for a paying customer's benefit. That's a quadruple no-no. This type of activity must be banned. But if there is a middle way on this, in working with corporations in a straightforward way, we would be silly not to investigate this, as certain Wikipedia editions already show that it is possible. I've highlighted in the past that we have systemic problems in Wikipedia with unpaid editors resulting in persistent non-neutral content. The university and college articles are the best (ie. worst) examples of this -- these always read like brochures that brag about the top accomplishments and rankings of a university because the number of alumni and students that put in positive statements far outnumber anyone who could pull them back into neutral territory. Unpaid, non-neutral, alma mater-advocacy is rampant and persistent. I hope we can start a longer dialogue about this at Wikimania. I'd be happy to propose not just a session, but an entire track at Wikimania to address this, including brainstorming/sharing sessions to get more views from other language editions. -Andrew [1] Wikipedia Weekly episode 108 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0698SX41VsE Discussion of paid editing at 33 minutes into the podcast On Fri, Jan 10, 2014 at 7:40 AM, Ting Chen wing.phil...@gmx.de wrote: Hello dear all, I would like to be more cautious about the difference between the good paid
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Paid editing v. paid advocacy (editing)
On 10 January 2014 21:06, Andreas Kolbe jayen...@gmail.com wrote: Quite. Museums' self-interest in employing a Wikipedian-in-Residence is often quite evident from the way the position is described (raise our profile etc.) And what about, say, the Henry Ford Museum? Or the Volkswagen museum? Is that not knowledge? Is it evil, because it's part of a business? The term you are looking for is propaganda. Or PR if you like being invited to a certain class of party. Which reminds me – I often think it odd that Wikimedia will fund a Wikipedian-in-Residence for some regional tourist attraction (think the Welsh Coastal Path project, or the York Museum), You've never actually been to the York Museum have you? Its a typical municipal museum. IE a place to dump all the historical stuff that you can just leave sitting around in the street. Its collection is better than some but only due to its age. The tourist targeting museum in the area would be the Jorvik Viking Centre. I'd assume the largest tourist draw is actually the National Railway Museum (certainly it has the best class of cameras) but that is a national collection rather than regional. -- geni ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Paid editing v. paid advocacy (editing)
I totally agree with MZMcBride and Erik. It also depends and what the money go for. If somebody is paid to bend the rules or use their privileged role, it is an obvious problem. If somebody is paid a compensation for the costs incurred in collecting materials (as sometimes is the case with scanners, photos, etc.), it obviously isn't. And the area between is grey and undefined. As you possibly know, I believe that outright forbidding all paid editing results in a situation when people still do it, but in secrecy. This is not good for us, as it increases the amount of work needed to eradicate such edits. I think that we should allow paid edits under certain conditions (although obviously not allow paid advocacy), when all encyclopedic standards are fulfilled, but require full transparency and disclosure, to allow better tracking and evaluation of such edits. I also believe that transparency and disclosure of even potential COI is crucial (and unfortunately impossible under current rules). best, dariusz pundit On Thu, Jan 9, 2014 at 8:57 AM, Erik Moeller e...@wikimedia.org wrote: On Wed, Jan 8, 2014 at 6:22 PM, MZMcBride z...@mzmcbride.com wrote: (Responding just on the general issue, not on the specific case.) Paid editing is not the same as paid advocacy (editing). This is a very important point. I agree it's an important distinction. I personally think it could be worthwhile to think about a separate non-profit organization which receives payments and manages contracts to systematically expand Wikipedia coverage, with payment entirely or largely decoupled from specific articles (at most coupled to specific domains) and the organization's policies being developed transparently in partnership with the community. I suspect such an org could receive significant grants and public support in its own right. Supporting free content isn't evil - there's stuff like http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1699256938/the-vanamo-online-game-museum which is totally awesome. It's COI and disclosure issues that raise red flags, and more significant violations of policies that sometimes go along with that. It's been suggested many times through the years that WMF should directly pay editors in some way. I don't think that's a good idea, though I would like to see more grants in support of expenses related to article writing (there are quite a few programs around that already, many of them chapter-run). *dims lights, stirs logs in fireplace* Back in the early years, I had a little statement on my userpage encouraging people to donate money to me if they liked my work and wanted me to do more on Wikipedia. (Nobody took me up on it, of course. Cheap bastards.) This was at a time when a lot of us online community nerds were thinking about donation-based funding models for communities. PayPal was just becoming a really big deal back then, because it suddenly made these early community funding experiments possible. Blender, Penny Arcade, Kuro5hin and others were among the true pioneers of what's now called crowdfunding. Axel Boldt deserves credit for this experiment: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiMoney . I still have a WikiMoney bank balance of ψ18. Maybe I can convert it to a cryptocurrency one day. :) I'd love to see more experiments that are conducted in full awareness of the ethical issues involved, both with funding models for free content, and with other incentive structures. WikiMoney was actually quite popular for a short while, considering how much of a pain it was to actually administer! Erik -- Erik Möller VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe -- __ dr hab. Dariusz Jemielniak profesor zarządzania kierownik katedry Zarządzania Międzynarodowego i centrum badawczego CROW Akademia Leona Koźmińskiego http://www.crow.alk.edu.pl ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Paid editing v. paid advocacy (editing)
2014/1/9 Dariusz Jemielniak dar...@alk.edu.pl: I totally agree with MZMcBride and Erik. It also depends and what the money go for. If somebody is paid to bend the rules or use their privileged role, it is an obvious problem. If somebody is paid a compensation for the costs incurred in collecting materials (as sometimes is the case with scanners, photos, etc.), it obviously isn't. And the area between is grey and undefined. As you possibly know, I believe that outright forbidding all paid editing results in a situation when people still do it, but in secrecy. This is not good for us, as it increases the amount of work needed to eradicate such edits. I think that we should allow paid edits under certain conditions (although obviously not allow paid advocacy), when all encyclopedic standards are fulfilled, but require full transparency and disclosure, to allow better tracking and evaluation of such edits. I also believe that transparency and disclosure of even potential COI is crucial (and unfortunately impossible under current rules). Yes, but the question is how to enable such a system. If the rules for paid editors were to be very strict - many paid editors would have still decide to do it in secrecy anyway, as it would have been simply easier for them. It might be like with infamous registered lobbyst system in Polish Parliament. Since registered lobbyst system was enabled 12 years ago in Polish Parliament only 6 people decided to register, while all other lobbysts still act in secrecy :-) System in German Wikipedia registers institutional/corporal editors - who for sure join the Wikipedia in order to support interest of their institutions/corporations. One can still do it following the Wikipedia rules - for example remove unsourced bias, keep pages updated, fix basic facts, such as the name of CEO etc. And - in the same time one can still have accounts for doing evil things - sockpuppeting in disucssions and votes, forcing obvious bias etc... -- Tomek Polimerek Ganicz http://pl.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Polimerek http://www.ganicz.pl/poli/ http://www.cbmm.lodz.pl/work.php?id=29title=tomasz-ganicz ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Paid editing v. paid advocacy (editing)
Tomasz, As has been said elsewhere, No registration required, we respect your privacy, and no paid editing are fundamentally incompatible. The only way that it would be possible for a system as you describe to exist, the following would need to be true : 1) No more IP editing -- most COI editing exists using IPs 2) No more anonymous editing -- having real names being used for account names would indeed go towards putting a halt to undeclared editing 3) Compulsory to declare any COI -- this is currently the case on some projects, but the conditions are such that this is not always followed The very business model that Wikipedia follows makes it impossible to enable any system where COI editing can either be eliminated or can exist without issue. Until that model changes, this will always be an issue. ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Paid editing v. paid advocacy (editing)
Thank you for highlighting something I should have clarified better in my post, MZMcBride. That sentence should have read paid advocacy editing in line with Sue's blog post that you referenced. We continue to support the important work Sarah and others have done in the GLAM sector through projects like Wikipedians in Residence. Frank On Wed, Jan 8, 2014 at 6:22 PM, MZMcBride z...@mzmcbride.com wrote: Frank Schulenburg wrote: [...] it is widely known that paid editing is frowned upon by many in the editing community and by the Wikimedia Foundation. No. Paid editing is not the same as paid advocacy (editing). This is a very important point. Suggested reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Dominic/FAQ https://blog.wikimedia.org/?p=25830 N.B. an example of paid editing that few would likely have an issue with in the first link and Sue's careful and correct wording in the second link. If we're going to have such a fine distinction, we should probably better document it to avoid misunderstandings. MZMcBride ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Paid editing v. paid advocacy (editing)
On Thu, Jan 9, 2014 at 10:28 AM, Tomasz Ganicz polime...@gmail.com wrote: Yes, but the question is how to enable such a system. If the rules for paid editors were to be very strict - many paid editors would have still decide to do it in secrecy anyway, oh, but there will ALWAYS be those lurking in the shadows. However, currently we frown upon edits which are according to the rules just as much as upon those which cross the line. I think it would be good to make and explicit, ostensive bright line, like Jimbo suggested - I just think the line should be elsewhere. Paid editing, when done according to the rules, and when subjected to transparent community control, is definitely better than a system in which paid editors are, in fact, motivated NOT TO reveal their affiliations. best, dariusz pundit ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Paid editing v. paid advocacy (editing)
I agree with you, Dariusz. We have discussed this at length in the community, and at Wikipedia Academy in Oslo in december. There is minimal support of a ban of paid editing. One thing is the fact that we have both Wikipedians in Residence and editing scholarships with GLAM institutions. It is naive to believe that cultural institutions like museums, etc, are not commercial. I am myself among those receiving USD 1.500 from the Directorate of Cultural Heritage to write about 19th century trappers' huts at Spitsbergen. Commercial? Probably not. Paid editing? Definitely. The debate among admins and at the Academy last month, revealed more or less consensus along several lines of thought. 1) A ban of paid editing is illusionary and impractible, and will just force paid editors underground 2) A ban will deprive us of invaluable expertise on a wide array of subjects that would otherwise not be covered 3) Guidelines and 5 pillars take presedence over COI anyway, judge people by what they do, and not who they are. 4) In-house employee editing is not only tolerated, but quite common at no-wiki. 5) The line runs at paid advocacy = third-party for-pay editing for a commercial customer, or for-pay POV editing. During the discussion, it appeared that a large proportion of the admins and bureaucrats who joined the discussion, had edited the articles about their employers. Most were aware of the COI potential involved, but asserted being able to write objectively even about an employer. Cheers, Erlend Bjørtvedt Norway 2014/1/9 Dariusz Jemielniak dar...@alk.edu.pl On Thu, Jan 9, 2014 at 10:28 AM, Tomasz Ganicz polime...@gmail.com wrote: Yes, but the question is how to enable such a system. If the rules for paid editors were to be very strict - many paid editors would have still decide to do it in secrecy anyway, oh, but there will ALWAYS be those lurking in the shadows. However, currently we frown upon edits which are according to the rules just as much as upon those which cross the line. I think it would be good to make and explicit, ostensive bright line, like Jimbo suggested - I just think the line should be elsewhere. Paid editing, when done according to the rules, and when subjected to transparent community control, is definitely better than a system in which paid editors are, in fact, motivated NOT TO reveal their affiliations. best, dariusz pundit ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe -- *Erlend Bjørtvedt* Nestleder, Wikimedia Norge Vice chairman, Wikimedia Norway Mob: +47 - 9225 9227 http://no.wikimedia.org http://no.wikimedia.org/wiki/About_us ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
[Wikimedia-l] Paid editing v. paid advocacy (editing)
Frank Schulenburg wrote: [...] it is widely known that paid editing is frowned upon by many in the editing community and by the Wikimedia Foundation. No. Paid editing is not the same as paid advocacy (editing). This is a very important point. Suggested reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Dominic/FAQ https://blog.wikimedia.org/?p=25830 N.B. an example of paid editing that few would likely have an issue with in the first link and Sue's careful and correct wording in the second link. If we're going to have such a fine distinction, we should probably better document it to avoid misunderstandings. MZMcBride ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Paid editing v. paid advocacy (editing)
Thank you very much for raising this distinction MZ. It's a very important one and, in the recriminations about this particular event, I would hate for the 'baby to get thrown out with the bathwater' by losing this distinction. -Liam / Wittylama wittylama.com Peace, love metadata On 9 January 2014 13:22, MZMcBride z...@mzmcbride.com wrote: Frank Schulenburg wrote: [...] it is widely known that paid editing is frowned upon by many in the editing community and by the Wikimedia Foundation. No. Paid editing is not the same as paid advocacy (editing). This is a very important point. Suggested reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Dominic/FAQ https://blog.wikimedia.org/?p=25830 N.B. an example of paid editing that few would likely have an issue with in the first link and Sue's careful and correct wording in the second link. If we're going to have such a fine distinction, we should probably better document it to avoid misunderstandings. MZMcBride ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
