User:Buster7/Sandbox-Paid Operatives
Where the Traffic Is. WP's importance to the corporate world.[edit]
- According to Wikipedia, competitive intelligence is "the process by which business enterprises gather and analyze information on their external competitive environment." Wikipedia usually appears in one of the top 3 positions when doing a search. Marketing mavens are always looking for an edge. "The recent scandals over large companies paying Wikipedia editors to alter their entries show that the Internet has emerged as a true battleground for marketing and mind share". Most compamies, especially those with employees who have attempted to alter Wikipedia entries, are aware that negative entries in a Wikipedia article are victories for their competitors.
- The reason why companies worry so much about an entry into a user-generated Web encyclopedia lies in competitive intelligence and search analytics, within the new field of business intelligence.
- A search request on any search engine such as Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft, or Ask.com will invariably produce Wikipedia results entries on the first page of the results list or a search engine results page (SERP). This is a case example of the importance of competitive intelligence and search analytics. Ficticious "Company X" knows that a user search will result in a visit to WP where negative entries exist. Therefore, Company X supporters reason that Wikipedia must be "helped" to present the "correct version of reality" to users. The Internet is highly compoetitive and every little edge is valuable. If Wikipedia did not show up so early on the commercial search engines, protecting the articles would not happen. "Where the traffic is, is search analytics".
Slim Virgin/Paid Editors[edit]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:SlimVirgin#Paid_editors
LORD BELL AND HIS WIKI-WAR[edit]
The controversial lobbying firm Bell Pottinger asked the founder of Wikipedia to advise its staff on ethical internet editing.
Lord Bell, the head of Chime Communications which owns Bell Pottinger, invited Jimmy Wales to speak to around 50 senior staff in the wake of an investigation by The Bureau of Investigative Journalism for The Independent, which revealed the company was secretly altering Wikipedia pages on behalf of its clients.
Mr Wales admitted that the Wikipedia rules about paid-for advocates editing the site were "a bit mushy" and should be tightened up. But he insisted PR professionals should always be transparent about their identity and client when editing pages.
According to the magazine PR Week, Lord Bell replied: "We don't become criminals because we are paid. We've done nothing wrong."
Mr Wales responded: "I'm uncomfortable when you say you have not done anything wrong."
Fifth most-visited[edit]
With credibility came scale. Today, Wikipedia has more than 488 million unique visitors each month, making it the fifth most-visited Web site in the world behind Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and Facebook and ahead of Amazon, Apple and eBay, according to comScore data from January.
http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1P2-104265.html[edit]
- Wikipedia's Help From the Hill; Edits Lead Site to Block Some Lawmakers' Offices
- This crime-scene-style investigation points to staff members of at least five offices: Sen. Norm Coleman (R-Minn.), Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.), Sen. Conrad Burns (R-Mont.) and Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa).
- In all cases the edits removed factually accurate but unflattering descriptions of the lawmakers, and in many cases they added some beautifying language describing awards or glorifying legislative records.
Transparency under attack[edit]
In case you're wondering, and before you write off blogs as dead in the water, there is such a thing as a code of ethics in this mercurial space we loosely refer to as buzz marketing. The lines separating church and state, as it were, have always been blurred, even in the pre-blog days, but the Internet has accelerated the pace. There's a thin line between paid and "natural" search engine results, political advocacy groups writing Wikipedia entries, or bloggers who are constant targets for advertisers that want to blend their message with the content. WOMMA, the Word of Mouth Marketing Association, outlines its ethical guidelines as falling into three buckets: honesty of relationship, honesty of opinion and honesty of identity. These guidelines are designed to protect consumers. In the honesty of relationship section, marketers must agree to "practice openness about the relationship between consumers, advocates and marketers" and "to disclose their relationship with marketers in their communications with other consumers." According to the honesty of opinion section, marketers must make sure that endorsements "always reflect the honest opinions, findings, beliefs or experience of the endorser." And the honesty of identity section says that they must agree to never "blur identification in a manner that might confuse or mislead consumers as to the true identity of the individual with whom they are communicating."
- The "Honesty of Identity" section of WOMMA's (Word of Mouth Marketing Association) ethical guidelines states: Marketers must agree to never "blur identification in a manner that might confuse or mislead consumers as to the true identity of the individual with whom they are communicating."
BP talk[edit]
- (ec; reply to Kaldari) The problem is that we're not in a position to judge those drafts. Determining neutrality requires being familiar with the body of source material that exists on each of the issues. Ensuring the best sources were used, that there was no cherry-picking, no omission of fact, no key sources left out, no subtle rephrasing of the material, would involve a tremendous amount of work. That BP would write this is by definition controversial, especially because – and this is the key issue – our readers didn't know they were reading BP's words. And when it comes to the environmental issues, it's even more controversial given that the company faced criminal charges. When Microsoft paid someone to change its article, Jimbo suggested it publish its views elsewhere so that we could cite them (see "Microsoft Violates Wikipedia's Sacred Rule"). I think that would be a good way forward here; BP could publish its perspective on its website and we could link to it. If there are simple factual errors, Arturo can list them here, so that editors can fix them. But we can't have any more of BP's words being added to the article unless they're in quotations marks and attributed to the company. SlimVirgin (talk) 22:11, 19 March 2013 (UTC)
- On another part of the issue, I am not prepared to do formal approval of an article, or comprehensive fact-checking of an article edit. All I will do is look at general fairness, try to spot obvious errors and inconsistencies, and check any references or statements that seem particular unlikely. Otherwise, I might as well write the article itself, and if that's what I want to do, I do it. I'm not going to put my own reputation on the line certifying something I didn't write in a subject where I am not an expert. It's like AfC--I check that it meets the basic requirements and that it has a good chance of not being challenged at AfD--I do not do anything like a GA review. If something looks so bad that it needs to be rewritten and if it interests me and I know enough, I may possibly rewrite it. What I will do on a talk page is give advice, if I think I'm qualified. I am not here to judge, and none of us are. DGG ( talk ) 22:34, 19 March 2013 (UTC)
- The only way to make a fair judgement of a summary of a corporation's environmental record is to look at a summary written by their rep and to look at a summary written by one of their "green" critics along side of it. It is not just a simple matter of checking four paragraphs for "issues". Information can be presented in a manner that accents the positive and minimizes the negative, to say nothing of just leaving some things out completely. Here is another summary of BP's environmental record for comparison :[13] BTW, regarding Arturo I want to say that I certainly do like him and I've never felt that he has attempted anything sneaky or dishonest. Furthermore, all things considered, I have felt that his edit suggestions have been, as far as I could tell, accurate and fair. It's only when Arturo rewrote this more controversial section that I have become very concerned. And then when editors that have never worked on the article began to arrive to place it in the article for him I began to wonder why I have spent so many hours and endless pages of talk when a paid editor and his crew can come and insert anything they want into the article. When I saw that Silverseren had even posted a few links so that that his posse could do a quick BP for Dummies read to bring their level of understanding of what they were about to vote on up to snuff--well who wouldn't wonder if some editors had not taken the "anybody can edit" slogan too far. Gandydancer (talk) 00:32, 20 March 2013 (UTC)
- If my name is being dragged through the mud I am not aware of it but I certainly have done nothing to be ashamed of. Nor has Arturo. He has been doing exactly what he is being paid to do and has not, as far as I know, done anything to break the present guidelines for paid editors. If some editors really believe that paid editors are more interested in a fair and balanced article than an article that makes their corporation look good, that's neither Arturo's fault nor mine. However I am critical of the fact that it is apparently perfectly acceptable for a paid editor to post at WP:COIN with a question about what to do if their suggestions are being ignored when it results in not only an answer, but the arrival of an editor to post their rewrites as well. And I have made no secret of the fact that I am highly critical of fellow-editor Silverseren's willingness to furnish bodies to push paid editor versions into the article and I don't believe that my position is disrespectful of Wikipedia or the community. The only good thing that I can think of to say of Silverserne's actions is that he was so brazen as to be entirely honest and sincere when he told Arturo, "I would suggest you just focus on answering my questions and ignore them. I'll also make sure to get some outside editors to review the sections before implementation so there isn't a problem." He has done more to hurt the case for paid editors than any number of critics could have done. Gandydancer (talk) 16:08, 26 March 2013 (UTC)
break[edit]
- Similarly, whether Arturo has been nice is not the issue, and whether he has followed our rules isn't the issue either. To paraphrase Goldacre, this is the serious business of producing an article that our readers can trust. If the current rules allow BP to rewrite the article, then the current rules suck. It's not a question of fault or who is or isn't polite. It's just a silly situation that we have to try to fix. SlimVirgin (talk) 21:31, 20 March 2013 (UTC)
WP is free and open[edit]
- As to your first point, there is a massive imbalance between the resources BP is capable of committing to promote itself on Wikipedia and the resources we are capable of committing to review their efforts. I see that as an issue. Perhaps you don't, which is fine, but surely the logical basis for my concern is obvious even if you don't share it?
As to your second point, I'm sort of tired of hearing our open-editing model put forth as a justification to ignore or downplay this issue. Yes, we differ from other reference works in that we allow open editing. But our open-editing model only makes it more important, rather than less, to craft a serious and responsible approach to corporate input. Do you see the paradox? We're much more vulnerable to editorial conflicts of interest than other reference works, but we take the subject much less seriously. It's dangerously narcissistic (although also typically Wikipedian) to believe that because our editing model is unique, we're therefore exempt from the usual concerns and responsibilities affecting other serious, reputable reference works.
As to your question about demarcating conflicts of interest, if you're seriously interested there are actually a number of published guidelines and other information about where editors should draw the line in terms of conflicts of interest. Often, the relevant standard is that any "relevant financial conflict of interest" must be disclosed; these would include stock ownership, employment, or litigation, but would exclude, for instance, strong personal feelings about a subject.
And let's talk about "anyone can edit". Our policies clearly state: "Wikipedia is free and open, but restricts both freedom and openness where they interfere with creating an encyclopedia." It is possible for us to maintain a free and open editing model and to create a cohesive and responsible policy constraining editorial conflicts of interest. MastCell Talk 20:47, 28 March 2013 (UTC)
- As to your first point, there is a massive imbalance between the resources BP is capable of committing to promote itself on Wikipedia and the resources we are capable of committing to review their efforts. I see that as an issue. Perhaps you don't, which is fine, but surely the logical basis for my concern is obvious even if you don't share it?
Modified COI tag?[edit]
I think that an appropriate disclosure might help resolve this recurrent problem. I'm experimenting with an altered COI tag in my sandbox [1]. The aim would be to 1. Provide notice to readers that a person connected to the subject matter has a major, continuing role on the talk page, as opposed to a limited, error-correction appearance; 2. To more visibly solicit subject matter experts who may not be regular Wikipedia editors. Based on the discussion above, I presume that there is a shortage of persons familiar with BP who would be able to check out the BP contributions without exerting major amounts of time; 3. To discourage large corporations from dispatching their employees to edit Wikipedia articles. Coretheapple (talk) 20:05, 28 March 2013 (UTC)
- No one is going to tag the article itself with this sort of thing, that suggestion is quite frankly dead on arrival. If there is a problem with the article, then fix it via normal editing and dispute resolution processes. The fact that a person from BP edited the BP article is not in itself an actual problem, and there is no need to call such a thing to the readers' attention. Tarc (talk) 20:09, 28 March 2013 (UTC)
- This tag would definitely require a change in the Wikipedia perception of "conflict of interest." It is not now considered a conflict of interest for a large corporation to assign an employee or a team of employees to have a continuing, significant influence on its article through the talk page. Indeed, such contributions are actively praised by the founder of Wikipedia. I'm working from the assumption that this loophole and mindset is absurd, and needs to be addressed. Disclosure is a traditional method of dealing with conflicts of interest. If a notice to readers is "dead on arrival," then I suggest that the COI policies of Wikipedia require change to bring them in line with real-world publishing requirements. Coretheapple (talk) 20:16, 28 March 2013 (UTC)
- I would really appreciate it if this section could be for discussing or organizing a review of the edits made by BP and Chevron employees. There are several other places on this talk page to discuss more general issues. Thanks. Delicious carbuncle (talk) 20:14, 28 March 2013 (UTC)
- I've put this in a separate section to address your concern. Coretheapple (talk) 20:22, 28 March 2013 (UTC)
Crowdsourcing[edit]
- Wales understood that when a top-down editor-driven model doesn't work, a bottom-up crowdsource model can take its place. There's no way a team of hired writers could produce the 2.2 million articles in English (and the thousands of translations or original contributions in dozens of other languages) that now comprise Wikipedia.
- But quantity isn't everything. What about accuracy? In 2005, the British science journal Nature examined the entries on a variety of subjects from Wikipedia and the online Britannica. On average, the study found that the error rates for the two Encyclopedias were about the same. (Britannica disputed the findings; Nature stands by them.)
- Why isn't Wikipedia a morass of errors? Although it may not have formal peer review, Wikipedia leverages the strength of the crowd ... and some clever programming. The system can mark articles as being incomplete or lacking a neutral point of view, which allows other users to come along and improve the article.
- Jeremy W. Crampton is a professor at Georgia State University. He can be reached via e-mail at jerampton@gsu.edu.
"We can not play innocents in a world that is not innocent"[edit]
Why independent editors are leaving Wikipedia, please read User talk:Slim Virgin#Re: BP <Retired>