Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2015-07-15/Op-ed

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• Who decides "deserves careful scrutiny"? — Neonorange (talk) 02:01, 17 July 2015 (UTC)
• It seems to me that fixing a typo or other trivial maintenance work could be done by COI editors if, as suggested in this op-ed, they clearly flagged in their edit summary that they are a COI editor and that other editors are encouraged to review the edit for appropriateness. I'm considerably more concerned about the work of undeclared COI editors than COI editors who are transparent and are making good-faith efforts to comply with Wikipedia policies. Unfortunately, there seem to be a substantial number of COI editors who don't know the rules, and some who actively engage in unethical conduct. How to improve this situation is under discussion in many places, on and off wiki, among good-faith editors. --Pine^✉ 05:40, 17 July 2015 (UTC)

• There are a couple of paid COI editors who I assist by carefully examining the version they prefer (typically posted in their userspace) and any comments from other editors on the article talk page and then replacing the existing article if it is an improvement. Often I suggest changes first. Of course I take full responsibility for what I post, and the paid COI editor must follow the advice at Wikipedia:Plain and simple conflict of interest guide or I will not help him/her. I would be willing to expand the number of paid COI editors I help in this way, and I encourage other Wikipedia editors to help as well.

The best way to discourage stealth/biased paid COI editors is for their customers to see that they are wasting their money paying for edits that are quickly removed, and to see that money spent on paid COI editors who follow WP:BPCA and WP:PSCOI results in a much-improved article that doesn't get reverted. As editors, we need to support the good guys and hinder the bad guys. --Guy Macon (talk) 13:56, 17 July 2015 (UTC)

• With regard to "if Flagged Revisions were to make a comeback", it sounds like the authors think this doesn't exist on the English Wikipedia. But it does. It's called "pending changes protection". You can see the queue here. So one option to the COI issue would be to have a mechanism by which a COI editor could put a proposed edit into that queue - for example, a "Submit as a pending change" button. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 17:20, 17 July 2015 (UTC)

• We have things called Wikipedia guidelines and policies. The "bright line rule" is an attempt to make a fake guideline/policy that has not actually gone through the procedure one normally goes through to make a real guideline/policy. Ken Arromdee (talk) 19:41, 17 July 2015 (UTC)

• This seemed contradictory. You expect someone with a conflict of interest to disclose it, and then not edit the topic for which they have a conflict? Does that really seem likely. What if someone doesn't disclose it, but only makes good solid edits with reliable sources, no one was hurt. Popish Plot (talk) 19:54, 17 July 2015 (UTC)

• I would be okay with "emergency" edits like BLP- and vandal-fixes and other edits that a banned editor is allowed to make. I would also be okay with respect to edits to pending-change-protected articles OR where the edit is similarly "held for review, a mechanism where paid editors could make clerical/maintenance edits as described in the Signpost article, provided that the edit is clearly labeled "paid edit." A new "paid edit" tag for such edits would be very helpful for those watching the change-log. I would be against opening paid editors to making edits that are immediately visible unless that same edit would be allowed by a banned editor (e.g. BLP-violation and vandalism-undoing edits). — Preceding unsigned comment added by Davidwr (talk • contribs)

• "The best way to discourage stealth/biased paid COI editors is for their customers to see that they are wasting their money paying for edits that are quickly removed." Guy Macon has it exactly right. The problem is that the client is almost always paying for biased editing and the editor is promising that the editing will stick. Like all Wikipedia's editing problems, policing this behavior is labor intensive. Solving this problem is otherwise unrealistic. Chris Troutman (talk) 11:09, 18 July 2015 (UTC)

• The "bright line rule" is not actually a guarantee of safety--I see it more as a minimum expectation. The real rule is WP:NPOV, and the number of paid editors I trust to always follow what I consider NPOV is very low. Many of them have by now learned enough not to f=delete negative material, but the inclination to insert positive material that a true npov editor would not have inserted is almost always there. More to the point proposed here, I have seen on wiki and at otrs a considerable number of company PR staff wishing to make routine updating changes. For about 2/3 the cases, there's no problem at all--often it's just a mater of substituting the new logo. For the other half, either they are trying to insert advertising under the guise of routine fixes--not necessarily in bad faith,; rather, they do not really understand the difference, or the article has so many previous problems that it needs drastic rewriting or removal, and the updating may well be to material which should be there in the first place. It is extremely hard for any editor to be truly NPOV in all respects--if we didn't care about it, we wouldn't be working on it. But in practice monetary compensation has a unique effect that other forms of pov do not. (that doesn't mean that some of them aren't equally harmful in other ways--I'm thinking of edits by fans of a performer or political supporters of a POV, or alumni of a college), DGG ( talk ) 09:36, 19 July 2015 (UTC)

• You said "if we didn't care about it, we wouldn't be working on it." By and large, that's true. However, every now and then when I have a few moments to spare, I click "random article" and either do clerical cleanup or actually add content to an article whose subject I don't really care about. I guess you are right in one sense though - I spend time working on "it" not because I a care about that topic or that article but because I care about the project as a whole. There are others - mostly those who "patrol" things like new-pages/recent-changes or who patrol cleanup- or similar categories - who edit articles whose contents they don't care about much more than I do. Yes, I know you know all of this already, I'm writing it more for the benefit of new editors and non-editors who may stumble across this page. davidwr/(talk)/(contribs) 04:06, 20 July 2015 (UTC)

• Most non paid editors and paid WiR care about the encyclopedia. Paid advocacy editors generally only care about the articles they are being paid for and about the happiness of those who are paying them. This is a critical difference and not one that can be easily dealt with. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 19:38, 21 July 2015 (UTC)
• For me, the apparently solid consensus speaks volumes. ResMar 04:56, 22 July 2015 (UTC)