Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2020-03-01/From the editor

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Four comments:

1. The WMF needs to start crawling before they run. They need to fix the entirety of the admin tool package before I consider supporting any attempt by them to deploy any form of machine learning to tackle the problem.
2. The technical bar to create a new article for spammed subjects should increase a little. The moratorium proposed last month is too extreme and counterproductive. Something like 20-50 edits should do.
3. The remaining suggestions are sensible, though I very much prefer a total ban altogether.
4. Other suggestions include increasing sourcing requirements for determining the notability of BLPs to a similar standard to WP:CORP and increasing specific biographical notability guidelines (the various sports notability guidelines are probably the worst - sports players commonly become businesspeople after retirement from sports and thus join the UPE target market).

As I pointed out in November, UPE is an intractible problem because a $10k spend on Wikipedia spamming buys nearly a year's worth of English speaking third world labour, which is extremely cheap and plentiful. The conclusion that we need to streamline as much as possible the removal of UPE is correct. MER-C 18:57, 1 March 2020 (UTC)

That's a good point #4 I hadn't considered before, especially if you include endorsements in ex-sportspeople's business interests. Just one quickly searched example: Alejandro Villanueva (American football)#Endorsements. Obviously a notable BLP, but is the endorsement encyclopedic? ☆ Bri (talk) 19:04, 1 March 2020 (UTC)

I'd regard that as trivia. MER-C 19:14, 1 March 2020 (UTC)

I removed the section in the Villanueva article. The sole source was military.com, which fails WP:RS. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 19:20, 1 March 2020 (UTC)

One more thing: spam grows exponentially. An attention seeking entity sees spammy articles about similar attention seeking attention seeking entities and decides they want their own. The rate at which spam gets added to Wikipedia is proportional to the amount of spam already there. MER-C 19:18, 1 March 2020 (UTC)

• If a partial informal approach was being considered, notifying companies that use of certain paid-PR companies will be automatically prohibited from even otherwise legitimate paid editing. While I'm reticent about giving a positive list of potential paid editors, having a firm, very public, blacklist might help provide some economic incentive Nosebagbear (talk) 20:20, 1 March 2020 (UTC)
  • I had mixed feelings when I wrote that the WMF should give out the usernames to all suspected UPE editors. I guess it comes down to "what degree of suspicion", but I'd like to make sure that if another Status Labs situation comes along the entire community is informed about it. In general the position should be to disclose to the community. OTOH, I wrote in the next paragraph that the WMF should investigate some of the claims of UPE in an informal manner - just to get information - they should do this as well - finding out what is going on is hugely important. Hopefully they can find a way to do both that is not contradictory. I would never suggest providing a white-list. I've seen 3 paid editors who credibly claimed to follow our rules, but after watching for awhile I'm sure I would never recommend 2+ of them. OK, 1 is sorta ok, but I wouldn't want it on my conscience if I made a mistake!
  • We've already got something of a blacklist going @Bri: should have the link. Certain we should maintain and formalize a blacklist. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 21:10, 1 March 2020 (UTC)
    • It's WP:PAIDLIST. The entire first section is for companies whose actors have been blocked at least once. ☆ Bri (talk) 21:15, 1 March 2020 (UTC)
• MER-C is dead on about the "exponential" bit, and I suspect a lot of that is about ignorance rather than malice. I have more than once had a spammer come to my talk page protesting a G11 deletion, telling me "But X, Y, and Z look like what I wrote, and I based it on that!". In more than one case, that's led to nominating X, Y, and Z for deletion too (generally successfully), because the spammer was right: Those were PR puff pieces too, and still got into the encyclopedia. I can't even find myself to too much fault the paid editor in that case; they looked at similar stuff and figured that must be the acceptable way to do things. We've got to get better at ensuring we stick to encyclopedic subjects, and strictly enforce the requirements for sourcing. Seraphimblade ^{Talk to me} 21:24, 1 March 2020 (UTC)
• The saddest thing is that a lot, and I mean a lot, of users are actually indifferent to paid editing - there are diffs, but I'm not going to dig them out now. Paid editing is an area for which there is no way of obtaining any metrics. It's probably enormous and it's probably even happening among the 300+ WMF employees - because it's happened before. The scale of it is so large that an RfC to ban it outright would probably fail. Somewhat indirectly, and perhaps ironically, it also contributed to yesterday's Arbcom decision to desysop another admin. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 00:48, 2 March 2020 (UTC)
• An easy way to help: please comment on discussions at Wikipedia:WikiProject Deletion sorting/Companies. --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 03:52, 2 March 2020 (UTC)
• These stories always tend to miss the forest for the trees. One reason our coverage of companies is so bad and so easy to be exploited by spammers is because editors who do quality work frequently can't be bothered with the extreme risk of nonsense deletion: it's rare that there's a household-name major corporation that someone hasn't tried to whack at least once. And so the neverending attacks on legitimate business content that these discussions inevitably wind up inciting (as the above comments demonstrate) make the problem worse by driving anyone not doing NPP from the whole area (editors who could be doing an efficient job of watching for paid editing, much as editors in other areas of interests keep crap out of their own areas). The Drover's Wife (talk) 09:37, 2 March 2020 (UTC)
  • If your point is that there are too many people spending too much time deleting company articles, I have to disagree. As soon as we let up on this, or say something like "we're going to be kinder and gentler on business articles" the flood of corp spam will become a deluge. There are at least a million new businesses in the US each year. They'd all love to get free advertising, most of them will get a write up in a local newspaper if they want to go to the bother. 90% will be defunct in 5-10 years, and we won't even be able to get a news story in confirmation of their non-existence. There's a reason that routine coverage doesn't count for notability. There's a reason that companies will ignore that.
  • And this isn't about big, obviously notable (BON) companies. I figure there are about 60,000 BONs in the world max. That would include all the actively traded stocks in the US as approximated by the Wilshire 5000 which now has less than 4,000 companies in the index. Add in similar sized private companies (Cargill, Koch Industries, etc., government sponsored companies Fanny Mae, etc., some other financial business, accounting firms, etc. that are (or were) usually partnerships, and that might be 10,000 BONs in the US. Adding in all the BONs in the UK, EU, Japan, China, and India wouldn't multiply the US number by 6. Adding in the top 10 companies in each country of the world only gets another 2,000. So 60,000 companies in the world that we should be able to get good info on. But when I look for these big companies, I'll estimate that half of them are missing here. Why? a lot of them aren't consumer businesses that are looking for advertising. How many businesses have Wikipedia articles? I'll estimate 4.8% of 6,020,000, which rounds up to 290,000. So something over 80% of Wikipedia articles are small, hard to find info on, usually consumer businesses looking for free ads. That's a fairly quick, broad brush approach. There will be lots of exceptions, but it gives you an idea of what we're up against. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 19:09, 2 March 2020 (UTC)
    • @Smallbones: - I know what we're up against: I'm an AfC reviewer who, when I do it, is as reject-happy with corporate crap as everyone else. The problem is that, if there's (as you say, and a reasonable estimate) 60,000 notable corporations in the world, we've got a culture that means people are likely to try to whack about 59,000 of those at some stage. Happens all the time. This is a huge disincentive to anyone apart from NPP people being active in the business space. That's why most of those notable companies don't have articles. It's also a huge barrier towards having the amount of editors doing quality control that you'd get in other spaces. We need to find a way of stopping people trying to throw the baby out with the bathwater because it's hugely detrimental to our coverage of the area (both in terms of building good content and pruning crap). The Drover's Wife (talk) 23:39, 2 March 2020 (UTC)
• WP:AfD is one of the best processes for getting rid of spam. Bearian (talk) 15:00, 2 March 2020 (UTC)
  • And painfully slow at times. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 19:09, 2 March 2020 (UTC)
• I dissented last month from the proposal to institute a moratorium on new articles about businesses. This article is much more positive and pragmatic. There are several excellent proposals here, and I commend Smallbones for these ideas. Cullen³²⁸ Let's discuss it 08:34, 3 March 2020 (UTC)
• Don't get your hopes up about the legal system fixing things. Law enforcement doesn't care about this kind of stuff. A civil suit would likely be tough because to get damages you have to show the court that some party was harmed and how. I'm not sure if an injunction would be easy to get or would accomplish much. Given that Status Labs has some well-heeled clients there's also the non-zero risk of someone wealthy getting upset about all this and deciding to try to bleed the WMF dry through legal fees. Fees easily can climb into many millions for any case that drags on. --47.146.63.87 (talk) 06:30, 5 March 2020 (UTC)