Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2020-08-30/From the archives

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If they'd known then how much effort would be involved in the next 15 years against it, it might have doomed the project! Nosebagbear (talk) 19:19, 30 August 2020 (UTC)

Well, that's the way of most pioneering efforts that succeed against all odds, isn't it? When you look back at everything that went into it and consider how many times along the way it could've easily all fallen apart with the eyes of your modern-day self, the idea of choosing to face all of that would be understandably daunting. Fortunately for every one of those long-odds success stories, people on the starting line of such things rarely know just what they're getting into! -- FeRDNYC (talk) 22:06, 30 August 2020 (UTC)

• It's so weird to see this article use "the Wikipedia" in places. Like how Zuckerberg used to talk about "the Facebook", way back in the beginning. Glad we grew out of that! -- FeRDNYC (talk) 13:22, 31 August 2020 (UTC)
  • Poke you on the Facebook! Nosebagbear (talk)
• I use the DuckDuckGo search engine and, if there is a Wikipedia article on whatever I'm searching for, it will appear in the upper right corner of the search results. To the casual user it gives the appearance of credibility no matter how questionably sourced that article may be. In the case of BLPs paid editors have clearly decided that promoting their clients on Wikipedia far outweighs the risk that other editors can change their client bios. The paid editors have all day to monitor their client's social media because that's what they do for a living. If another editor makes changes they can immediately revert or subtly make incremental daily edits to get it back to what they want it to be. From what I've seen in AfD discussions promotional editing seems to fall into one of two categories. The first are fans of a subject who genuinely like the performer and think they should be on Wikipedia. In good faith they write an article but don't understand WP:GNG or WP:RS. They think Youtube subscribers or Instagram followers count for notability. Add to this the services like authoritytitans who send promotional material to what appear to be legitimate news sites. The second group are paid editors who might, for example, vastly inflate a passing mention or single quote made by their client in the New York Times and imply that it was a full biographical profile. They have professional associates who can be called to the AfD page to counter and overwhelm any !Delete comments. And, unless there is overwhelming consensus for deletion, the default decision is to keep the article. Thus, promotional bios and product spam tends to stay. Blue Riband► 19:01, 1 September 2020 (UTC)

Quite sinister your description, Mr. Blue, of professional paid agents abusing Wikipedia just because they can without much risks. But I'd guess that's possible and real. Nevertheless I'd say in normal editing days I don't even think about that, I'm just not that paranoid. But OTOH the possibilities are still creepy. -- Just N. (talk) 16:08, 5 September 2020 (UTC)

• Ah, but a long-time would-be rival has taken on the definite article: The Citizendium Jim.henderson (talk) 20:05, 3 September 2020 (UTC)