User talk:DGG/Archive 0.25

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2011

PR firm discussion

Hi,

I really appreciated your comments at User talk:Jimbo Wales. You said you've worked with a number of internal PR departments, but no PR firms, because none will admit it. I'd like to work with you, representing the first firm that admits it. I've been editing here seven years. My contribution history just shows a year and nine months because I had to change my username due an off-wiki situation, but my current account has over 5,000 edits and I've been involved in a couple leadership positions here. I believe in Wikipedia and its mission, to the point of telling clients "Sorry, we can't do that for you." Words/phrases like "premier," "first company to..." and "world-wide" do not appear in my writing. I see a potential for PR firms to have interests aligned with Wikipedia's mission and contribute high quality photos, articles, and other items that will improve the quality of the encyclopedia. I'm coming into an executive role with my new firm, and so I'm not subject to pressure from clients, because our company's reputation and effectiveness mean more to us than a little money from a client who just wants to promote him/herself. I've contacted ArbCom and received advice from them about how to proceed. Would you be willing to work with me on this? One of two things will happen: Either my firm and Wikipedia will find a mutually beneficial situation that could become the model for future collaboration, or it will become clear that it is impossible for PR firms to edit neutrally, and thus this experiment will be clear and incontravertable evidence of the same.

To be honest, if this experiment shows that it is impossible for PR firms to work with Wikipedia (or that it requires too much AfD time or editing time), I'd like to know that, because I'll be leading the effort to detect them and ban them, even though I work for one. Why? Because I want the playing field to be level for all the firms. Either we all have a way to work transparently, or else none of use are allowed.

Please let me know your thoughts. ɳorɑfʈ ^Talk! 03:13, 7 September 2011 (UTC)

reply in progress., will take a day or so. DGG ( talk ) 05:32, 7 September 2011 (UTC)

Thank you! ɳorɑfʈ ^Talk! 10:38, 7 September 2011 (UTC)

Hi, got your email, but have been unusually busy. Will get back to you when I get a free moment. Thanks. ɳorɑfʈ ^Talk! 08:09, 12 September 2011 (UTC)

Chinmaya.328

Thanks for your comments on User talk:Chinmaya.328 (though I'm not certain the editor even knows of the existence of talk pages). The user's other article, Themis Medicare, reminded me exactly of your recent comments on Wales's talk page about identifying when a PR firm has written something...a list of milestones, reference to the company being first at numerous things, etc. As a side note, I don't know (and maybe you don't want to make public) how your conversations with NoRaft went, but I support the idea of working with paid editors, not just blanket forbidding them (since we can't even do that successfully anyway). I honestly don't get why Jimbo thinks that such involvement is now and has always been forbidden and everyone knows that and no one disagrees. I totally accept that he opposes it, and even accept the idea that he/WMF can make a fiat rule against it, just not his idea that there is an obvious and overwhelming consensus that agrees with him. Qwyrxian (talk) 02:35, 14 September 2011 (UTC)

Yes, I saw that one--in fact, I would have listed it for deletion except that I saw you had worked on it. It's large enough that it might be notable, but whether I feel like doing the work for an article like that depends upon the factors of how important the company is & my opinion of the editor's good faith. I've had no conversations with NoRaft. I sent him an email, suggesting he privately & confidentially tell me who he is, & what articles he had written, but had no response. I will not do something potentially problematic with someone who hides his identity from me, any more than I go down dark alleys with masked strangers. I can see his problem, though--he's promised his clients confidentiality, and by our own rules I can't insist he tell me. Therefore, I shall do as always: any article he or anyone known or unknown asks me to look at on-wiki, I will look at and give my opinion and advice, on-wiki. I'll talk with even masked strangers in bright lit public places. I do not think Jimbo's ruling has literal consensus, but is rather one of the pious statements that nobody will openly challenge, but nobody will actually follow. It is even contradicted by his own statement of our basic policy, that anyone can edit. Anonymity has its benefits, but also its problems, and can lead to such paradoxes. DGG ( talk ) 04:02, 14 September 2011 (UTC)

COINAPO

Wanna take a look at the EU project article yourself? I think Crusio is pretty tired of dealing with that stuff. ASCIIn2Bme (talk) 13:58, 3 November 2011 (UTC)

• I'm still following it. The article creator requested some more time to improve the article. He has now written a nice well-sourced piece of text on nanoscience, which unfortunately has nothing directly to do with the "action" (I don't want to call this a project, because COST programs don't provide funding to conduct experiments, only funding for short reciprocal visits and to organize short meetings or summer schools). Once the editor tells me that it is finished, I intend to have another look and then proceed with AfD if I think notability has not been shown (which, frankly, I expect to happen, given the current progress). But it is true that I am tiring of it and I have a lot of meetings/travel coming up, so I may not be able to devote much time to this in the near future. --Crusio (talk) 15:08, 3 November 2011 (UTC)
  • Okay then. User:Materialscientist suggested on his talk page that the nanotubes part (pictures etc.) could be merged to another, more closely related article. ASCIIn2Bme (talk) 15:58, 3 November 2011 (UTC)
    • So the steps would be first moving that part, and then deciding if there were anything left. What would be left essentially would be the list of meetings. I've no general objection to articles on series of meetings, if they are substantial meetings that lead to a series of specific publications. But how many pf these groups are there? DGG ( talk ) 23:25, 3 November 2011 (UTC)

Proposed deletion II: Academy of Achievement

Hello, DGG. You have new messages at Talk:Academy of Achievement.
You can remove this notice at any time by removing the {{Talkback}} or {{Tb}} template.

Thanks. I just found your name in the article history. -SusanLesch (talk) 02:57, 21 November 2011 (UTC)

Regarding entries from Marketing Metrics book on Wikipedia

After reviewing your comments, I would like to fill you in our proposed changes:

(1) We have worked directly with the authors (including Dr. Paul Farris, Darden School of Business, and Dr. David Reibstein, Wharton School of Business) to obtain the rights to use the Marketing Metrics book on Wikipedia, and the publisher of the book (Pearson Education, Inc.) has agreed to this usage. Would you please let us know exactly what documentation we need to send to you or Wikipedia? Once we get the information, we will forward the resulting document(s) to you as soon as possible.

(2) We will review each of the existing entries to ensure quotation marks on all information quoted directly from the Marketing Metrics book and add additional sources where possible.

(3) We would like to work with you to properly construct the MASB information at the end of the reference to reflect the intent of the project (described below).

(4) Finally, we would also like to work with you directly to avoid or resolve any questions or issues that may arise as we work to increase the understanding of marketing by improving marketing entries on Wikipedia.

Our Wikipedia participation is on behalf of the MASB Common Language Project led by Dr. Paul Farris (University of Virginia Darden School of Business), Carl Spaulding (Nielsen Catalina Ventures), and Dr. David Reibstein (Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania). The objective of the project is to eliminate ambiguity in marketing terminology and definitional differences among marketing, C-suite management, and finance within organizations and across businesses and industries by establishing MASB-endorsed common language for marketing activities and metrics.

Our ultimate goal is to encourage marketing academics and practitioners to write and revise Wikipedia entries so that Wikipedia becomes the repository of “common language” for marketers and becomes a preferred source for definitions of marketing activities and metrics, much as the Association for Psychological Science “Wikipedia Initiative” is attempting to do for psychology. To this end, we are discussing with the American Marketing Association how to engage their members in our effort.

The Marketing Accountability Foundation and its Marketing Accountability Standards Board is the independent, private sector, self-governing body authorized by its membership constituency to establish marketing measurement and accountability standards across industry and domain, for continuous improvement in financial performance and for the guidance and education of business decision makers and users of performance and financial information. The body is operated exclusively for charitable, educational, scientific, & literary purposes within the meaning of Section 501 (c) (3) of Internal Revenue Code and its members include academics and practitioners from the marketing and finance disciplines.

Karenmharvey (talk) 19:04, 23 November 2011 (UTC)

I would be delighted if we could have this material; I have frequently expressed the dismay at out lack of coverage on these subjects. There are, as you have noticed, some problems:

Licensing is relatively straightforward, but you must do more than just permit the work to be used in Wikipedia. Wikipedia content must be free--free for anyone in the world to use and reuse as they see fit. Therefore, you must explicitly license the rights to the material according to our licensing, using the WP:CC-BY-SA and the GFDL licenses, as explained in WP:COPYRIGHT and WP:Donating copyrighted materials; be aware that these licenses give everyone in the world an irrevocable license to reuse and alter the material, even for commercial purposes. in any manner they choose, provided they attribute the content. The necessary licenses must be sent from the copyright owner of the material as prescribed at WP:DCM to our OTRS system.

But you need to understand that Wikipedia is free for anyone to edit--anyone who wishes to change or add to your material can do so, provided they have a source for their changes. Contributors here have no right of WP:OWNership. The actual quotations can of course not be tampered with, but any person, qualified or not, can remove or replace them or write something else entirely-- Wikipedia entries are not stable, and there is no person or group here with actual authority to decide what is the best version. There is nothing here that corresponds to the roles of a conventional editor-in-chief, or conventional referees. Changes do need to be discussed if challenged, but the result is decided by the consensus of whomever appears. We do not accept arguments from authority: if someone is a true expert in the subject they will need to show it not by formal qualifications, but by being able to make the most convincing arguments.

This is very much a different form of publication. So Wikipedia is not actually suitable for an actual standard: if you have a standard you want to control and make it available, you should host it on your own site. If you want other people to freely use it, including anyone who may want to write here, place the two licenses specified above on each web page.

I hope the psychology project you mention goes well; concern has been expressed about whether the self-confident amateurs and those out to prove a pet theory who abound in that field, often with fixed political or religious or cultural positions, will interfere with the entries so much as to make it unsatisfactory for their proper purposes. Some previous contributions in that subject area from true experts have been challenged and even rejected by those with a particular point of view. Those who, like myself, have an academic background and are devoted to honest science as much as to free content, try to help as much as possible, but we cannot guarantee to succeed, and we can act only as individuals. The projects which have gone well are those in subjects like dermatology or chemistry, where the unknowledgable or biased are not very likely to sound convincing. But I think the odds are very much in your favor: marketing and accounting and other such areas of business should be fields where this too can be accomplished--unlike some other areas of applied and theoretical economics.

As another point, Wikipedia is international, covering the whole world, not just English-speaking countries. You will presumably be presenting material according to the usual practice in the United States. You need to be sure to explicitly say so, and write in such a way that others can add corresponding sections explaining the meaning in their own country. You do not of course have to do it yourself, though if you do know the differences , it would be good to explain them to some extent. If the US practice is worldwide also, by all means say so, but do not write it such as way that the reader will assume it if it is not the case.

References should be not just to the works of your own group. The way of showing their degree of acceptance is to give references from other works. works clearly of authority in the subject such as standard textbooks. Make sure all schools of thought are represented, or at least indicated, if there should be differences.

It would be good to write an article on the MASB Common Language Project. There are obvious problems of WP:Conflict of Interest, but there is no reason not to write the article, explain the COI on the talk p; others will check it. If you tell me at a suitable point, I for one will do so. This of course also applies to the other organizations mentioned; it probably should also apply to the senior academics leading the group as individuals. Remember that the general reader is not concerned withthe details of internal organization, and outside references to the group or individual are needed also.

There are special problems in articles where the terms are used; do not make direct references to your group in every likely article. The internal links will lead to the main article on the term in question.

Remember we need more than definitions--what would help is context--the historical development and social implications of the particular terminology. Please be aware of our sister project, WP:Wiktionary, which is explicitly a dictionary and does want definitions--you might want to add material there also. They have their own rules, but they too fare free content in the same sense we are.

Now, I must give you a caveat: I speak here for myself only. (and, though I have some experience at Wikipedia, I am not in any sense a professional in your subject and have no relevant academic training or practical experience-. Actually, I have worked extensively with the publishers an academic librarian buys from, with whom I have many good relationships, and have learned much about their marketing perspectives.) Anyone else here who wants to differ from me, can do so. I have tried my best, however, to give you what I believe to be the standard policy and practices here, at least as I understand it. DGG ( talk ) 20:15, 23 November 2011 (UTC)

2012

Help for "Marketing Metrics" book

The authors of this book are interested in making it open source. Can you let me know what licensing will need to be filled out to make this possible? Also, could you provide me with an example of a Wikipedia entry for a textbook? Thanks so much for your help! — Preceding unsigned comment added by Karenmharvey (talk • contribs) 21:16, 4 January 2012 (UTC)

to make it open source, it must be published on the web with a CC-BY-ATT or CC-BY license or the equivalent, or better; a print only book could be published open source, letting people copy & redistribute as much as they want by scanning or photocopy, but if the purpose is widespread use, doing it that way doesn't help all that much; if the purpose is only letting people freely reuse pieces of it, it's a conceivable method. Examples of opens source books are Wikipedia: The Missing Manual by John Broughton in print) online at our own site  ; an example near your subject is at [1] and their print price list. Note that their book are CC3.0-ATT-NC-SA, and would thus not be considered open source for Wikipedia purposes) There's a good discussion at opensourcetext.org; see also opentextbook.org DGG ( talk ) 00:43, 5 January 2012 (UTC)

Wikiproject Cooperation

I just recently started Wikiproject Cooperation and I thought you would be interested. Thanks for your time. Silverseren^C 01:15, 10 January 2012 (UTC)

certainly I'm interesting, but I think we should try for a more specific name--more specific, but that won't scare people away, like the notorious ARS. DGG ( talk ) 02:33, 11 January 2012 (UTC)

PixelMEDIA article (and my other contributions)

Dear DGG, Thank you very much for the comments on my PixelMedia article that you posted at my Talk page. I have revised that article according to your comments and will also revise my previous articles soon using those same comments as a guide. I would appreciate it if you could review the PixelMedia article at your earliest convenience and let me know if it looks okay or if further changes are necessary. I will also inform you as I alter my previous articles so that you can review those as well.

I do have a question: Can you please clarify, or provide an example of, what you were referring to when you mentioned your concern about "the practice of inserting back references in the articles on these application to the products you are discussing"?

Thank you again for your feedback. I greatly appreciate it!Michael Leeman (talk) 18:20, 4 November 2011 (UTC)

replied on your user talk page. DGG ( talk ) 19:23, 4 November 2011 (UTC)

Thank you for your helpful advice, tips, and revisions! I hope to begin reworking my articles this week. Please know how grateful I am for your help.Michael Leeman (talk) 13:52, 9 November 2011 (UTC)

Dear DGG, I have revised two of my contributions - the PixelMEDIA and Widen Enterprises articles - per your recent comments. If you could please let me know how they look, I would be most grateful! I plan to then revise my other contributions accordinglyMichael Leeman (talk) 16:52, 10 November 2011 (UTC)

Dear DGG, I'm sorry to bother you, but when you have a chance can you please look over my revised PixelMEDIA and Widen Enterprises articles? I revised them per your recent comments and would like to know if they look okay to you. Thanks!Michael Leeman (talk) 14:03, 18 November 2011 (UTC)

Dear DGG, I revised the PixelMEDIA article to address all comments on its Discussion Page as well as the issues raised by the three tags. I've removed any promotional phrasing as well as any text passages that may have resembled the text of others. Could you please review and let me know how it looks? Thank you as always!Michael Leeman (talk) 15:35, 11 January 2012 (UTC)

(talk page stalker) based on the editor's cleanup, I have removed the maintenance templates from the pixelMedia page. Gaijin42 (talk) 15:51, 11 January 2012 (UTC)

Proposed compromise for Academy of Achievement

Hi DGG, I wanted to see if I could draw your attention back to the Academy of Achievement Talk page once more. I appreciate your removal of the EduCap section, although Ebikeguy disagreed, and I've offered up a possible solution. The short version is I've offered up a new version of the EduCap section that I think would work as a subsection of the new Background section I had proposed in late December. My hope is to restart discussion over there, and would like to have you involved. Cheers, WWB Too (talk) 23:14, 17 January 2012 (UTC)

since Wikipedia is about to be made inaccessible for 24 hours starting at 5:00 GMT 18 January, this will have to wait till we can resume. DGG ( talk ) 00:26, 18 January 2012 (UTC)

EduCap

Hi there DGG, I've been working on a new draft for EduCap, and since you originally created the current one by unmerging it from Academy of Achievement, I wondered if you would mind reviewing it? I've posted a longer explanation of the draft on the EduCap Talk page (here), and the new draft is in my userspace (here). Let me know if you're interested or have time to review it. Cheers, WWB Too (talk) 20:33, 12 March 2012 (UTC)

The main thing to do is remove some of the general background about student loans--a link to our articles is enough if our articles are adequate. Second, it needs some elucidation (with documentation) for the corporate organization. Does a company called educap own another company also called educap along with two other companies, or Does the company educap do some operations under its own name, and some through two subsidiary companies? DGG ( talk ) 00:12, 13 March 2012 (UTC)

Hi DGG, thanks for your reply and taking the time to look at my draft.

I'm not too sure what you see as "general background" about student loans—is it just the first sentence of History and operations? Anything else in particular? Otherwise, I believe the rest simply establishes what it is about EduCap that is noteworthy, i.e. how the company came to be and the type of loans it created. It may also be that the wording could be changed to make it clear how the information relates to EduCap.

About the relationship between the three organizations: aside from the sources already included, there isn't much more documentation available. What I've tried to outline in the draft is that EduCap is the company, Loan to Learn is the brand under which it provides loans and the Catherine B. Reynolds Foundation is a charitable foundation that it operates. For example, the July 16, 2007 Washington Post article states:

Under those arrangements, one legal entity, EduCap, operates under three different names: EduCap, the Catherine B. Reynolds Foundation and Loan to Learn, the brand under which EduCap loans money to students.

Let me know what you think; also, so far I've only reached out to you about it, but perhaps it would be worthwhile to seek input from WikiProject Education? Thanks for your time and attention. Cheers, WWB Too (talk) 19:02, 13 March 2012 (UTC)

Since it's hard to disentangle, the best way to put it will be to use the sentence from the Post, in quotes. (What I think it means is my second guess, that they operate under their own name and under two other names as well.) As for the background, best way I can show you is making the edit, so I will do that. There's usually a way to say it very concisely for those who haven't the least idea, and thenthey can look at the general article for the rest. Wikipedia is hypertext. DGG ( talk ) 23:01, 13 March 2012 (UTC)

Sure, feel free to edit my draft. I'm curious to see what you mean. WWB Too (talk) 23:53, 13 March 2012 (UTC)

Hi again. Still looking forward to your suggestion about streamlining the student loan industry info; meanwhile I've reviewed the draft with your suggestion in mind about quoting directly from the Post article, and I have some concerns about how this would work and whether it is necessary. EduCap's use of the brand name Loan to Learn is discussed in two places (the intro and History and operations) and the C.B.R. Foundation is discussed also in the intro and at length in a section titled Catherine B. Reynolds Foundation. I'd suggest our goal here is not to "disentangle" the names per se, but to reflect what reliable sources have written about them. I believe my current draft is already consistent with the Post's language, so I'd suggest leaving this alone. Thoughts? WWB Too (talk) 17:59, 14 March 2012 (UTC)

Hi there, DGG. It's been a few days, so I wanted to ask again if you'd show me what you meant with your suggestion for article. If you're busy—and it does look like it—I may go ahead and seek further input. Cheers, WWB Too (talk) 19:49, 19 March 2012 (UTC)

EduCap redux

Hi there, DGG. I realize you're working on other projects at the moment, but I wanted to try one more time to see if you were interested in continuing our discussion about EduCap; I am open to your suggestions, but if you're too busy, I'll probably take the request (including our previous conversation) to WikiProject Cooperation for feedback and assistance there. Let me know if you have a moment. Cheers, WWB Too (talk) 17:52, 20 March 2012 (UTC)

Yes, Iwill get there today. I know I've said this before., but it's next on the list. DGG ( talk ) 17:56, 20 March 2012 (UTC)

Right on, very much looking forward to it. WWB Too (talk) 18:37, 20 March 2012 (UTC)

I've posted a reply to your questions on the EduCap Talk page. Overall, there's not a great deal more that can be done, based on available sources, but I do offer a couple of ways in which we could tweak it based on your suggestions. Looking forward to your next response. Cheers, WWB Too (talk) 19:55, 21 March 2012 (UTC)

Paid Editor Help - Robert X Browning

Could you give your opinion here? It loks prety straightfrward and ready to go to me, but i'd like a second opinion. Silverseren^C 19:10, 26 March 2012 (UTC)

It's certainly ok, but I'm making some changes and additions to the same structure as other articles on faculty, and dealing with my pet bugaboo, the repeated use of the subject's name. DGG ( talk ) 01:04, 27 March 2012 (UTC)

Mistress Selina Kyle unblock conditions

Hi DGG! I've been concerned about some of Mistress Selina Kyle's recent editing, but I'm not sure if they are a problem in regard to her unblock conditions or not, so I figured I should ask you for clarification (given that SB Johnny is no longer involved). Do you know what the conditions were in regard to paid editing? In reading the conditions, it wasn't clear if her recent and extensive work in taking over Paid Advocacy Watch comes under them or not. - Bilby (talk) 21:45, 28 March 2012 (UTC)

See her User talk page. DGG ( talk ) 01:45, 29 March 2012 (UTC)

In a very real sense, I'm sorry it came out that way - MSK was doing some good work, and I support reducing the impact of paid editors. I had raised it with you because I was going to suggest a topic ban on AN/I due to some ongoing harrassment issues, (not of me, but of other users), but I had thought I needed that point clarified first. Your explaination of your decision makes sense, and I don't see anything but wikidrama emerging from following up my original concerns, so I'm happy to see them dropped. I'm sorry for putting you in that position, though - I doubt that blocks are ever pleasant to apply. - Bilby (talk) 03:26, 30 March 2012 (UTC)

Alas, when one accepts the responsibility of unblocking or supporting an unblock, one must accept the responsibility of dealing with the consequent problems if the response is not what was hoped for. DGG ( talk ) 03:50, 30 March 2012 (UTC)

EduCap again

Hi there, DGG. I appreciate your earlier responses on the EduCap Talk page, and I wonder if you saw my response last week? I'd love to bring the matter to resolution if you think it's close; let me know if there is any further information that you need. I also realize you're busy, so I am going to ask for others to review at the Cooperation and Education wikiprojects. Cheers, WWB Too (talk) 17:23, 29 March 2012 (UTC)

I would suggest not treating this as a merge or replacement, but editing the existing page with your additional material. I think you could go ahead and do that, and I'll check after the weekend. If I have a chance to search using some other approaches, I will do so and modify it--I find it extremely odd that the company has dropped off the radar to the extent it has, & there must be something, but it may not be at all easy to find with the usual indexes. DGG ( talk ) 03:57, 30 March 2012 (UTC)

Thanks for the support, DGG. I'm actually quite reluctant to make direct edits myself, particularly given the previous controversy on the Academy of Achievement Talk page, and Jimbo's recent suggestion that direct edits by paid COI editors is bad practice. I'll see if I can have someone else make the move, and I'll be available to talk about any details afterward. Thanks, WWB Too (talk) 14:38, 30 March 2012 (UTC)

See my comment at WikiProjectCooperation: [2]. Thinking it over further, since you do represent Reynolds, you surely know if there are later developments about one of her companies or can find out about them. We can use primary source documents when they speak for themselves and do not need interpretation, so: are there any further regulatory or legal actions? Have they issued any press releases or made any public statements in the last two years? Have they been mentioned in any hearings? One of the reasons why we do not reject COI editing entirely is that such people sometimes can more easily find such sources. DGG ( talk ) 17:13, 30 March 2012 (UTC)

OK, I was slightly confused. Of course, I'll see what I can do in my userspace draft. I have also put in a request about what press releases or other primary sources may be available. I'm not sure there will be much else that's public, but I'll see what I can find. Cheers, WWB Too (talk) 19:24, 30 March 2012 (UTC)

WikiSkeptic

I have started a discussion concerning his actions, and a recent statement he has made, on WP:ANI. Your input is welcome, as most of what I have written concerns my personal interactions with him, with some statements he has made towards you.—Ryulong (竜龙) 09:02, 31 March 2012 (UTC)

EduCap IV

Hey there, this afternoon I made a number of edits to the proposed draft based on your feedback, and I've posted an explanation with links to diffs on the EduCap Talk page. I'll post a quick follow-up at WP:CO-OP as well. Looking forward to your response. Cheers, WWB Too (talk) 23:04, 2 April 2012 (UTC)

Tuesday,I hope. DGG ( talk ) 02:28, 3 April 2012 (UTC)

Cool, thanks. I'll be around. WWB Too (talk) 13:40, 3 April 2012 (UTC)

New web-page of Foundations for Freedom

Dear David.

Couple days ago one of my friends and yesterday me personally contributed a new web page "Foundations for Freedom" as English translation of http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%98%D0%BD%D0%BA%D1%83%D0%B1%D0%B0%D1%82%D0%BE%D1%80:%D0%9E%D1%81%D0%BD%D0%BE%D0%B2%D1%8B_%D0%A1%D0%B2%D0%BE%D0%B1%D0%BE%D0%B4%D1%8B. The page is about the activity of our voluntary organisation acting in Eastern Europe with the focus of setting up the foundations for freedom together with other organisations over Eastern Europe.

I saw that you were last moderator who locked this page and at the moment we can neither create new, nor update existing one. In your comments you indicated that it contradicts with the previous moderation, which was about unambiguous advertising.

I respect the work you are doing and ask you to give the advice how can we contribute with the information about our activity? I am ready to put it into incubator before we finalise it.

Thank you in advance. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Oleksiy.stasevych (talk • contribs) 11:12, 3 April 2012 (UTC)

I see the Russian Wikipedia article is still in their incubator; there would be a stronger case for translation when they've accepted it. But even if they do, it doesn't mean we will. Our standard for organizations is WP:ORG, which requires 3rd party independent sources, and I do not see them--everything there is either published by the foundation or its sponsor. I do not even see any indication of why the organization in significant enough that there might be some. Additionally, the page is wholly promotional, to spread the word about your organization. It should rather be written so that people who know about it, can find the sort of information the public would want.

I deleted it for both no indication of notability and promotionalism, which tend to complement each other, not conflict. The page protection is for 3 weeks, to prevent yet another try in creating an unacceptable article. As you appear willing to try, I've reduced it to expire this weekend. If you have proper sources by Monday, rewrite the article. (If you are ready sooner, come again and ask me) they can be in any language; Russian or Ukrainian are acceptable here, not just English. Good luck with it DGG ( talk ) 00:43, 4 April 2012 (UTC)

Stevens Institute of Technology article updates

Hello, DGG. You have new messages at Talk:Stevens Institute of Technology#Updating_page_along_guidelines_for_college_and_university_articles.
You can remove this notice at any time by removing the {{Talkback}} or {{Tb}} template.

Thank you for your feedback. I have continued the dialogue on the Stevens Talk page. QueenCity11 (talk) 20:31, 4 April 2012 (UTC)

I have made updates to the best of my ability consistent with your latest feedback. Please see the Talk page for more, and thank you! QueenCity11 (talk) 11:45, 20 April 2012 (UTC)

EduCap V

Hi there, still hoping for a response from you on EduCap Talk, following the changes I made at your suggestion. Might you have some time today or this weekend? WWB Too (talk) 13:30, 6 April 2012 (UTC)

I see you have still nor been able to find better or additional references. I found some myself, and will list them there. DGG ( talk ) 02:55, 8 April 2012 (UTC)

EduCap VI

Hello again, DGG. I've made some further additions based on some of the sources you provided, and explained why the others were less useful. Either way, you should like some of the new inclusions, which I've linked on the EduCap Talk page. Are you willing to take the article live as it is now? WWB Too (talk) 21:46, 9 April 2012 (UTC)

Hi there, it's been about 24 hours, so I thought I'd try you again. I'm also likely to see if a few others at WP:CO-OP are able to look at it, as well. Cheers, WWB Too (talk) 22:28, 10 April 2012 (UTC)

You are writing this for pay, and possibly have a deadline, or are waiting to collect your money. I, however, am a volunteer. One of the enjoyable things about being a volunteer is that I no longer have to work by anyone's timetable. True, I should be reminded if I don't get to something for several days, but I do not provide 24 hour turn around. In fact, I usually allow a day or two to consider mentally before writing anything I think complicated. When we say at WP that people writing with strong COI should get their edits reviewed, that does not mean we promise to review immediately. Any commercial writing here must be compatible with our normal volunteer efforts, not just in content, but in manner of working.

As a general note to anyone coming here:

I'm aware that what I want to see before approving an edit can be more stringent than many other good WP editors, including some at CO-OP. I'm putting my own reputation on the line, & I will not do that unless it's sound enough that I would have written it myself. If I say it's OK, I normally mean I will personally defend it if challenged. If you want an easy pass, don't come to me. DGG ( talk ) 23:41, 10 April 2012 (UTC)

Of course I realize that, on this topic, you are a volunteer and I am not. That said, I hope you'd agree that I've acted in good faith throughout this process and, even if my draft isn't WP:PERFECT, it is much better than what can be found in the EduCap article now. I have made some further edits based on your feedback, and responded again on the EduCap Talk page. Let me know if you're more comfortable making the merge. WWB Too (talk) 16:02, 11 April 2012 (UTC)

Hi DGG, just dropping you a note to say that I appreciate all your input on the EduCap article and, as you are focused on other things, I have asked for some other editors to weigh in so that we can hopefully iron out any final issues. If someone else does agree to do the histmerge, I'll look forward to seeing your edits then. Cheers, WWB Too (talk) 12:46, 17 April 2012 (UTC)

Deletion of Article: Victory Seed Company

Hello,

After reading all of the wiki instructions, I honestly did try to write this article from an encyclopedic, informational, and neutral perspective. It was certainly not intended to be spam or advertising. As a matter of fact, I searched out Wikipedia for other similar articles as precedent and actually modeled the article using the following two:

• Victory Brewing Company

• Gurney's Seed and Nursery Company

With your experience, can you offer suggestions about how the article can be modified to convey the included information but to stand up to the interpretation of the guidelines? I understand the concepts of "spam articles and legitimate articles about commercial entities" but do not see how the Victory Seed Company article differed from other company pages on Wikipedia and specifically that ones that I modeled this article after.

Your help would be appreciated. Thank you for your time. Webfarmer — Preceding unsigned comment added by Webfarmer (talk • contribs) 18:16, 11 April 2012 (UTC)

(talk page stalker)The article was in large part copied from the subject's own website; un-surprisingly, the tone was favorable, indeed downright filled with praise for this wonderful company and its noble goals. Wikipedia is not here for promotion even of worthwhile initiatives. The tone was simply not straightforward and matter-of-fact enough; and there were no, count them, zero, sources other than the company's own website. --Orange Mike | Talk 18:29, 11 April 2012 (UTC)

(talk page stalker) Mr. Dunton, Wikipedia is not here to help you promote any of your various enterprises, if your business is notable, someone will eventually write an article on it independently. Please read about "other stuff" in regards to the existence of similar articles. Besides the COI info I posted on your page, please also read our business FAQ. Valfontis (talk) 18:54, 11 April 2012 (UTC)

Thank you Valfontis and Orange Mike for the education! I thought that I had read everything and had a grasp on contributing but had missed the COI page and its firm recommendations. That sure would have saved me a lot of time. Webfarmer (talk) 19:22, 11 April 2012 (UTC)

Firstly, I want to say that understand why my article was deleted and that I am not attempting to appeal the decision. It is fair and makes sense to me now that I know all of the rules.

However, now that I do understand the issues and controversies surrounding COI and how content in Wikipedia is intended to be presented and used, it brings me back to the various company articles that I (erroneously) modeled the Victory Seed article after, as mentioned above.

For example, if you look at the Gurney Seed Company (Gurney's Seed and Nursery Company) article, it was created nearly three years ago, and has remained on Wikipedia unchallenged. Based on the user name chosen by the contributor and the other company articles that they created (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/Alivegardens), they appear to be a representative of the company. Refer to Dave's Garden Watchdog (http://davesgarden.com/products/gwd/c/146/) for an independent presentation of company ownership and affiliations. This does raise some concern about consistency and fairness in the interpretation and application of the rules. Webfarmer (talk) 21:13, 11 April 2012 (UTC)

Did you read WP:OSE? Please do. If you feel the articles or editors in question need more oversight, please look to the appropriate noticeboard or dispute resolution or deletion process. It's nothing personal. Oregon-related articles have more oversight than most as we have a very active WikiProject. Feel feel to join in if you're interested in improving articles about Oregon. Valfontis (talk) 21:54, 11 April 2012 (UTC)

Yes I have read the WP:OSE. You pointed me to it after I posted my obvious OSE related defense. And of course, the logic is sound . . . I was not attempting to justify my article submission, only pointing out that the articles that I used as structure are also as much in error . . . which of course, is simply an example of OSE :) I have also read the dispute resolution and deletion process articles but those do not apply since I agree with DGG's justification for deleting my article. I guess I just let it drop and work itself out organically as I am presented with a classic Catch-22. It is not appropriate for me to edit or comment on the Gurney's Seed and Nursery Company (and sister company promotions) due to COI. And I just realized that all of this conversation has been on DGG's talk section for which I apologize for contributing a bunch of clutter here. Thank you for the link to the Oregon WikiProject . . . I will check it out. Thanks again. Webfarmer (talk) 22:36, 11 April 2012 (UTC)

I'm rereading Catch-22 right now... I think you misunderstand--I meant that you can use a noticeboard, start a deletion process, or seek dispute resolution in terms of the problematic articles or editors you have pointed out. And you can of course comment on rival or sister companies with which you have a COI, you just are cautioned strongly about writing or editing articles about them. It is always appropriate to bring inappropriate articles or problematic editors to the attention of non-COI editors who will evaluate the situation, and it is always appropriate to add comments or questions to article talk pages or bring articles to the attention of a related WikiProject. If you state your COI up front, you should be able to get a fair hearing. Hopefully DGG doesn't mind the clutter, but he is of course free to copy this conversation elsewhere. Valfontis (talk) 23:15, 11 April 2012 (UTC)

Perhaps I should give my own opinion. (incidentally, I don't mind discussions here, just so you realize a number of people are likely to see them; but I do prefer that after the first exchange, that I have a chance to join in. This isn't irc.).

I think Orange Mike and Valfontis express very well the general view, a view that I agree with, though I have my own way of saying it.

Many of the older articles--even from just a few years back--are much more promotional than we would currently accept. With the increasing prominence and acceptance of Wikipedia, we are being so much used for promotion currently that we are collectively (and, speaking for myself, individually) taking a much stricter line about it. It used to be just an annoyance, but now its a major threat to our role as an encyclopedia. It will take us a long while to get to all the hundreds of thousands of previously existing problems, but at least we can try not to add to them. (It's like unsourced BLPs--we agreed not to accept any more, but it's been a much harder problem dealing with the existing ones.) I shall personally look at the existing articles mentioned above, but we need to differentiate those that might have available good third party sources for notability and are therefore worth improving, from those that don't have them. For Gurney's, a very long established company, I think it shouldn't be difficult to find some. (An article will not be speedy-deleted just for lacking sources, but there's no point doing the work if it is going to be deleted in the regular AfD way, which it will be unless somebody finds them.)

Webfarmer, the standard advice to you, is that if you do have such sources, write an article in your user space, by starting a page User:Webfarmer/Victory Seed Company, and then ask one of us to look at it. If you don't have such sources, even though it may pass speedy, it won't prove an acceptable article. In any case, don't copy from your webpage--even if you give us the required permission, the tone is usually different:an encyclopedia article is a little more formal, and considerably more concise, omitting personal details. You have to think not of what you want to say, but what a reader, hearing about the company, might want to know. My own advice is that is you are certain you can do this OK, just rewrite the article accordingly, with sources; if you have any doubts whether the sources are good enough, do it in user space. there's no purpose in formally appealing--you will be told just the same thing, write an adequate article and there will be no problem. And that's what you should want to do in any case. DGG ( talk ) 01:47, 12 April 2012 (UTC)

Consul of Liechtenstein article

Dear Administrator Goodman, At your convenience, the Consulate of Liechtenstein to the Southern USA would respectfully like to establish a private dialog concerning the Wiki article found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_S._Allen . Please contact me through the publicly listed consulate email address of allenbru@cox.net. Thank you; Klaus Brunner Chief of Staff and Chief of Security for the FL Consulate to the Southern USA Flconsulate (talk) 13:28, 23 April 2012 (UTC)

emailed. DGG ( talk ) 02:10, 24 April 2012 (UTC)

Frontiers

Dear David, Could you please have a look at Frontiers Research Foundation (and the discussion on its talk page) and Frontiers (Academic Publishing) and give me your opinion? I think that two articles are not justified, but I'm not really sure how to handle this. Thanks! --Guillaume2303 (talk) 11:04, 3 May 2012 (UTC)

see my comments of the talk p. for the article on the Foundation. DGG ( talk ) 16:27, 3 May 2012 (UTC)

Thoughts

What do you think of this: User talk:Dennis Brown/Thoughts. Feel free to reply there if you choose. Dennis Brown - 2¢ © 12:33, 7 May 2012 (UTC)

The actual danger from an admin is not article-writing but sanitizing; an admin who avoids editing an article can protect it in a preferred version, or chase away those who would change it.) Otherwise, the danger is from any editor using their prestige to influence the acceptance of content, and no editor who has prestige can avoid that. Therefore all paid editing by experienced people here is dangerous: the only safe way to use our skills is to teach the general public. I will no longer help paid editors with articles or approve it for them, because I would be using not only my skills, which is fair, but my prestige also. Rather, let them write as they see fit, and I shall comment as I see fit. As any teacher knows, while you cannot stop plagiarism, you can require quality. DGG ( talk ) 15:41, 7 May 2012 (UTC)

• Sanitizing is a tough one to enforce, as it isn't always obvious. We all have different thresholds for what is acceptable without references, for example. I'm not a fan of paid editing, but part of my concern is the perception of non-admins, who are more important than all the admins combined when it comes to content creation. If we don't draw clear lines, we lower the trust in the admin system overall. And there is no prestige like admin prestige when it comes to editing, in the eyes of the non-admin. Many non-admins are very much afraid to revert a bold edit of an admin, or even speak out about an admin, either assuming "they know best" or fear of retribution. I never was, but you always thought that I sought out trouble unnecessarily anyway ;) That we undermind trust even more, this is a great concern of mine. It is already bad enough. Dennis Brown - 2¢ © 22:02, 7 May 2012 (UTC)

  and thus there is a problem for an admin who does paid editing at all--any of his work in the field will be under suspicion. As an arb said informally at a recent meeting, though probably an admin would not be demopped for doing paid editing, that admin would lose a lot of respect and effectiveness. DGG ( talk ) 22:50, 7 May 2012 (UTC)

• I would agree with "No admin can be a paid editor" in theory, but then it would just happen without disclosure. Really, an admin shouldn't, even if a non-admin does. Pick one, a paycheck or the mop. And while you and I will look down on admins taking money, the average editor would only see the "admin" button on their page, and would still hesitate to revert. Most editors don't know the reputation of any admin, and think of admins like they would in a forum: the guys that can block you. Most don't bother and are not interested in the political side of Wikipedia. I wasn't even recently, until I saw some of the side effects. Dennis Brown - 2¢ © 00:18, 8 May 2012 (UTC)

Articles for Deletion

Hi DGG. I just did a bunch of my first AfD discussions.

What I found was there were a lot of cruddy advert articles with no sources, yet sources were available. The articles technically could be made appropriate for Wikipedia, but in practice it's unlikely anyone will make the effort. It's more likely to create a headache for everyone edit-warring with a poor COI advert spammer for an article of only minor value to Wikipedia. Yet Wikipedia policy is to keep articles if reliable sources exist rather than if they are likely to ever be used.

I'm perplexed by how to handle the dynamic. I noticed a comment on one AfD suggesting your vote was motivated by a need to discourage poor-quality COI spam and I thought I would just ping you to get your response. Am I way off the mark here? I'm perplexed by what is the best practices, to punish COIs pushing advert or uphold policy to the letter. User:King4057 (COI Disclosure on User Page) 08:36, 16 May 2012 (UTC)

(talk page stalker) I would say that such articles, if the subject is notable, can just be stubbed to a sentence or a paragraph, with one or a few of the better references attached. Then it can be worked on from there, from scratch as it were. Silverseren^C 08:41, 16 May 2012 (UTC)

I'm guessing it's one of those things different editors have different opinions on. I'm not sure what mine is. I would also like to discourage blatant advert and not have to police thousands of articles on barely notable organizations. However, if the COI editor leaves it alone after we stub it, it would be of some minor improvement to Wikipedia. User:King4057 (COI Disclosure on User Page) 14:30, 16 May 2012 (UTC)

There is nothing that a person may not want to write about, and a good predictor of what someone might be interested in is that someone else is interested also. Therefore every weak article are not just capable of improvement, but likely to be improved, and most articles get improved eventually. This is not a short-term project. Suppose something might be of interest to one person in a million: Wikipedia gets hundreds of million visitors a year, so the problem becomes getting them not only to read, but to improve, articles.

The world has realized that it is so desirable to have an article at Wikipedia, that there is no possible way we can avoid having to police not just thousands, but quite literally millions of weak articles. If we throw out the weak existing ones to avoid checking them, we'll be dealing with the same ones coming in back again.

The best way to focus attention on improving weak and outdated articles (and about 90% of our content has become outdated) is to avoid focusing energy on valueless activities here. Every trivial dispute that escalates because of the hostile nature of internet exchanges is harmful--harmful not just in the impression it gives but in the efforts of good people necessary to resolve it. Every debate about whether a borderline article is notable or not is detrimental--the effort would be better spent improving it, and on quickly removing the actually harmful. We have three rapidly achievable ways to improve here, if we have the will to do them: decrease in hostility and uncivil behavior by removing those who do it and by experienced people setting good examples, with emphasis on increasing cooperation and decreasing use of the inherently confrontational WP:BRD cycle; clear fixed subject-based inclusion criteria to decrease conflict over deletion by providing a clear basis for quickly deleting or keeping articles; definitively resolving conflict disputes with wide attention as we definitively resolve inclusion disputes--long AfDs are often really debates about appropriate content within articles .

there is nothing at Wikipedia that cannot be improved by wider participation of increasing numbers of new editors. We will get that by making it easier to edit and easier to start articles. People who have been here for a while lose the initial excitement at being personally able to affect the content of the only universally visible publication ever; it is the newcomers who will maintain our vigor. We are not making progress here: while dramatic improvements in the editing interface are forthcoming, it seems we are about to adopt a policy which will drastically decrease the ability for newcomers to write new articles. There is nothing more important than people. Content is relatively trivial: what we do not improve today we can improve tomorrow, but a person once discouraged almost never returns. We have projects to write better forms, but we will never write an adequate form--we need projects to educate people without them. We have excellent bots for routine tasks, and effective edit filters, but we seem unaware that this is a human enterprise requiring friendly personal spontaneous human communication. DGG ( talk ) 15:42, 16 May 2012 (UTC)

Thanks DGG. I'm trying to digest this. I think what you're saying is to just fix the articles instead of focus on the bureaucracy. So instead of focusing so much on the AfD process, maybe I should just improve the article. Am I on the mark there? I sort of wanted to make sure I was doing it right before doing too many AfDs. User:King4057 (COI Disclosure on User Page) 20:39, 16 May 2012 (UTC)

Yes. In terms of direct effect, the best thing anyone can do here is improve quality of articles.

But there are indirect effects also: the most obvious is the need to keep articles here long enough that they can be fixed.

A much less direct one but I think the most important quantitatively in terms of the ultimate amount of improvement per effort expended, is the need to continue to attract new editors and get them involved. This requires both not discouraging them by rejecting their work, and not discouraging them by excessive bureaucratic or technical difficulties.

But what an individual should choose to do is affected by what the individual is best at, where the need is greatest. and what they enjoy doing. that last factor is perhaps the critical one, because we are all volunteers and will only be here if we get satisfaction from our work. DGG ( talk ) 16:19, 18 May 2012 (UTC)

To tell you the truth COI and company articles is what interests me the most, but after going through AfCs and request edits for just one day, the current state of affairs just makes me feel bitter and angry. To see someone submit a request edit, after overhauling their entire article, removing controversy and adding advert. Or donating my time to help a COI in AfC, who refuses to follow my very simple instructions and goes bat crazy over a peacock tag that he won't even leave up for 1 day while I ask the editor that posted it. I already feel like I hate COIs. I don't think it's good for my health. It sounds like a good idea to help people, but they use direct editing as a threat "if you don't XYZ, I'm going to remove it in two hours." They feel empowered in a way they would never behave if working with the New York Times. Even instances where COIs appear to be resolved and collaborative, three months later they come back and censor the entire section they had just collaborated on. No wonder the community feels how they do. I'm already growing bitter :-( User:King4057 (COI Disclosure on User Page) 16:54, 18 May 2012 (UTC)

Thanks for all your helpful comments. Put me in a slightly better mood ;-) User:King4057 (COI Disclosure on User Page) 01:32, 19 May 2012 (UTC)

We need to re-evaluate how we do things there at afc. the standards for article approval seem to be very low. I myself would never approve an article of much lower quality than I would write myself, but many people accept articles that are at best barely possible. And it is much more difficult to guide someone to write a good article than to take over yourself and just fix it, but they learn more if you guide them, though as all teachers and students both know, it can be a very painful processs. Personally, I'm getting to think we might as well let them do manual direct editing, and just look at the results strictly. One process stream, through which everything passes. But the need to watch articles is a real problem, because we all of us who know how to do it have many more than we can effectively watch. I do go back over my deletion log every few months to see anything that turns black again--about half the time its OK, like a good redirect, and about half the time not. The problem of maintaining quality in a project this size was never realised 10 years ago. Elsewhere in the world too, I've seen so many project at all levels that start off great, but are difficult to maintain. Entropy never forgets, and maintenance always increases until its cost is more than the cost of construction. At some point in the future, WP, like any project, will get so top heavy we will need to start over on some better foundation that we do not yet envision. The published and social process people thought it would have happened already, and are still trying to figure out why it didn't collapse at 1 million articles and then 2 million (I think the answer in part is that we developed enclaves; you can fight entropy in an enclave by putting in work & letting things get even worse elsewhere) The other part is the continued ability to interest and attract very highly qualified people with great amounts of time to use, and willingness to use it here. I've done many times more for the diffusion of knowledge in 5 years here as a volunteer e than the previous 35 as a professional. I look on my training in science and librarianship and rteaching and administration and publishing as just the a preparation for this . DGG ( talk ) 04:51, 19 May 2012 (UTC)

Someone at AfC was actually commenting their standards were too high, leading to a huge backlog, when the point is merely to publish articles that would survive an AfD. They also commented that 90% of submissions are never published, suggesting that blocking articles from creation was their mission as much as creating them. Do you think we should be AfDing this one? Or if not, what can we do to make it less advert? I've only done a dozen or two AfC submissions and I found the process extremely efficient. But I'm just learning, so humbly interested in your feedback. I noticed we consistently had different answers in AfDs and it's interesting to be on the other side.

On the other hand, the prevailing wisdom of pro-paid editing advocates is that the community has an obligation to help COIs and in a hurry, quick, before they edit themselves! As a result, many posts in the {{request edit}} queue or paid editor help board lead to volunteers swooping down and spawning vast discussions on content of relatively little value. This works to make a short-term point, but it's not scalable were the process done en-masse. I've been somewhat duplicating the AfC process like this[3][4] to clear out the queue. What do you think? User:King4057 (COI Disclosure on User Page) 07:57, 19 May 2012 (UTC)

That prevailing wisdom is exactly what I am disagreeing with. I think it produces very low quality barely possible articles. Letting them edit directly produces either acceptable articles if somebody helps them, or rejected articles from which they might learn something. I am faced with two choice: one is to spend my time u-grading this afc-passed articles, and thus single-handedly work indefinitely to restore credibility to a system ; or start looking for arguments for deletion of such articles, which means expanded the interpretation of what we consider promotional writing that is unimprovable and needs deletion, or narrow the limits of what sort of references we accept for articles on organizations & people connected with them, or possibly trying to change the deletion criteria otherwise. I have made comments at a few current AfDs that show my try at this approach. In other words, the flood of junk has done to me what similar things have turned to others, turned me into a deletionist. DGG ( talk ) 14:25, 19 May 2012 (UTC)

I would be interested in your opinion on the CREWE/paid editing/COI dynamic. I noticed I have a strong keep lean compared to others in the AfD discussion, which led to a couple being relisted. I guess WP:CORP is a higher bar than I realized. User:King4057 (COI Disclosure on User Page) 03:24, 20 May 2012 (UTC)

My solution is entirely orthoodox: to enforce high standards on articles. There are multiple ways of going about it, and the total independence of every individual editor here ensures that everything anyone thinks a good idea will go on simultaneously. I have no way of imposing higher standards on afc; there is no way of imposing on me to accept lower. If people do not agree on an article, the community decides at AfD, and the result will be unavoidable inconsistent. Such are the rules of play, & such they are likely to remain. Those who wish to engage here must work within them or they will fail in their purposes.

You are asking me what way I would recommend to you or marketing professionals generally? I give you the same advice I have always given: to learn to write articles that will be considered unquestionable acceptable. There may be no agreement on the boundary of what is just barely acceptable, but there is general agreement about what is absolutely not acceptable. For an editor to try to make their articles just passable is folly--there is almost a guarantee that they will often lose them. The only sure way to keep them is to make them good enough to resist challenge. All cut-rate paid editing is doomed whenever the standards rise. And there's an inherent difficulty to making them excellent: excellent articles here cannot be written by a single person. it requires not polished work, but work good enough and open enough to encourages others to polish it. Unless you write articles that disinterested people want to make even better, they will always be vulnerable.

But open editing and professional editing may be inherently incompatible. I have increasing doubts whether anyone in the PR profession can adjust to our manner of writing, and the discussions on and off wiki reinforce them daily. If I continue in the direction I am thinking, and others come to see things similarly, we may end by driving you away at whatever cost to our coverage. The only way you have of resisting it is to such good work that we can not plausibly object to it, and that mean meeting the expectations of an overwhelming consensus. In practice a few people here who persist in objecting can cause a stalemate. And this will affect not only the new articles; there are tens of thousands of old ones in equally poor condition. My comments at AfD and Deletion Review will show on a current basis how my thinking develops; it's there in the trenches that I do my work, though I may come here to summarize. DGG ( talk ) 03:25, 20 May 2012 (UTC)

Thanks DGG. In any hot-button issue those with the most extreme points of view are most vocal, so I'm glad I actively probed you for something more middled. I think this is similar to how I think of it. Just like any media, Wikipedia has content needs and we need to learn how to fulfill those needs with the same degree of professional expertise as we do in other mediums. Did you know we (as marketing professionals) have vast amounts of data on what makes the most viral tweet, the most compelling blog post and years of experience pitching timely stories to the media - yet we are lost on Wikipedia.

For years I was an expert among marketing professionals on Wikipedia. I did webinars, spoke at local events, consulted people routinely (for free), built a reputation (not intentionally) as the Wikipedia guy, when in fact I had only written a hand full of articles and knew very little. Now I am 10x the Wikipedian I once was, and still 10% of where I need to go, yet at 1% of where we should be (my target) I was an expert among my peers. We have a long way to go.

Appreciate the discussion. User:King4057 (COI Disclosure on User Page) 05:12, 20 May 2012 (UTC)

Something to look at.

I have created a rough draft of what could become WP:EASYMONEY at User:Dennis Brown/EASYMONEY for the purpose of helping COI editors actually understand what they are doing wrong, how to fix it, and how to actually become a contributor instead of a liability. I'm trying to avoid all the adhoc speeches given to the growing number of PR and marketing firms that are joining us, and at the same time avoid taking a stand on the policy or politics of the issue. I am interested in your opinion of the wisdom of this. If you like the concept, please feel free to participate or modify in any way you choose. I'm not married to any format or details in this, it is just a rough draft at this point. I will drop this same note to a few other editors whom I feel would be beneficial in considering this page. Dennis Brown - 2¢ © 14:42, 7 June 2012 (UTC)

I was planning something with a roughly similar intent : "What is Promotionalism" It should complement what your've been doing. I want to keep it separate, because my part refers to much more than paid editing. The structural problem with yours is that you need early on to explain that there is a safe universally accepted way as specified at COI--asking for article creation or proposing a draft in userspace, and a less safe not universally accepted way, direct editing, which is what much of yours is directed to, though much applies to anyone. You also need to explain that policies and guidelines contain contradictions. And in the other direction, there are a few absolute NOs, such as don't remove uncomfortable facts, but use the talk page, & if necessary, OTRS. There's some wording changes needed; for example, the RS problem is as much pR-based sources as blogs, WP:N is not policy, but a guideline, and WP:BRD is an essay which not everyone agrees with--personally, I think it in practice a temptation to violate the policy WP:CIVIL--when I started I was astounded people were actually encouraged to work in that fashion. . A better title is also needed: "Editing for money" ? DGG ( talk ) 16:43, 7 June 2012 (UTC)

It was thrown together quickly this morning. If you are inclined, I would love to have your participation. I've asked only a few editors whom I know have different ideas about Wikipedia in general, as to get a balanced approach to it. It is targeted for PR/Marketing people who are new to Wikipedia, who very often get blocked right out of the gate, as you observe. This is one reason I invited Orangemike, as this might be a tool he would use via UAA concerns, Nobody Ent, Kim Dent-Brown, The Bushranger and others who have unique and valuable perspective and of course you, whose opinions I always appreciate. I'm hoping to get others to pitch in on the actual content, as I don't wish it to be solely my opinion and words, but clearly a community "help" guide. And I'm not married to the name either. Would like to hear other opinions on that at the talk page. With help, I don't think it would take a great deal of time to get this up to par since the scope is narrow enough. Dennis Brown - 2¢ © 17:45, 7 June 2012 (UTC)

I followed a very similar vein as DGG describes above in my contributions to the essay, but I like his language more "universally acceptable." I could see that in the title somehow: "Universally acceptable marketing & public relations behavior on Wikipedia (too long). User:King4057 16:08, 20 June 2012 (UTC)

Interview with Ragans

A PR publication called Ragans may be covering a report I'm publishing next week. The thesis of the report is that ethical Wikipedia engagement by companies is a form of content marketing. Just like any independent news and information source, Wikipedia has content needs. Companies can achieve mutual benefit by transparently offering content of value to the editorial community. The report shares statistical information from 2,500+ Wikipedia articles on companies to gleam insights into Wikipedia's content needs, so organizations can better align themselves.

What bothers me about media coverage on the topic is the lack of voice from the editorial community and the reporter expressed an interest in doing a Q&A with a volunteer editor. I was wondering if you were interested. It seems up your alley, since the focus is on quality content. User:King4057 21:34, 7 June 2012 (UTC)

Yes. ask the reporter to email me. I would personally very much like to see good content from companies; the problem is getting content that meets the needs of the readers, not the needs of the companies. (And it is not really companies, it is organizations of any type--the problems are very similar), A reputable publisher knows how to accomplish this: it uses the company's PR as one source, in the light of other sources, and as filtered through the critical knowledge of experienced and independent editors, and rewriting it so it matches the expectations for newspaper or magazine articles. A less reputable publisher of course tends to present it much less carefully filtered & rewritten. The difficulty at Wikipedia is despite good intentions, we cannot count on having skillful editing of the material, and so we have had the policy of rejecting information from organizations, for fear we will be unable to evaluate it. But after 4 years here working with this material, I know it can be done; I'm currently trying to rewrite at least one promotional article a day, many of long standing--including some I accepted in past years when I had not yet developed a sufficiently skeptical eye.

There are two difficulties: one is that the content the company wants to contribute only has a partial overlap with what the reader needs. Readers do not want to hear why the company thinks it had good products, they want to hear facts about the products, including references to published independent opinions of them the company may have collected. From this they will make their own judgments of value. The other is that the style of presenting material is different when you're outside the material, and I am not sure how practical it is to expect most people whose professional careers have been within one framework, to adopt another. (There are analogous difficulties for people who have spent their career writing academic papers or computer manuals or music reviews.) DGG ( talk ) 03:46, 8 June 2012 (UTC)

Oops, forget about my email. I have your email address and submitted it to the reporter. I agree with your assessment above. I'm using the term "ethical Wikipedia engagement," because "paid editing" entails writing the entire article, instead of using a collaborative process. On the other hand, for smaller yet notable companies, there is very little controversy and fewer interested editors. So I think the approach will vary, especially depending on the amount of controversy/negativity. The other issue is what I'll call the "ethics tax" - meaning it is much faster, cheaper and more effective to edit Wikipedia "less ethically" (but perhaps more risky). One of the reporter's questions were "what is the ROI of ethics?" I get this question a lot. User:King4057 01:18, 9 June 2012 (UTC)

If we at WP cannot get promotional editing under control, our response is likely to be more stringent standards for the notability of business and other organizations, & greater selectivity in the content of those we keep. There have already been such proposals, and even without a change in the formal guidelines, the interpretation can gradually change--and in fact is changing. For even myself, a supporter of inclusionism in business articles, the degree of my enthusiasm is much less than it used to be, & my likelihood of making drastic cuts in promotional content is much higher--so much higher, that these have become my principal activities here. Where I used to rewrite, I will often stubbify; where I used to stubbify, I will now delete or nominate for deletion. If the writing for smaller yet notable companies does not greatly improve, that level of company will soon no longer be considered notable. The obvious fact that nobody is in control here gives a false impression that one can try to get away with anything. But with enough eyes, no corner is too obscure to escape notice, and we have by now learned that maintaining a neutral encyclopedia requires standing up for it firmly. DGG ( talk ) 03:24, 9 June 2012 (UTC)

I use the following arguments:

• Avoid "vengeful editing" from editors frustrated with your behavior
• Avoid reputational risk from public humiliation
• Have a productive working relationship with editors, instead of edit-warring

These arguments are most relevant to major brands with reputations to protect, more community interest/activity and a legal department that understands risk management. These companies understand the need for ethical behavior generally.

But ethics is just an operational in-the-weeds piece of helping companies inform the world about topics they have a vested interest in through Wikipedia. I want companies to stop seeing Wikipedia as a liability and start seeing it as an asset. Wikipedia isn't just a place where an angry customer or special interest group weaponizes the site to attack companies they don't like; it's a free service to create credible corporate/executive/product profiles in the interest of free knowledge. User:King4057 23:57, 10 June 2012 (UTC)

Maybe I am asking a lot of you, but if you were ever interested in doing a blog post or Q&A style article addressing the marketing community, I would be happy to set that up as well. From my perspective we should be listening to the community more, but the volunteer editorial community doesn't have an army of PR professionals giving them voice or an organized effort to educate marketing professionals. I would like to improve that when and how I can, like the article I did here with Robert Lawton. User:King4057 16:49, 12 June 2012 (UTC)

I'm working on an essay: What is promotionalism. I do want to collect what I've said at various places. And I'm also thinking of a group like the Article Rescue Squadron, which I am tentatively naming Wikiproject Promotionalism Removal Unit. But I am concerned with the ideologues as much as the PR community. And remember that no one person can speak for the community, and we do not agree on the approach to this--we only go by formal guidelines to the extent we want to at the moment for each case separately, so everything here will always be erratic.

But a few specifics. first, We do not intend to be a friendly place for people expressing grudges. I remove or greatly condense such material when I see it, although it is necessary to separate the removal of over-emphasis from the attempt at a cover-up. I think the best approach for an individual PR person confronted with this is OTRS. The OTRS people are practiced at sounding as professional or bureaucratic as necessary to be convincing, while still maintaining our values.. (I do a little such work for schools complaints & i think I have always satisfied people that we're doing what we can, though not necessarily what they would like.) Second, the 4th reason for working by our accepted practices is that you will succeed in getting to say what can appropriately be said within our limits; it's not just risk management, but in a more positive sense effective working. Third, It helps to remind people that Commons is open to good photographs with a free license, & does not require immediate use in an article. & what is put there might end up being used quite widely. DGG ( talk ) 00:17, 13 June 2012 (UTC)

My opinions are still forming/changing as I become more experienced and based on what I observe, but I have observed that ethical community collaboration takes immense patience, extra work and lower "results" from the sense that most companies would prefer bias entries, which they could obtain through less ethical participation. The survival of EthicalWiki will depend on ethics actually being the most viable route, which means I rely on the community to do a good job screening out poor ethics - an impossible job. User:King4057 13:41, 14 June 2012 (UTC)

Of course they would prefer entries that meet their immediate needs; such is the nature of capitalism, It is our obligation to do the work to see they can not get what they would prefer when it conflicts with the principle of providing encyclopedic information. Everything you say leads to the conclusion that promotionalism must be removed, I think in the end we will be able to do so only at the cost of abandoning the principle of anonymity. It is folly to think that we here now have constructed something that can not be improved upon. DGG ( talk ) 21:45, 14 June 2012 (UTC)

In any case, check out the news story and a similar story in PRWeek. I don't think the point of Wikipedia and great content really got across the way I'd like it too, but... User:King4057 13:41, 14 June 2012 (UTC)

Also, within just a few hours of the articles being published, the discussion hit Jimbo's Talk page. User:King4057 23:48, 14 June 2012 (UTC)

User talk:Dennis Brown/EASYMONEY

Your name is being thrown about on this page, but in positive way. Perhaps it is time to join us? It is morphing quite a bit, but there are some good ideas being thrown around, and the essay has undergone a lot of changes, and more is yet to happen. Some of your insight would be helpful. Dennis Brown - 2¢ © 17:35, 20 June 2012 (UTC)

I see the discussion on the name, but where is the essay? DGG ( talk ) 23:59, 20 June 2012 (UTC)

• • • User:Dennis Brown/EASYMONEY. It is still undergoing a lot of changes, and there is a pretty wide variety of people looking at it, including at least one who COI edits himself, which I think adds some balance. Dennis Brown - 2¢ © 00:49, 21 June 2012 (UTC)

The COI contributing would be me. ;-)

Some of my contributions to the essay are influenced by DGG's perspective. User:King4057 21:12, 21 June 2012 (UTC)

Hi DGG. Especially seeing that I just invited Ocaasi, who is sort of the champion (I think) of the PSCOI, to chime in, I toned down the See Also. My rational is that if the essay is to focus on being something both sides of the aisle can agree on, we can only confidently say that there is disagreement. Please feel free to revert if you disagree. User:King4057 01:13, 23 June 2012 (UTC)

We do not disagree. I was not satisfied with my wording in context, but neither am I satisfied with the previous wording, or the current. is a fundamental problem, and the page is being evasive about it. It is very difficult to give advice when practice deviates widely and inconsistently from the formal guideline. Though there is a formal guideline that COI editing is strongly discouraged, there are wide differences in its interpretation, with well-regarded people here taking completely opposite positions. Some would revert to the formal position when I joined: that a COI editor may not write an article ever or even suggest one, but wait until somebody uninvolved notices the topic is important. Others would actively encourage COI editing and concentrate on improving it, emphasizing that all guidelines inherently have exceptions. (And during the period where it was most strongly discouraged, the encyclopedia nonetheless became filled with it, and most of it remains.) Even the "safe" method (AfC) that we recommend is very inconsistent in application and results, whichI will discuss elsewhere.

I therefore think it necessary to highlight this at the very start--especially because people with outside experience expect some degree of stability in large organizations, which they will not find here. It's regrettable having to start off with a warning that nothing you do will necessarily keep you out of trouble, but such is the situation. In formal organizations there is authority to appeal to, when needed for bypassing obstructive people, but there is deliberately nobody here with authority over content. Nor in most places is there such a wide contrast between our theoretical very open acceptance of newcomers, and our apparently ineradicable suspicion of them. The apparent rule is not "everybody can edit, but "everybody can edit, unless it's about a subject your deeply care about--and even so you must learn our rules before starting, though there is no practical way to learn without extensive experience here." if you do things our way, but it is impossible to learn what it is without a few years of experience.I will try a rewrite based on putting this at the beginning, not the end.

The basic problem I have is that it is being approached from the paid editor perspective, not the COI perspective. It applies just as much to non-profit or even amateur organizations, as it does to companies, and it does not depend on whether one gets compensation. The only special problem with paid is the resentment people here feel at others getting paid for doing work poorly that they do better as volunteers. DGG ( talk ) 19:38, 23 June 2012 (UTC)

Indeed. I find analogies with traditional publishing very effective here. Someone in my position is only a "paid" editor in comparison to those that contribute for free. In working with professional journalists, we would both be paid. It's largely a perception problem that my work is comparable to volunteer work. Only ~20% of my job is writing articles. The rest is education, consulting and content negotiation, with up to 50+ internal stakeholders at a single company(the record so far). Molding companies to work incrementally, voluntarily accept a lack of control and endorse extreme honesty and transparency is an intricate task. An article I could write in 8 hours as a volunteer would take 8 months as a consultant. It's hard work!!

Regarding experience, I think the community should be able to expect a professional-quality engagement and professional-quality content from companies, the same way journalists expect professionalism. I'm working on getting to that level that I think should be routine. Journalists don't typically have to do much with contributed articles we offer them. The obvious (yet unrealistic) feedback is to ask editors to do volunteer work first. I suppose you could say I'm working on the private-sector solution to the experience problem. Volunteers shouldn't have to drain the community's resources (except when they choose to voluntarily, because they enjoy it) to literally work for free FOR the paid editor. So someone like me gets the paycheck, by convincing someone like you to do the work for me. On the other hand, I hope many editors will collaborate with me, because they just enjoy doing so and see value in my contributions. What we can do though is provide better instructions (the best we can).

In any case, if you do find any notable non-profits attempting to write an article with a COI, I'm particularly interested in doing some pro-bono work helping worthy non-profits that can't afford me. User:King4057 23:52, 23 June 2012 (UTC)

BTW, something I learned from you was how policies and guidelines are just a North Star as it were, that rely on good judgement from impartial volunteers; how their interpretation can vary. I applied that principal in my volunteer work here[5], resolving a dispute through good judgement instead of policy citation wars. I could see us working something similar into the essay. I think requesting factual corrections, sharing sources, etc. is fairly straightforward and non-controversial, but making substantial content contributions is where we could take a more reserved stance, expressing that most companies can't meet Wikipedia's content needs and editors may or may not be helpful. User:King4057 00:22, 24 June 2012 (UTC)

Links to Signpost

[6] , [7] [8]

Op-ed for the Signpost

Dennis Brown suggested I get your feedback on a draft op-ed I'm writing for the Signpost. Would be curious what you think. I made some tweaks based on his response. User:King4057 16:19, 5 July 2012 (UTC)

• I will give King credit for getting me to more readily accept the inevitable, and for his sincere efforts to pave a road forward on this issue that you and I have talked about previously. I think you may have some ideas or insight that could help him, as you are more familiar than I am, even if I'm more vocal. Dennis Brown - 2¢ © 17:40, 5 July 2012 (UTC)

I would word it as verbose, not vocal. (smile) DGG ( talk ) 17:43, 5 July 2012 (UTC)

I have this policy selection / approach chart that aligns companies with the best approach to Wikipedia based on "corporate attributes." The Signpost op-ed is somewhat loosely based on it. I've got:

• Hands-off policy
• Monitoring & response (vandalism, overt factual corrections, etc.)
• Public relations (being a resource as discussed in the op-ed)
• Content marketing (transparently offering valuable content to Wikipedia)
• Paid editing (direct editing)

My thinking is that almost all companies should be doing PR (offer sources, answer questions, donate images, and be a helpful resource from the Talk page). Wikipedia will benefit from pushing companies in this direction. Content marketing (where I fit in) is a niche. It requires too much consulting and expertise to do well in a matter that brings real value to Wikipedia. However it's the only way to truly resolve undue weight issues, it's easier for companies with an overwhelmingly positive reputation and it's the only way to get quality articles on subjects volunteers aren't interested in. (we also can't prevent it)

So my perspective is encourage public relations, tolerate content marketing (when it's actually good), make paid editing very difficult. The attitude of tolerating PR on Wikipedia comes from dealing with paid editing, but doing PR as I define it would actually be helpful, but is almost unheard of today. That's my rant anyway. ;-) User:King4057 19:30, 5 July 2012 (UTC)

I do think we have to be realistic and expect that many will want to put their own hands on the article itself, and will need to develop guidance there as well, some may be very good at writing and the key is getting them to learn a bit first. And DGG, you always make me smile, even when you are rightfully "setting me straight". Hopefully, I will require less of that as time goes on. Dennis Brown - 2¢ © 01:35, 6 July 2012 (UTC)

The problem is not only or perhaps even primarily with companies, but with non profit organizations, and pressure groups of all sorts. The problem is not primarily with skilled PR professionals, but less skilled people assigned to it, or simply amateurs. There's a good deal of COI editing of companies and products done by fans of the products, not by the companies, and some degree of conflict of interest permeates most of Wikipedia. Almost everything I ever worked on is either because I am interested in it, or want to show off my virtuosity.

And I agree with Dennis that in most cases we might as well deal with COI on the article page directly, as with other edits. King4057, and others, have asked me at times to approve article drafts they have COI with --I have refused to do so, because I will not take the responsibility for something I have not written, beyond seeing it is not blatantly objectionable. Let COI editors declare the affiliations, and then their edits will be judged appropriately. The only time that an edit needs approval on a talk p. is when it is dealing with something that is obviously susceptible, such as removing inconvenient facts.

The true question is the same with this approach as with prohibiting direct COI editing: how do we deal with COI editing from people who do not declare it. I see only two approaches. One is to have an high index of suspicion for every edit that might be influenced by conflict of interest, in essence abandoning the principle of Assuming Good Faith. The difficulty here is that very few can write material that is truly at a standard of sourcing that is proof against the possibility of bad faith--it requires not only that statements be sourced, but being confident that all the sources have been examined and fairly considered and judge in context. Very little in enWP meets that standard. This would require actual research and fact checking at a degree which is beyond our capabilities, and amounting to what is done by the most careful editorial review. This is not work for amateurs. It is easy to say, that if our standards are sufficiently high COI will not matter, but this The other approach is to require all editors to be identified. The principle of permitting anonymous editing makes us vulnerable; it is necessary for those working on certain topics, but there it might have to be assured by some confidential mechanism for assigning names. Either approach means a radical change in Wikipedia.

The only simple approach is the same we have used for other problems: patiently remove the worst of it, and go from there. DGG ( talk ) 03:39, 6 July 2012 (UTC)

The more I think about it, "advocates" is actually a good bucket for marketing, non-profit advocacy groups and other COIs in a similar category. On the other hand, your typical PR professional doesn't know what a "paid editor" "advocate" or any of that means and I think we should shoot for instructions that speak to them. I'm not sure what the solution is.

In my view there are a lot of issues with direct editing. It puts a COI in the position of "what they can get away with" instead of what impartial editors feel are an improvement. I shared an example with BusterD at one point where I refused to do edits that obviously hijacked a subject-matter article to create a promotional plug. These edits were implemented without my knowledge, against my explicit instructions and they stuck. The person that posted them lied about it despite obvious and overwhelming evidence to the contrary. But if a COI is allowed to directly edit, these obviously poor edits would be fine as long as they have a disclosure on their user page.

In another case a Fortune 500 company created an obviously promotional article with enough sources to skate by. In another, direct editing achieved greater influence on controversial content than would be achieved from the Talk page.

Allowing direct edits would mean Wikipedia and CIPR have contradicting advice. It creates an "ethics tax" because it's substantially more work to follow the bright line than directly edit and direct edits can achieve more "results". It encourages marketing to swamp Wikipedia with spam, bias, etc. and let Wikipedians clean it up instead of blocking it at the door. It creates ethical ambiguity and complexity in the instructions we provide COIs and doesn't offer companies a way to contribute with greater confidence they're doing it right (many ethical companies wouldn't dare contribute to Wikipedia in a manner Jimbo doesn't support). I think the fact that an impartial editor accepts a certain degree of responsibility for the edits is rather the whole point rather than a crux.

I guess it's the nature of the beast for their to be different perspective, but I'll tweak the op-ed to address the fact that many readers may not agree with the bright line and maybe articulate better why I support it. ;-) User:King4057 04:52, 6 July 2012 (UTC)

to take your first example, if there is a disclosure, the page will be followed, especially by the people who are most critical of paid editing. The problem is when there is not a disclosure. To take the second, people paying attention to articles on companies would catch it. If we paid half as much attention to this as to technical issues of copyright and borderline porn actors, both problems are trivial. But the fundamental limitation of a crowd-sourced project is there is no way to get anybody to do anything unless they want to. We can often force people to stop doing harmful things; we can not force them to do good ones. The solution for this is the same as for all other problems in Wikipedia: more highly interested editors with a wider range of interests. But the secret of getting them is something which can do be done by tinkering with the interface: it has to be exciting to work here. The excitement in the beginning was we were doing something new in the world that might be important. We've done that--it has become important beyond all rational expectation--we just have to maintain & improve it. Most people find maintaining ongoing projects not particularly exciting. DGG ( talk ) 05:16, 6 July 2012 (UTC)

One of the key points here is disclosure. At the end of the day, we need to go the extra mile in being as flexible as possible to insure the highest compliance with disclosure. I agree with DGG that once we know someone has a COI, more eyes will be on them so their edits to articles will be held in higher scrutity and cleaned as needed. That is one thing that many volunteers DO want to do, watch COI editors, so there is likely sufficient manpower to do so if they are fully disclosed, then direct editing will be less of a concern. If we can start them at talk, move them into article space, all the better. And keep in mind, more than a few of these PR types will end up editing other articles as well and become worthwhile contributors outside their specialty, for both practice and the love of editing. My initial motivations to be here in 2006 were both curiosity and COI editing and I ended up a non-COI admin, after all. I can't be that unique. Dennis Brown - 2¢ © 12:46, 6 July 2012 (UTC)

One last observation, we want to offer respect and a sense of belonging to those who do fully disclose their COI. If we treat them as second class citizens, this won't work. Many editors will "hate" them regardless, so over time we will have to work on changing the culture of Wikipedia to accept this as a subset (but fully equal) part of the community. Maybe they need their own portal. Dennis Brown - 2¢ © 19:06, 6 July 2012 (UTC)

I have a very different way of looking at it. I don't see PR people as part of the community, but more like someone who (ethically) represents a company's interest on Wikipedia. However, it seems like we are at an impasse, which is to be expected in an area where there are so many different POVs. User:King4057 20:00, 6 July 2012 (UTC)

Not an impasse, just different ideas. You are right that most won't become a real part of the community, but some (like myself and you) will. I'm not fixed in any opinion here, just sharing my own perspective. I'm just saying we have to invite them in, and encourage them where we can to become part of the community. Dennis Brown - 2¢ © 22:29, 6 July 2012 (UTC)

Wikipedia has the same blurry line between readers and editors. I don't think it's necessarily confusing to adopt a similar blurriness between advocates and volunteers. Just as it's not unusual for journalists to come to "the dark side" and all kinds of incest in traditional PR/journalism relations. But even I find that my contributions as a volunteer are more neutral than those with a COI, so I humbly request review and collaboration from editors with nothing at stake, but the reader's interest. But I think what I'm taking away here is that it isn't the Bright Line specifically, but some genuine form of collaboration or oversight - where the Bright Line is merely a way to guarantee those characteristics. User:King4057 23:54, 6 July 2012 (UTC)

Do you guys think something like this would be helpful as a better place for discussion to take place?

COI Task Force

Objectives;

• Determine community consensus
• Improve instructions and guidelines
• Evaluate what can be done to best achieve Wikipedia's goals as it relates to COI

Task lis;

• <insert>
• <insert>

Consensus building

• I find that most content produced by paid advocates violates NPOV or has other issues

support

oppose

other votes

• I am interested in quality, NPOV content, when produced, regardless of the source

support

• I find that the quality of company articles gives corporations reason to complain

• I am open to paid advocates that improve an article, but primarily improve the positive aspects without addressing major controversies.

• I believe that paid advocates are part of the community and should be treated similarly to any volunteer editor.

further discussion

• The question: I find that most content produced by paid advocates violates NPOV or has other issues is pretty loaded and guaranteed to be all supports, btw. I only issue is that Wikipedia itself doesn't distinguish between COI editors and volunteers. Even IPs are given 99% of "rights", excepting where socking would be a concern, ie: RfA. But I'm not saying that encouraging limitations is a bad thing either, just that many can become quality contributors. Many are now. Most aren't, granted. I don't know. I think I would like to hear DGG on the issue. Dennis Brown - 2¢ © 01:44, 7 July 2012 (UTC)

A great deal of the content contributed to wikipedia violates NPOV, or has other related issues, such as inadequate of non-independent sourcing. I see nothing worse about paid editors than unpaid POV editors We deal with this just the same, by having uninvolved editors review the edits. If anything , the paid editors are easier to deal with, for they will give up once it becomes not worth their while to continue.

I think by now we have said everything, so the topic is closed here for at least a few days. DGG ( talk ) 23:56, 7 July 2012 (UTC)

COI+ certification proposal

I've thought of an idea that might break our current logjam with paid editing. I'd love your sincere feedback and opinion.

• WP:COI certification

Feel free to circulate this to anyone you think should know about it, but please recognize that it hasn't agreed upon by either PR organizations or WikiProjects or the wider community. It's also just a draft, so any/many changes can still be made. Thanks and cheers, Ocaasi EdwardsBot (talk) 15:00, 28 July 2012 (UTC)

I've commented there. I disagree with the key part of the approach. All editors should edit directly and take responsibility for their edits. Otherwise, the certification idea has some possibilities. DGG ( talk ) 19:22, 28 July 2012 (UTC)

McKinsey

Hi DGG. I know you're not comfortable making proxy edits, however I submitted a {{request edit}} on the Talk page for the history section we've been working on and I would welcome your comment on whether the drafted content is an improvement. User:King4057 19:34, 22 August 2012 (UTC)

I'll get there tonight. DGG ( talk ) 21:51, 22 August 2012 (UTC)

The section looks good; I made some copyedits. I can't read an article without doing that in the background. Your restoration of the core principles was appropriate. Often this sort of thing is overemphasized, since they rarely say much beyond platitudes, but in an article of this importance those few sentence are suitable. Are there any particular other issues? point me to them a little more precisely. I am beginning to think that this article should try for at least GA, and possibly FA, but I don't have experience with getting articles through those processes. DGG ( talk ) 05:04, 23 August 2012 (UTC)

The HubSpot article I wrote was nominated for GA by another editor back in May, but not yet reviewed. A GA-quality McKinsey article would be a truly massive undertaking considering their notability and an impracticality at our current pace, but we'll see.

I think what is needed is to review the Talk page discussion and indicate whether there are any outstanding issues from prior discussion that would suggest fulfilling the request edit would be problematic. I noticed - for example - that User:DES has reviewed some of my request edits, and he relies on the assessment of editors involved in the article. You can see here that two editors provided positive feedback on the work of SAS Institute, however he is waiting for a less casual approval from editors who are subject-matter experts.

You may - at your discretion - choose to do any, none, or all of the following:

• Review the discussion and draft and indicate on the Talk page if you feel the request edit should be fulfilled
• Use the {{request edit | D | A}} template (which I helped create largely with you in mind) to request that I implement the edits myself.
• I have noticed sometimes it helps to have an impartial editor ask for any last comments, etc.

User:King4057 20:07, 31 August 2012 (UTC)

Paid Advocate Stuff

Sorry it took me so long to respond on McKinsey above. I've been working almost non-stop over the last few days with Heritage Auctions. Your Talk page moves fast!

Although you're more of a direct-editing supporter, I thought you might be interested in the Bright Line essay I put together and a proposed Talk page template for Extant Organizations. For my part my efforts are to make the bright line more obvious and practical.

On the other hand, I'm also interested in your thoughts on the "go ahead" request edit template, where edits can be approved but the COI editor is asked to make the edits themselves. Do you think it improves the discomfort of proxy edits, or does it create the same problem. One editor I worked with recently seemed to like it, so I think it will work for some, but not all.

User:King4057 02:06, 2 September 2012 (UTC)

1. Such essays should make clear the diversity of opinion. There is no true Bright Line--there is nothing that is absolutely safe here, because there is no definitive authority (& it is necessary to make clear that while Jimbo is more authoritative than anyone else, his special role is that he will always be listened to, not that he makes the final decision) I think a key rule is that it is not necessarily the manner of the edit but the content: if you suggest something biased on the talk, no matter in how diffident a manner, you will lose significant credit. If the edit is impeccable, it can withstand criticism even by those who are most suspicious of the manner. Most people here have their eye fixed on the results, not the process.
2. I think that go ahead template is a good idea. I will look at the wording. I'd like it to say something like: I'm not saying this is necessarily right, but in my opinion it's reasonable & a justifiable edit. or what i sometimes tell people: I think this will be supported.
3. That article you mention is a new way to handle trivia. There are one or two sentences I may change, and a cut. (the soldier fee is I think tabloid emotion, but then I have an exceedingly low tolerance for faux human interest. )
4. "Extant" is a poor choice of word. "active"? but please, no garish colors. DGG ( talk ) 04:12, 2 September 2012 (UTC)

Awesome. I shared your comment with BigNate RE the template; he has done much of the work there. I think wording along those lines would be great for the request edit. Whatever you're comfortable with would be a good representation of what most editors uncomfortable with proxy edits would concur with. I wasn't sure what article you meant RE a soldier fee. User:King4057 04:55, 2 September 2012 (UTC)

I changed the template to "The reviewer requests that the COI editor implement the proposed edits directly." I figure each review can - if they choose to - explain why they use the template, without any need for explanation within the template itself. User:King4057 19:00, 2 September 2012 (UTC)

Even better, you can now use {{request edit | G}}, which is not an accept or decline (stands for "go-ahead"). And the language to {{request edit | R}} for substantial changes/additions only suggests the editor is asking for feedback, rather than approval. User:King4057 19:32, 4 September 2012 (UTC)

sounds promising, though i tend not to remember parameters unless they get coded in Huggle. I can keep track better of separate templates & I'd guess so do most people who only occasionally use one. DGG ( talk ) 02:05, 5 September 2012 (UTC)

Borderline AfC draft

I recently reviewed and declined Wikipedia:Articles for creation/Theodore Michael Siegel. I know you fairly recently looked over the entire AfC process and had a number of criticisms of the quality of the review decisions, both of approvals and declines. In this case I thought the draft was near the border of acceptance, and if in its current sate it was moved to mainspace and AfD'd it might well pass. On the other hand, there are some significant problems IMO, and I thought this might be the best way to get the original drafter to help deal with them.

If you have time to give this a look, I would value your opinion. If you don't I will mentiojn it on the AfC reviewer talk page. DES ^(talk) 00:09, 4 September 2012 (UTC) Oh, do note that this is one of the few cases where an AfC draft has a proper talk page. DES ^(talk) 00:10, 4 September 2012 (UTC)

this is interesting in more ways than just AfC. As far as AfC goes, it might well pass a deletion discussion, and it would be fair to give it a chance. The article needs strengthening, with removal of low quality references, and copyediting for compactness and to give a smoother appearance,and less appearance of promotionalism, but these are things that I find quite hard to coach someone to do--if I think an article is worth it, I do it myself, and suggest they learn by seeing the changes I make. When I do it on AfCs, I have usually been doing it before accepting the article, to give a clearer idea of what I think acceptable, but in principle, I think this should be done in mainspace.

The AfC process is only a means to an end. Building a NPOV encyclopedia is the goal, and many ways will work. What really affects the quality of AfC is not the format or structure, but the knowledge and skill of the reviewer--just like NPP, It's a little freer from junk than NPP, because people with utter junk mostly know better than to use it. However, it's a lot slower. True, the more processes , the better different needs can be met if people are guided to choose rightly, but the problem in maintaining quality is that the more processes, the harder to monitor. I think we're increasing our problems in the usual WP way, by setting up something more elaborate than we have good people to manage.

I'm going to make a rather radical suggestion here that I've been thinking about for a few days. I suggest we revive the proposed policy I opposed 6 months ago, of requiring some editing experience before submitting articles. Kudpung was right. There are only two ways to get improvements: one is to require qualification for reviewers, whether at AfC or NPP or anywhere else; the other is to require some basic qualification for editors. (Actually, we probably need both--they're complementary) I failed to take adequate account of the growth of promotionalism that comes with our increased visibility. The Board was wrong as well as me--we have two basic principles in conflict: NPOV, and, Anyone can edit. We can no longer have what we hoped for, a NPOV encyclopedia that anyone can edit. Something has to be compromised. To the extent we're a site for personal growth, we want to keep Anyone can edit, and accept the decline in NPOV. To the extent we're an encyclopedia, it's the opposite.

as far as other issues, there is something much more important to me than AfC: promotionalism. I dislike this sort of promotional article, making use of PR-based human interest coverage and local awards and ratings to build up something that is the tabloid equivalent of notability. Our rules don't handle these well. The GNG is based on substantial coverage from 3rd party RSs but I do not consider press releases, or material derived from press releases, to be independent RSs, except to the extent they provide factual product information and the like. The sort of news articles based on them I regard as a perversion of journalism, lending false color to what would be more honestly presented as advertisements. People have to be notable for something, and I think its the actual notability that we need to focus on. All the GNG measures is whether the person has a good press agent. Local human interest journalism is not a RS, regardless of the prestige of the publisher.

How does one tell if an article is promotional? My basic guideline is that a non-promotional article includes only material that would be of interest to a general reader coming across the mention of the subject and wanting the sort of information that would be found in an encyclopedia, not material that would be of interest only to those associated with the subject, or ton prospective clients/purchasers/students. The principle on which I base the guideline is that those writing with a conflict of interest or as a paid press agent, are automatically thinking in terms of what the subject wishes to communicate to the public, but an uninvolved person will think in terms of what the public might wish to know.

In this case, nobody would have heard of the dentist without having seen the press releases, and there is no point reprinting them here. They're very good press releases for the purpose, and anyone searching the web for a dentist in Chicago will find them. No one else will care.

for some details as applied here, see the talk p. DGG ( talk ) 01:44, 4 September 2012 (UTC)

Punishing Non-AGF Astroturfing

You and I have gone back and forth a few places on how to "punish" non-AGF astroturfing as a means to deter bad behavior. This kind of public boasting about intentionally corrupting Wikipedia's neutrality shows there is not enough fear of the repercussions.

I have been thinking it is beyond Wikipedia's ability and charter to punish violations of US astroturfing laws. In particular, the project has no means to verify even the individual's identity, neither alone create punishments that don't entail collateral damage or punishments that are more meaningful than blocks.

Astroturfing has real-world consequences that goes beyond Wikipedia (it's illegal). In a recent COIN case, someone was paying $20 a pop for editors to create a false consensus on the Talk page. I cannot think of a more clear example of intentional and illegal astroturfing.

I am wondering (just brainstorming) if it is really the project that should be punishing unlawful astroturfing (when clearly intentional and non-AGF) on Wikipedia, or if that isn't more of a legal issue that is beyond our role as a community. Corporate Minion 18:36, 9 September 2012 (UTC)

Well, one thing is certain--taking legal action is beyond our role as a community. Essentially the only thing the Foundation will take legal action about is copyvio of the trademark, for good reasons. And though any individual who wants to inform the FDC about anything is free to do so, but we have a very well established rule, WP:LEGAL, that anyone who takes or threatens legal action against a contributor on the basis of edits at Wikipedia is barred from Wikipedia until the action is determined. The rule has served us well in many different circumstances. You would then need to propose not applying it to legal actions based on accusations of accepting payment without disclosing it. I think making the exception would be a tactic used for bullying, and bullying is the reason we apply LEGAL very broadly.

So what practical step are you suggesting?

I don't want to punish anyone for anything. What I want to do is deny recognition, along the general lines of dealing with vandalism according to WP:DENY, a widely accepted essay. We can deny recognition to promotionalism by the same method that would improve Wikipedia from low quality good faith editing also: requiring higher standards.

Personally, I would support a WP rule that accepting payment without disclosing it is cause for rejecting an edit, even retrospectively, and banning from Wikipedia. Not just support: I have several times proposed it. As you say, the reason it has not been implemented is that we have no adequate way of detecting it or enforcing it, except for those foolish enough to boast about it. (& sometimes when someone does boast, it is concluded they are in fact making good articles on topics we ought to be covering.)

We are heading for an impasse between the principle of anonymity and the principle of NPOV. I think Wikipedia would be worthless without NPOV, but we could survive with limits on anonymity, using the same manner of making exceptions to real-name editing we use for permitting good faith editors who must use tor or other anonymous proxies. Our original principles, excellent as they were, may need modification now we've become such a desirable target. DGG ( talk ) 23:10, 9 September 2012 (UTC)

I agree this is an extremely difficult area, speaking as one who's had to adjudicate on situations with elements of this. My initial approach as an arbitrator was to recommend examining the sources and how they relate to the edits, which is (relatively) easy with many types of subjects that are well covered such as medicine and science, but becomes much harder with topics less well covered. Casliber (talk · contribs) 00:37, 10 September 2012 (UTC)

And especially when all the available sources have some degree of dependence upon press releases. Yes, many things would be simpler if we wrote only on the traditional encyclopedic topics. DGG ( talk ) 00:58, 10 September 2012 (UTC)

I think WP:DENY is different, because it says the motivations for vandalism are "recognition and infamy," but this is only true in a very small number of COI cases. Based on my interpretation of the FTC's astroturfing laws, anonymous COI editors would not be punishable by law, unless they show an intentional effort to deceive Wikipedians into thinking the edits are volunteer-written. The $20 scheme, sockpuppets and Bell Pottinger are all good examples, since Pottinger created a false identity to make it appear as though they were a volunteer. Wikipedia's after-the-fact enforcement seems aligned with the law of astroturfing, but I think deterrence-based enforcement (before the fact) needs to take place in the real-world, off-Wiki in order to generate fear of the repercussions and establish a legal precedence. Corporate Minion 20:08, 11 September 2012 (UTC)

It's different, but perhaps even stronger: the motivation for writing for pay is getting paid. If the client pays only if the article is kept, then the de-motivating effect of deletion is immediately obvious; if the client pays in advance or pays a consulting fee regardless, a portfolio of rejected articles will not get many contracts or advance a career. This particular scheme is a little different, but effective follow up with checkuser will remove future work also. Agreed that if one disguises oneself sufficiently, one may get away with it. We sometimes say it is hard to accomplish a sufficiently effective disguise, but people have claimed to have disguises we have not caught, and we cannot prove them wrong. The end of the provision for anonymity make sockpuppeting almost impossible. Will it prove to take that? You seem to be giving an argument that the legal approach will not normally prevent this, either. So again I ask you , who do you propose will bring the legal actions? More important, who among us volunteers will be comfortable being here in atmosphere of legal actions? Normally, anyone not out for evil tries to get out of any such potential situation as soon as possible--for an evil person, its one of the risks of doing business. DGG ( talk ) 02:22, 12 September 2012 (UTC)

This makes sense. My reservation would be that it relies on detection instead of prevention. For example, the promotional article discussed below remained for 2.5 years. If I was a paid editor that wrote that, I would consider it a success and have run off with my money long ago. It is not healthy for Wikipedia to defend itself against a flood, when part of the solution should be educating them up-front. Corporate Minion 19:16, 12 September 2012 (UTC)

Barchester Healthcare

Hello David, I wish for your help with another article again. For the past hour, I have been reviewing this article to see if it meets the criteria for AfD. With Google News, I have found several sources but I believe all of them are either small mentions or advert-like:

http://www.homecare.co.uk/news/article.cfm/id/1557762/new-chair-in-dementia-at-the-institute-of-mental-health-in-nottingham

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2012/sep/09/care-homes-ratings-survey-watchdog

http://www.property-magazine.eu/healthcare-reit-acquires-sunrise-senior-living-22276.html

http://southdownsliving.blogspot.com/2012/08/hurstwood-view-care-home-opens-in-east_20.html

http://www.carehome.co.uk/news/article.cfm/id/1557765/awards-ceremony-celebrating-positive-media-contributions-on-older-peoples-issues-to-be-hosted-by-janet-street-porter

http://www.carehome.co.uk/news/article.cfm/id/1557781/new-care-home-opens-in-guildford

http://www.eveningnews24.co.uk/news/all_the_fun_of_the_fair_as_hethersett_hall_care_home_marks_its_20th_birthday_1_1503943

http://www.independent.ie/opinion/columnists/gene-kerrigan/gene-kerrigan-heavy-consequences-of-the-light-touch-3196975.html

http://www.communitycare.co.uk/Articles/05/08/2011/114837/barchester-healthcares-apprenticeships-scheme-for-care-workers.htm

http://www.personneltoday.com/Articles/16/05/2007/40635/private-care-home-operator-barchester-healthcare-fined-500000-for-sacking-lesbian-nurses-because-of-their-sexuality.htm

http://www.altassets.net/private-equity-news/barchester-beats-private-equity-firms-to-3is-uk-westminster-healthcare.html

http://www.carehome.co.uk/news/article.cfm/id/1553104/award-winning-care-at-barchester

Aside from these, a very large portion were affiliated with the company. The best sources that actually talk about the company and its history is this and this (scroll to the bottom, click "2008" and and go to "July 2008", it'll be July 9). At Google News, I stopped my search here.

I apologize if I have flooded your talk page with these links but I would like your advice. SwisterTwister talk 02:52, 11 September 2012 (UTC)

1. the links were convenient, no problem there. Very good and careful work of yours, more patient than I would have probably done.
2. As for the sources: (1) the sex discrimination case is the sort of thing we would never include in a blp, and there's a good case to be made for not including it with a company either, unless it becomes a national scandal. (2) That G news indexes their own company newsletter is unusually sloppy for G News--it usually only includes industry-wide pr sources. *=(3)the carehom.uk refs are just press releases. One of them is even on the firms own awards to their own staff! That belongs only in their own newsletter, not a industry publication. (4). The Irish times is about people and their hobs, not the firm, but it is the closest. (5) Which of the July 9 articles?
3. I consider businesses of this size notable; the main factors I go by is their relative position within the sector, or alternatively whether they have done anything particularly important individually. In this case, I don't see anything specifically important, but they are repeated cited by good sources as being a leading firm or the leading firm in their industry. This is however my criterion, not the WP criterion. As for the GNG, we would need to say that incidental or routine mentions that something is the leader is an indication of notability. My general position on this is clear: I think the GNG as written is primitive nonsense, and as long as we have it , it needs to be squared with reality by interpreting the language to give a reasonable result.
4. The article is pure PR, and low quality at that. Peacock language, repetitiveness, minor things made into significance, very few specifics. As usual with such, it's mostly copied from their website, which , again as usual, gives a good reason to delete it as G12, which I shall do tomorrow so you have a chance to see this.
5. I think however an article could be written, and this illustrates the dilemma of promotional editing: because whoever wrote this one is most unlikely to be able to do it right, and the only way there can be an acceptable article is if someone competent here writes it. The situation is developing that the best way a PR agent can get an article for a weakly notable firm is to write a bad one, and hope that someone here will bother rewriting it. I've done it many times, and I'm getting disgusted with doing it.

Some of my talk page stalkers from the pr industry will recognize this problem. DGG ( talk ) 03:59, 11 September 2012 (UTC)

Thanks for the swift response and comments, I have now reduced the article to a stub and removed certain sentences that appeared to be copied and pasted. I too am concerned with the mentality that companies appear to have, believing that Wikipedia is a social networking website or web host. As a result of this, nearly of all my recent AfD nominations have been from searching Category:Articles with a promotional tone. Also a result of this, I attempt my best to offer the user(s) advice especially at AfC. SwisterTwister talk 04:20, 11 September 2012 (UTC)

Yes, that's one way to do it, and what I would have done in the past. But I'm now inclned to be more drastic. The best way to stop copyvio and promotionalism is not just to remove it, but to remove the article. The principle is WP:DENY. Not everyone agrees, and I myself do not do it consistently. (I tend to decide by how crucial i think is the subject & whether it is in my field of interest; though I have to admit that my current level of annoyance tends to affect it also.) part of it. What you did was fine.

But they do not exactly see us as a social networking service or a web host, though individuals often do. They see us as an advertising medium. DGG ( talk ) 04:54, 11 September 2012 (UTC)

Question David: Wouldn't the same objective be reached not by changing notability, but by just establishing that "What Wikipedia is not" supersedes notability? We can admit that a company is notable, but still delete it - regardless of who wrote it or what size the organization is. Corporate Minion 20:54, 11 September 2012 (UTC)

so we do. WP:CSD#G11 provides for the speedy deletion of "Pages that are exclusively promotional, and would need to be fundamentally rewritten to become encyclopedic." I have deleted not just hundreds, but thousands of pages under that criterion. Whereas for notability, the parallel criterion A7 provides only for the speedy deletion of an article " that does not indicate why its subject is important or significant", which is much less than notability and avoid even using the term to prevent confusion. An article with inadequate evidence of notability may be shown to be so by finding additional references. and we encourage trying if there is any evidence it might be successful. The problem is articles which are not "exclusively" promotional, but somewhat informative, for they can be reduced to a stub that still shows the importance, and those which are exclusive promotional but can be fixed with sufficient rewriting. These are matters of interpretation. I and SwisterTwister were discussing a page that was almost exclusive promotional, but had could be considered to have some small amount of information, and which could arguably be fixed by reducing it to that small amount, and which she was prepared to do, but I was not.

You would be arguing that we should never try, but that runs against the accepted principle that we should always try to improve what is improvable if it can be reasonably accomplished--and many articles written with a promotional intend contain both a good deal of preservable information and a good deal of no-informative promotion. If you mean that we drew the line at rejecting articles with any degree of promotion, we would run across the problem that a perfectly straightforward informative balanced article about a worthy product or company or organization, fully referenced with substantial reviews and other significant references from reliable third party sources, will likely have a promotional effect, at least for those who might want the product or services or support the cause--and those are the people promotion is aimed at. As an example, a good article on a notable book describes the plot, says it was a best seller, and cites the reviews and the critical commentary. This is the most informative article, and also the most effective promotion. DGG ( talk ) 00:47, 12 September 2012 (UTC)

I think as my skills as an editor improve, I will find myself increasingly on the deletionist side of things. The task of actually performing the cleanup however seems impossibly large and uninteresting. I don't know that I had any arguments per se, except that I am thinking about the argument you've made about deleting content in response to poor COI work. Corporate Minion 03:15, 12 September 2012 (UTC)

One reason I do cleanup is because I know I am more of an editor in the RW sense than a writer, and I admit that I find it enjoyable to show my virtuosity. But the other reason is that we have found it is almost impossible to reform editors already established here. Much howe ver can sometimes be made of them, if we can catch them early. And if it cannot, early is the best time to stop them, before they learn how to effectively deceive here. . DGG ( talk ) 04:34, 12 September 2012 (UTC)

Retail loss prevention

By the way, there's complex issue of COI and COATRACK at Retail loss prevention (see history and talk page.) Maybe you care to take a look at that too. Tijfo098 (talk) 22:16, 22 October 2012 (UTC)

yes indeed; a classic conflict of an industry white-washer and a consumer pov pusher. The whole thing needs to be redone; a small amount of the text in the various versions will be helpful. DGG ( talk ) 03:29, 24 October 2012 (UTC)

COI and notability

At a current AfD, I made a suggestio [9]n that I would like to expand here:

A year ago my usual position on promotional articles about subjects of borderline notability was that I would want to accept the article, and then rewrite it to remove the irrelevant material, emphasize (or sometimes add) whatever was really important,& keep only the good references. I have come to feel differently. The reason is my increasing sense of desperation from working at AfC and NPP. When it was a trickle, we could deal with it, but not now. The greatly increased use of Wikipedia for PR, is of course due to the public perception of Wikipedia's significance. I don't see how we can avoid being a target, but we can alter our response.

I can not justify it by the formal WP rules, but the article on a person or firm of borderline notability that is here only as a result of a PR effort does not arouse my sympathies, and I judge it somewhat more strictly. I think many of us do. I now do pay attention to the origin and motivation of the article, & I also pay attention to the quality of the PR work--when it a great effort to magnify things, it increases my degree of skepticism. How we interpret our rules will always depend on common sense, otherwise known as IAR, and perhaps that informal interpretation is the best guide when the situation is otherwise ambiguous. We could think of it as self-defense. Because of the nature of the work I do here, I've thought about this for some months, and I've figured out how to express my feeling in an actual proposal:

I suggest a formal guideline that articles written with COI must show clear and unambiguous notability . (Because we cannot always tell whether something is PR, it would necessarily apply to those jobs of PR so poorly done that we could tell; this is most of them, and even forcing an improvement in quality would be of considerable help to the encyclopedia) I can see how it would be abused, by leading to an increased use of I Think It's Notable/Not Notable as an argument. I can see how it would be misused to delete articles by good-faith contributors who are merely copying what they think the correct style here. I can see the danger in discarding articles that are merely poorly written--unlike some other WPs that can require quality writing, we have an important role for editors with an imperfect knowledge of our language. We'd probably need some subtler wording, and it would fortunately all depend in practice on what people think at AfD, not the views of a single administrator. I've heard it suggested we counter promotionalism by omitting BLPs, and articles about companies & organizations, which is a throwing out the essential content along with the junk. More realistically, I've heard it suggested that we omit non-famous BLPs & companies & organizations. Mine is a lesser move in the same direction.

Opinions and suggested modification requested before I actually propose it. DGG ( talk ) 20:33, 28 September 2012 (UTC)

• I agree. A recent DRV (Bianca Jade) made me formulate the thought that one way to meet the flood of PR is to be much tougher-minded about the words significant and independent in the GNG; but I agree that, if the definitions can be got right, a higher formal notability standard for PR-driven efforts is desirable. I presume you are thinking of the AfD level: should there be a higher A7 bar for PR entries, as well? JohnCD (talk) 23:03, 28 September 2012 (UTC)

Yes, it was that one which started me thinking. I think for a change like this, it would be better to trust the community, than individual administrators, since it's a matter of interpretation. . Since the community has gradually been using higher standards for these promotional articles at AfD, this will give a smooth transition. Perhaps the real value of my suggested change is to make it easier to explain and support the decisions that are already being made. At CSD, we already have G11, which gives a good deal of flexibility. (And in deciding whether to use G11, I do take into account to some degree the likelihood of rewriting into an article that would pass AfD--certainly I myself am not going to go to the trouble of rewriting one unless I'm very sure it will!) And opinion at WT:CSD has always been against linking A7 to "notability"--I questioned that when I first came here, but people with more experienced explained to me how any connection would cause confusion and erratic single-handed deletions. DGG ( talk ) 23:17, 28 September 2012 (UTC)

Apart from the regular spam for sports people and garage bands, I take particular exception to the use of Wikipedia for promoting people, companies, and products. There is a core philosophy here that we are expected to to copyedit, improve, and find sources for every newly submitted article, but other than reaching for the delete button, I wouldn't lift a finger to edit a spam or vanity page. It's our own fault as a community that we too often allow such articles to stay, and a greater fault of the Foundation who firmly believes that greater controls are not necessary, and that a landing page that explains the rules to newly registered users is a low priority. We don't want to throw the babies out with the bathwater, but as such articles are almost always written by SPA/COI we should only allow admins, or at least established editors to vote on bio and corporate AfDs, but as long as the WMF decides what the community can decide, it will never happen of course. Even getting a new CSD criterion for SPAMBIO or CORPSPAM would be nigh on impossible. 00:06, 29 September 2012 (UTC)Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk)

I would encourage new people to participate as soon as they knew their way around--we need them, but to replace those leaving, and for fresh viewpoints. What we need to do is to find more effective ways to teach them, on the assumption that any teacher must make, that most of them really do want to learn. The troublesome or bigoted long term contributors are the more difficult problem. Commercial PR writers are bad enough, but the zealots are worse-- commercial writers, once they have lost, leave. A zealot never gets discouraged and I keep seeing those I first spotted 5 years ago. But WP is a communal project, and it is more important that it remain communal than that be a first-rate encyclopedia. The original intent was right: to recognize our unreliability, but strive for comprehensive coverage. And as I said, I would not establish new CSD criteria, basically because I do not trust individual admins to make judgments. DGG ( talk ) 01:44, 29 September 2012 (UTC)

Request for comment on AfD of interest

You've participated in the past on an AfD discussion on SEO topic so I thought you'd be interested in providing input on AfD on SEOmoz.orgCantaloupe2 (talk) 02:50, 17 October 2012 (UTC)

DGG, since you have already read the AfD discussion, it would be valuable if you weighed in on a somewhat related request for administrative action.[10] Though I picture you (perhaps wrongly) as more of a mentoring admin than one who takes administrative action, there was some discussion about whether it should be on the administrator's noticeboard, etc. - I have never had a need for admin intervention, so I probably did it wrong. I have also apologized in a few areas where I haven't handled things the best way I could have, but I do need a mutual IBAN quite urgently to offer some relief from the situation.

Cantaloupe may be watching this contrib and perceive it as hounding, so I should let him know here that I am a regular Talk page stalker on DGG's Talk page. He is a good admin and not one to take sides. In my opinion, the discussion on COIN has far too much defensiveness, blame-gaming and discussion on petty content disputes, creating a battleground on the COIN board, rather than finding the best solution going forward. Corporate 18:55, 17 October 2012 (UTC)

Despite the disclaimer, you make me feel like I'm followed. You didn't just come here, but you're disruptive to come to my thread topic and butt-in. You've already expressed your opinion in the AfD. I'm here seeking his neutral input. I don't appreciate your attempt to create undue influence. This is NOT the drama board. Cantaloupe2 (talk) 21:53, 17 October 2012 (UTC)

Once two people are involved in a discussion, they normally follow each other on the general area, and this is reasonable and expected; it's only wrong when they start following everything unrelated each other may also work on. As I personally work on many different things, I myself often do not follow up as much as I ought to, nor can I always respond immediately, and I am always grateful if someone suggests I may want to take another look. If they've asked me too often, I tell them. DGG ( talk ) 00:40, 18 October 2012 (UTC)

I'm trying to figure out if DGG is hinting that I ask too much of him. It would be a reasonable complaint ;-)

Even though User:BusterD is my mentor, I also see DGG as a mentor from the perspective that he has taught me a lot about Wikipedia and given me perspective. Because he his an editor I respect, I value his opinion on this and other issues and ask for his feedback often so I may improve as an editor (though I still disagree with him on occasion).

Because DGG feels strongly that COIs should disclose, I was surprised he did not have stronger opinion about behavior that discourages disclosure, but also that he didn't point out some of my less stellar work, something he is not shy about doing. This is an area we disagree, because I feel excessive disclosure only paints a larger target on an editor's head, while he feels editors that do not disclose their personal identity are less accountable to their work.

Cant, you should know I also mentioned this here to ask if I was approaching this right. I am not sure the COIN discussion will result in a concrete admin decision, but I have also not encountered the rules on forum shopping before and am in unfamiliar waters having never needed an admin action before, so I have asked for help. They may feel even the Talk page post is forum shopping - I don't know. Corporate 02:44, 18 October 2012 (UTC)

(1) Corp, I am saying that you are not asking too much of me here; when you do, I say so, just as I said so when I decided it was not my role to review your edits before submission. Quite the opposite: I object when a third party tells you or anyone they are doing wrong to post here.

(2) The discussion here however is bringing up many different things. Some things I have very strong feelings about, and they fortunately already are and should continue to be policy: the relevant one is NPOV. NPOV is harmed by bias as well as by COI; both can not be eliminated from our feelings, but can be from our work. I think bias much the harder to deal with. Opposition to an otherwise unexceptionable article on a subject one dislikes is one expression of bias. Since I have worked from the start here on questions of deleting & rescuing articles, I have been continually engaged in fighting against it since I came here, on many different fronts. The four prevailing streams of it from then to now are a bias against articles on pseudoscience, against articles that discuss common prejudices, against articles detailing slightly taboo or disreputable sexual topics, and against articles on commercial organizations.

(3) That 4th takes us into the current COI territory. I feel strongly that it ought to be policy that at least commercial COI editors must self-disclose; I consider it our best defense against the disreputable. It is however not current policy, & I cannot blame anyone for not following my preferences. or from arguing against me. But neither is it policy that they cannot edit directly if they edit properly; were it to become so, as some wish, I would have to tell people not to do it; as it is I warn them in their best interests against doing it unless they are sure they are doing it correctly. I consider you generally do it correctly enough, but I can understand that you may not wish to do so in order to be in an unassailable position to discuss the general paid editing issue.

(4) I indeed work by mentoring but when it fails I use the admin tools; I became an admin partly to be able to strengthen my mentoring by having them. I do not however work in dispute resolution or in personal conflicts, unless there is some special reason, because I find the current procedures for dealing with them ineffective and counterproductive--I have however stayed out of the discussions of their reform, because I have no better ideas to offer that would fit the situation here & be likely of adoption. I will make an exception to defend someone I think unfairly attacked, but I do not like to prosecute or judge.

(5) If you had asked my advice, I would advised you not to have taken this issue to the COI noticeboard, but to argue at individual articles. That is what I almost always advise, and what I have myself always done in analogous situations. DGG ( talk ) 03:51, 18 October 2012 (UTC)

I'd like not to continue this thread here. DGG ( talk ) 03:51, 18 October 2012 (UTC)

Officeautopilot

That's just the tip of the iceberg. Most other companies in that field (automated marketing) have SPA-created wikipages. I've added a list to the AfD of Officeautopilot and nominated for deletion those below it in a market survey. Some above it should probably be deleted too. I suspect that only the top 5 (which have significant market share) are truly notable. The rest seem to rely on the self-generated noise of their industry. Tijfo098 (talk) 08:37, 22 October 2012 (UTC)

I like your criterion of relative standing in the field; I have long argued that market share is a relevant factor of notability for companies. Do you think there is any chance we can get it actually in the guideline?

But more generally, every non-famous company in every field can be assumed to have a high probability of having COI-created or influenced Wikipedia page, as can every non-profit organization, and every non-famous individual in any creative , commercial, academic, or political field. (Depending of field, the COI in may be hobbyist or advocate, not paid PR). For the famous, the degree of influence will vary. Most truly major companies are wise enough to leave WP articles alone. Even truly major universities and international NGOs are often not wise enough, possibly because they are not able to afford the high quality PR work who actually understand. (By PR I mean either in-house staff, or consultants/paid writers or the people doing their own naïve work.) (By "high probability" I mean between 50 and 99%, depending on field)

There are several remedies, all of which reinforce each other:

1. Be more careful in checking copyvio. Low grade PR work very often just copies the web site.
2. Be more stringent in enforcing notability standards, still remaining sensitive to the underlying principle that being an encyclopedia means that if people in the general public are likely to look here for information, they should find it.
3. Develop and enforce a higher standard of article writing in general.
4. Get competent work at AfC and NPP. At the moment, AfC is the worse part of the problem, because most COI articles are now going there.
5. Get more careful work from deleting administrators, both to make necessary deletions and avoid unnecessary
6. Get better results at AfD through increased participation.
7. Evaluate not just new, but existing articles. COI goes back to the beginning.
8. (more controversially) require identification of at least paid PR, & if possible all COI. The more competent & careful will self-identify, & it provides a firmer basis for quickly removing the others.

The problem, of course, is who is going to do all this? How many people here both understand the problem and have the skill to handle it? My approach is to instead ask, How many can be taught to understand the problem and develop the skill. There's the leverage point, and it is at this point I am increasingly working. It will not make me popular, but admins and other editors who to it wrong need to be corrected. It's more difficult to change the working habits of experienced editors than to teach the new ones. I've been working mainly with the new, for they are at least grateful to be taught, not resentful. I have so far at Wikipedia tried to not be bold about challenging other experienced admins and editors. Perhaps I no longer need to be popular, but I don't want to look like I'm leading a single-purpose crusade. After all, I came here originally to write good articles in areas important to me. Now the most I do is wait until a bad one of interest comes along, and then I try to fix it from reject to grade C. DGG ( talk ) 18:43, 22 October 2012 (UTC)

One problem with the market share criterion is that it may be hard to come by reliable metrics (most sources are non-free and sometimes not even available in academic libraries, but only as expensive report from Gartner etc.) The German WP uses a simpler procedure with a sharper cutoff, although it has sub criteria by business type! de:Wikipedia:Relevanzkriterien#Wirtschaftsunternehmen Basically a company needs to have either (i) 1000 employees, or (ii) annual revenue of at least 100 million euros or (iii) at least 20 branches in different countries or be (iv) publicly traded on a German stock market or (v) hold a dominant market position with one product or service or (vi) have historically fulfilled any of the previous criteria. That automatically excludes most start-up spam. (They have some very low bar for publishers though, "at least three books with a reasonable spread in academic libraries".) Tijfo098 (talk) 22:16, 22 October 2012 (UTC)

Whether there are market share reports depend on the industry--for private companies especially, and outside the US, it can be difficult. (Smething can also be done just out of comparison -- if addition is not OR, neither is < and > '. I am, however, not at all a specialist in business librarianship. The German approach is also a good one. Again, private companies are the most difficult. Going by industry seems reasonable to me. As for publishers, I agree Yes, a very good place to use formal size criteria would be publishers and newspapers & other media, though I agree with you that that their criterion iv is very weak, at least as far as the US is concerned.

One particular difficulty with start-ups is that they can be news-worthy even if new and small, but the news that gets published is almost always contaminated by Press releases. DGG ( talk ) 03:29, 24 October 2012 (UTC)

COI and clarity

Hi David, I've not got much involved with questions of paid editing and COI but came across MMCG while stub-sorting. Unashamedly written by its PR company, going by editor name. I've tried to make it less peacocky and removed excessive detail, but would be delighted if you could cast an eye over it and see if I've done enough. Is there any central reporting place for notification of paid editing like this? I see that the editor has been blocked, but of course they are likely to reappear with a name which makes the situation less obvious! Their only other edits using this name were to James Toseland (a former motorbike racer) and one of the edit summaries says "RBP International is James' management company". PamD 12:38, 23 October 2012 (UTC)

I did some further editing. There's a coi noticeboard, but it is not at present policy to automatically block COI editors unless what they do is entirely promotional, and I don't think I'd consider him so, as the article did have some information -- the block is because he used a corporate username. If you watch the article it will be enough to see if he comes back on the subject. The give-away will be if the link to the ceo becomes blue. I left the link in for that purpose. A key reason for not blocking promotional editors is it does no good: they just come back under another name, & unless the style is very close or the subject identical we cannot spot them. That's why I advocate a rule that COI editors must declare themselves, so we know to inspect closely what they edit. DGG ( talk ) 21:27, 23 October 2012 (UTC)

I have been experimenting with articles on PR agencies, where PR editors are particularly active. For the most part, they are not disruptive, but neither are they helpful. They are eager to add over-sized awards section, but not to provide a better logo image, share independent sources or improve their history - it's disappointing considering the level of service we provide to journalists that companies are unwilling to be a resource for Wikipedians the same way. Awards is particularly problematic in the PR industry, because we have hundreds (if not thousands) a year due to the eagerness of PR firms to gobble them up and pay corresponding application and sponsorship dues.

The San Jose Group keeps adding promotional content and I feel like it creates a burden on me to clean up after it. They get paid to write a poor-quality article and I clean up after it for free - this burden is no less in article-space than it is in Talk space.

Anyways, I am experimenting now with tags. I think they may be a great way to provide COIs feedback directly in article-space and most COIs will fix the problem themselves to get the flag taken down. I have seen the flags effectively provide incentive for a COI to clean up their own problems. Credit Suisse is a good example of where I was happy - the company shipped me a book (I could not have written the article without it) and pointed out the images they had on commons. Corporate 01:18, 24 October 2012 (UTC)

tags work, if attention is paid to them. and whether the firm does pay attention is another way for seeing who are the constructive editors. And although AfD is not supposed to be used to force improvements, it can be very effective. In some fields we have had very careful consideration about just what awards do and do not confer notability (for example, performers). We need to do this in other fields also, so a person without expert knowledge can tell. (For example, in a field I know, we have decided that no award within the college contributes to notability under WP:PROF--which would seem obvious enough, but college PR people keep adding them. I had, btw, an interesting conversation with a very senior university faculty member about the woeful inadequacy of all college press releases, including those from his own university, He confirms what I have noticed, that they never say anything precisely.) DGG ( talk ) 03:23, 24 October 2012 (UTC)

I guess maybe I was wrong.[11] I didn't think it was right to have an article made up almost entirely of case studies and awards. But yes, I think tags are great. If you add a promotionalism tag to one of my articles, I can turn around and say "if you want to get rid of the tag, this is what we have to do." Provides incentive. Corporate 12:55, 25 October 2012 (UTC)

RFC Feedback

Looking for more feedback from uninvolved parties for an RFC I posted at the page ALCAT test. The discussion is here: Talk:ALCAT test#RFC:Neutrality and reliable sources. Many thanks. Plot Spoiler (talk) 19:43, 24 October 2012 (UTC)

commented. I supported one part of your position. DGG ( talk ) 06:09, 25 October 2012 (UTC)

Your further involvement could be helpful. Also dealing with some pretty nasty and spurious COI attacks against myself that you might know best how to handle as an admin. Plot Spoiler (talk) 14:57, 26 October 2012 (UTC)

(edit conflict) Fyi, User:Plot Spoiler refuses refused to answer a gf question [12] about the existence of a potential conflict of interest. As I've remarked elsewhere, I find found this to be a matter of some concern. —MistyMorn (talk) 14:59, 26 October 2012 (UTC)

DGG, as an admin, do you have any further recommendations on how the ALCAT page could be improved? Seems that compromise and consensus-building is not being all that effective in creating a more neutral page? Plot Spoiler (talk) 02:53, 1 November 2012 (UTC)

As a general rule, no admin or group of admins here can determine content other than as editors in the ordinary way. I see you added the sentence on the athletes back. As an editor, I consider it appropriate. As an administrator, I have nothing to do with that question, except to prevent an edit war about it. As far as your own interests are concerned, they would be much better served by not editing the article further, than by edit-warring again to insert the sentence or anything else. It would, admitted, seem odd to be in the position of blocking someone for insisting by long continued edit warring on inserting a sentence that I personally think appropriate, but such would be my obligation. DGG ( talk ) 04:58, 1 November 2012 (UTC)

Sorry to bring you into this again, but MistyMorn has really crossed the line [13] with her WP:Harassment, lack of good faith and uncivil behavior. The intervention of an admin - just for civility purposes - would be appreciated. Plot Spoiler (talk) 18:57, 1 November 2012 (UTC)

I've left her a comment. If she understand the situation, that should be sufficient. I think you are likely to get a boomerang effect if you pursue this. DGG ( talk ) 23:22, 1 November 2012 (UTC)

I'm male btw; the username was prompted by a love of Chinese ink wash painting at a time when I didn't envisage needing to use it socially. —MistyMorn (talk) 00:30, 2 November 2012 (UTC)

Sorry--I shouldhave known better than to make assumptions of this sort. DGG ( talk ) 02:17, 2 November 2012 (UTC)

No problem. My concerns do remain about the question you responded to on my talk page. Rereading WP:COI, I realize that posting a coi template on the user's page was actually a gf procedural mistake on my part. The intention was to ask a straightforward question in as impersonal way as possible with the aim of eliciting a straightforward and clear response. Regardless of my procedural blunder, is it not reasonable to expect editors of commercial product pages to provide this sort of information when asked? —MistyMorn (talk) 08:47, 2 November 2012 (UTC)

I have been saying for some time that it ought to be required that people with COI disclose it. However, some see this as preventing the adoption of the rule they really want, which is that people with COI must not edit t all, or at least not in mainspace. All such rules, regardless of their intrinsic merit, have the same problem: there is no way of detecting & consequently no way of enforcing.Pushing too hard to get someone to reveal their COI has been held to be an attempt at outing, disclosing someone's real name, which is considered a much more serious matter here than COI. This does create a dilemma. My approach is that our best safeguard against coi is to require NPOV editing from everyone. If someone edits as if they had COI , it does not matter who they actually are; and similarly if they edit fairly. On this particular article we do have at least one person editing as if they has a COI for the subject, but we also have people editing as if they had a unreasonable bias against it. The result is the usual one, to remove most of the information. I think that's very unfortunate, but I've seen it happen many times, and it suits the views of those who think our approach to things they think evil, such as alternative medicine, is to minimize the evidence of its existence. Now I have a bias myself: I think most alternative medicine at best foolish and at worst dangerous, but this leads me to desire full treatment of it, in the confidence that any fair presentation will show people how wrong it is. At present, the ostriches are winning, and we are rapidly removing or minimizing articles in this field and also in creationism, parapsychology, & climate change denial (which is the most dangerous of them all, actually,& therefore tone we should cover especially fully and fairly), I have found that many who claim to support NPOV actually mean that they support NPOV when the result is a view they find acceptable. DGG ( talk ) 16:58, 2 November 2012 (UTC)

You raise two quite separate points:

• Regarding COI disclosure, a negative statement has nothing to do with outing but provides a commitment. Imo, a positive disclosure could be made in very general terms to protect anonymity. (Btw, I wish to have nothing to do with personal outing in any form.)
• Your concerns about perceived bias from current WP:MED contributors to the ALCAT page frankly surprise me. The simple fact is that none of the sources identified that meet WP:MED provide any support for the medical claims made by the marketers of ALCAT. This is scarcely surprising given the current marketers' implausible claims (diagnostic testing apart!) regarding use of dietary restriction to treat conditions for which there is no substantive evidence of a dietary link ["pseudoscience"]. At a more basic level ["failed hypothesis"], the MEDRS sources all concur that the test is was not appropriately (cf [14]) validated in the primary studies -- so, here again, it's unsurprising that we agree among ourselves on this point.
  

More generally, I'm sorry you seem to have limited trust in WPMED members implementation of MEDRS -- an excellent guideline, imo, for identifying reliable secondary sources for biomedical/health-related claims. I feel User:TenOfAllTrades recently provided some measured and thoughtful responses to this sort of criticism [15]. Speaking personally, as someone with a background in assessment of epidemiological and clinical evidence, I'm professionally used to examining sources independently of my own opinions (ie "biases" in the sense of "prejudgements"). As regards your perceptions about prejudging alternative medicine topics, I hope that sort of independence is evident in my approach here to a variety of such topics (beyond homeopathy), such as barefoot running [16], psychoanalysis [17], transcendental meditation [18] and (just today) mindfulness based stress reduction [19]. In most of these topics (homeopathy aside! [20]) the evidence is much less clear-cut than it is for ALCAT.

—MistyMorn (talk) 20:33, 2 November 2012 (UTC)

COI and notability

At a current AfD, I made a suggestio [21]n that I would like to expand here:

A year ago my usual position on promotional articles about subjects of borderline notability was that I would want to accept the article, and then rewrite it to remove the irrelevant material, emphasize (or sometimes add) whatever was really important,& keep only the good references. I have come to feel differently. The reason is my increasing sense of desperation from working at AfC and NPP. When it was a trickle, we could deal with it, but not now. The greatly increased use of Wikipedia for PR, is of course due to the public perception of Wikipedia's significance. I don't see how we can avoid being a target, but we can alter our response.

I can not justify it by the formal WP rules, but the article on a person or firm of borderline notability that is here only as a result of a PR effort does not arouse my sympathies, and I judge it somewhat more strictly. I think many of us do. I now do pay attention to the origin and motivation of the article, & I also pay attention to the quality of the PR work--when it a great effort to magnify things, it increases my degree of skepticism. How we interpret our rules will always depend on common sense, otherwise known as IAR, and perhaps that informal interpretation is the best guide when the situation is otherwise ambiguous. We could think of it as self-defense. Because of the nature of the work I do here, I've thought about this for some months, and I've figured out how to express my feeling in an actual proposal:

I suggest a formal guideline that articles written with COI must show clear and unambiguous notability . (Because we cannot always tell whether something is PR, it would necessarily apply to those jobs of PR so poorly done that we could tell; this is most of them, and even forcing an improvement in quality would be of considerable help to the encyclopedia) I can see how it would be abused, by leading to an increased use of I Think It's Notable/Not Notable as an argument. I can see how it would be misused to delete articles by good-faith contributors who are merely copying what they think the correct style here. I can see the danger in discarding articles that are merely poorly written--unlike some other WPs that can require quality writing, we have an important role for editors with an imperfect knowledge of our language. We'd probably need some subtler wording, and it would fortunately all depend in practice on what people think at AfD, not the views of a single administrator. I've heard it suggested we counter promotionalism by omitting BLPs, and articles about companies & organizations, which is a throwing out the essential content along with the junk. More realistically, I've heard it suggested that we omit non-famous BLPs & companies & organizations. Mine is a lesser move in the same direction.

Opinions and suggested modification requested before I actually propose it. DGG ( talk ) 20:33, 28 September 2012 (UTC)

• I agree. A recent DRV (Bianca Jade) made me formulate the thought that one way to meet the flood of PR is to be much tougher-minded about the words significant and independent in the GNG; but I agree that, if the definitions can be got right, a higher formal notability standard for PR-driven efforts is desirable. I presume you are thinking of the AfD level: should there be a higher A7 bar for PR entries, as well? JohnCD (talk) 23:03, 28 September 2012 (UTC)

Yes, it was that one which started me thinking. I think for a change like this, it would be better to trust the community than individual administrators, since it's a matter of interpretation. . Since the community has gradually been using higher standards for these promotional articles at AfD, this will give a smooth transition. Perhaps the real value of my suggested change is to make it easier to explain and support the decisions that are already being made. At CSD, we already have G11, which gives a good deal of flexibility. (And in deciding whether to use G11, I do take into account to some degree the likelihood of rewriting into an article that would pass AfD--certainly I myself am not going to go to the trouble of rewriting one unless I'm very sure it will!) And opinion at WT:CSD has always been against linking A7 to "notability"--I questioned that when I first came here, but people with more experienced explained to me how any connection would cause confusion and erratic single-handed deletions. DGG ( talk ) 23:17, 28 September 2012 (UTC)

I was thinking deleting blatant spam on notable subjects is quite easy to justify using our policies:

WP:NOT > WP:V > WP:GNG

No?

It's a little offensive to have double-standards for COIs. I should therefor tell companies they should not disclose to avoid such targeting. Corporate 19:44, 4 December 2012 (UTC)

We delete blatant spam wherever we find it, though when we find it, it was generally inserted by people with a COI, whether or not a commercial COI. Fans can have COI as much as paid staff, and for some products or enterprises there are many fans, sometimes more unreasonable than any PR agent. We have always interpreted promotion to include all forms of advocacy. To apply a stronger standard of notability for article mostly made for promotional purposes seems a rational intersection of two standards, not a double standard. Both notability and promotional nature have degrees, so for those articles where both are a little questionable in both regards, I think it reasonable to consider the questionability as additive. I'd say the people most likely to object will be the ones engaged in the lower levels of commercial promotion, who will no longer have customers except from those organization of clear notability. I'd further say that an attempt to hide COI is not regarded as ameliorating the matter.. I continue to suggest we regard it as very strongly aggravating it, along with other indications of bad faith editing.

The general principles of WP:NOT are so general that most of the other policies and guidelines are there to interpret it. The various illustrative examples on that page have varying levels of status. Some have become firm policy, some are advice, some are explicitly just links to guidelines. WP:NOT doesn't take precedence over WP:V--it's the other way round. In the content policy box at the top of WP:NOT, the "core policies" are NPOV, NOR, and V. NOT is among the "other content policies", along with Article titles, BLP, and Image policy.

My views on the GNG are well known--I consider it an obsolete part of the Notability guideline whose use ought to be restricted to situations where we can't find anything that actually pertains to the notability of the subject. Others think it the true basic part of the Notability guideline. What I think is universally agreed is that it is in practice what we generally use. DGG ( talk ) 06:50, 5 December 2012 (UTC)

I was referring to this: "I suggest a formal guideline that articles written with COI must show clear and unambiguous notability." Maybe it wasn't intended that way, but it reads like something that singles-out/targets COIs, validating the rhetoric PRs are using to justify astroturfing and censorship. Corporate 22:13, 4 December 2012 (UTC)

Certainly it singles out COI; that is exactly the purpose, and what I said in the paragraph above. It singles out COI whether it's by paid editors, or by people associated with the subject, or by fans of the subject or something associated with it, or by advocates of the cause associated with the subject. It does not specifically affect writing by paid editors any more than the other forms of COI. And it's directed towards the writing, not the editors; the wording is deliberate "written with COI" not "written by COI editors". You're assuming that the only form of COI is that by PR professionals. That's the most prevalent kind, but it's the easiest to deal with. People working for money are more rational than people working with an emotional commitment: when we make it not worth their while, they stop.

there's an alternative wording: written in a promotional manner. But the difficulty here is that this does not make a clear gradation: manner can just be a poor choice of words, or the idea that even a dispassionate but unskilled editor might have that they have to use adjectives of importance in order to make the notability clear to us. There's another alternative meaning, writing for the purpose of promotion. The problem here is that any writing , no matter how dispassionate, about a subject of any practical current significance will inherently promote the subject to a considerable extent, assuming it isn't written in order to abuse it.

But I want to emphasise that to some extent it is in fact about editors, and just as we regard the use of sockpuppets as likely to indicate bad faith editing, I would very strongly support regarding concealment of any explicit conflict of interest as similarly indicative. This would certainly meet your objections that we are unintentionally inducing editors to not declare themselves. More radically, if it comes down to a matter of our basic principle of NPOV being compromised by our basic principle of permitting anonymous editing, I would favor a change to restrict anonymous editing, and dealing with good faith needs to edit anonymously by permitting confidential disclosure, just as we do for those who must use open proxies. DGG ( talk ) 06:50, 5 December 2012 (UTC)

There is a certain degree of practicality, but I think many are offended by the idea of targeting the editors instead of the edits. I would suggest the articles be deleted under WP:NOT instead of WP:COI. Disclosure is one indication of an ABF situation, but it is too difficult to measure an editor's integrity. Instead, the best way to measure a COI that has a chance here is whether they are willing to read and follow instructions. COIs that are asked to disclose and do not demonstrate this well enough. Corporate 00:47, 5 December 2012 (UTC)

CM, I think you have hit on a very good solution to the problem of disclosure: failure to disclose when asked should be treated as a failure to follow our rules. Unfortunately, at present, nobody is actually required to do so. I would support requiring it More, I have always supported requiring it. I am perfectly prepared to ask every likely editor whether or not they have a COI. But since nobody is ever required to identify themselves, and this interpretation of our rules against Outing is unlikely to change, this creates some rather absurd situations when someone is asked to disclose whether or not they have COI. If someone denies it, how do we prove it. Many PR editors when asked have simply denied it, even in the face of obvious incongruities, and nobody can prove them wrong, unless a sockpuppet investigation is justified and gives a match with a known corporate site. DGG ( talk ) 06:50, 5 December 2012 (UTC)

In my Talk page patrolling, I came across an opportunity to potentially test out my argument,[22] but in actuality, I think I ended up in a very similar place as your original argument that I so opposed. The problem being that, in this case, WP:NOT was not so applicable, because it wasn't advert. Corporate 15:05, 6 December 2012 (UTC)

sources (start-ups)

One thing that came up to me was the prevalence of start-ups in Mountain View, CA having their own page while much larger companies with less online notability are assumed to have less notability. Online visibility certainly makes it easier for verifiability, but even today the internet is not the almighty resources and shouldn't be the determining factor in notability. Also, companies for which editors go around looking for each article which mentions the name/site and have to stitch them up so the same sentence can have eight references is in my opinion just looking for perception of notability. Cantaloupe2 (talk) 22:24, 4 December 2012 (UTC)

There is a true localization of major innovative companies in a number of geographic areas. But it is also true that local chambers of commerce and similar organizations have created unduly promotional articles for firms in their region, and people associated with universities have done so for firms funded in part by the university, or exploiting inventions made there, or even just those made by alumni. And see above for the problem of whether to focus on promotional editors, or on promotional writing. In practice, once a clear example is uncovered here, it has proven very productive to take a look at all articles associated by subject, geography, and even more productive to look for those by the same editor, whether by user name or by common characteristics.

The problem of equal weight to non-online resources is always going to be with us, because it is associated with the presence of amateur editors, and editors who--amateur or not--think in on line terms. The only likely imnprovment will be getting more resources freely available on the internet. The extreme example is various religious organizations in some countries, which simply don't bother using it, for whom notability is as much a matter of word of mouth as even print sources, let alone those online.

There is often not a strong correlation between our notability requirements and whether a subject is actually "notable." I recently told a commercial bakery (a household name according to my wife) that they don't meet Wikipedia's notability requirements. But so long as WP:V is a policy, I'm not sure anything can be done.

Our coverage of topics therefore adopts a similar bias as the convenience and availability of sourcing. However, it's not unlike our many bias'. We have 100+ articles on Linux, but 1 sentence on Vagisil, because most editors are more interested in writing about the former than the latter. Our coverage of consumer companies is much better than B2B, because consumers write articles - CEOs don't.

On the contrary, PRs do not have to scrounge for sources, because as a matter of course, they almost always have coverage reports collected already for internal purposes. Offering transparency into these reports to make it easier to cover them is one of the best things COIs can do and properly sourcing content because one is motivated to make the content stick is a good thing.

On the other hand, many COIs will add sources that do not even mention the company to make the article appear sourced or use sources in other misleading ways.

Corporate 00:08, 5 December 2012 (UTC)

2013

Speedy deletion of Efficiency, Reform and Growth

Hi DGG, thanks for your editorial comments on my article on Efficiency, Reform and Growth - I just wanted to ask your advice on what to do next. Before writing the article, I did do my best to try and avoid COI problems as much as possible - and started a discussion of this on Teahouse under Notability and Conflict of Interest. I realise now that I should have mentioned this on the talk page of the article - sorry - I'm not very Wikipedia experienced as yet! As I mentioned there, I really just wanted to get a page going, and to help by providing some content, but was keen to get the input of other editors to trim the article down and make it as neutral as possible. That was the reason for submitting through AFC rather than simply publishing - I expected the article to come back with some editorial comments I could work on, like those you provided on my talk page. As the main editorial comments I got before submitting to AFC only related to secondary sources, that was mainly what I focussed on editing. Would it be possible for me to edit down the page following your advice for reconsideration? Or to offer it up to other editors to change as they think appropriate? Thanks for your help.

Also - as regards my user name, I thought it would be better to have an open afflilation, so as not to cover up any COI issues - I had hoped that the name fell under the usernames that contain a company or group name but are clearly intended to denote an individual person as I added an individual number - such as in the WidgetFan87 example. I can see that it's not a particularly clear name, however - could I ask what you might suggest there as well? Thanks! — Preceding unsigned comment added by CabOffice01 (talk • contribs) 11:55, 8 January 2013 (UTC)

the relevant rules are WP:COI. and WP:User. I'll give you my opinion on what the consensus is about how we interpret them, but as you realise, there is no individual here entitled to set policy or judge individual cases.

First, the username part, because that is the easier to deal with: (I see the notice I left said I was going to block the name, but that was a form notice--I did not actually do it.) You are correct that the name does not technically violate the username policy, but it does in essence. When you have a username that relates in any to the name of your organization, you imply that you are editing officially, and have a superior right to edit the page. But that is not the way WP works--all editors are considered equal--and your contributions like those of any editor must be justified by sources. I'm sure you do not intend to give such impression, just as you say, but that's why we have the rule. Thus it is much better to choose another name. On that user page, you should disclose your conflict of interest in general terms. There is no rule that requires you to give your real name or exact position at any time. If you hold an official position, it is probably better that you do not do so. Personally, I think a government agency ought to be especially careful, even more than a private firm--it is so very easy to misinterpret.

As for conflict of interest: Our policies have a notorious ambiguity--we say you should not edit with a conflict of interest, but we do not prohibit it. There has been considerable discussion about this here for many years, as the archives of the COI talk page WT:COI will indicate. To abbreviate tens of thousands of words to one paragraph, there is no consensus whether we should prohibit it. There have been very positive statements that we do prohibit it, including some from our Founder, but such a rule has never been adopted. I think the critical objection is that if we had such a rule we would be unable to actually enforce it. Unless we were to actually adopt a policy of requiring real names, which is in opposition to one of our most basic principles, it would just drive people to greater attempts to disguise the COI. Unlike some parts of what we politely call the Real World, we are a very practically-minded group of people, and we try not to attempt the impossible.

The problem with COI is that experience has shown that while it is not impossible to write a suitable page with a conflict of interest or as a paid press agent, it is relatively more difficult: the writer is automatically thinking in terms of what the subject wishes to communicate to the public, whereas an uninvolved person will think in terms of what the public might wish to know. On your talk page, The process of AfC was devised primarily not to deal with COI, but to deal with inexperienced editors in general. It is not all that well adapted to COI, but it is probably the best method we have at present. The first attempt of a totally inexperienced editor writing as an amateur is likely to be a failure to show proper sourcing, which is easily correctable if the subject is notable, and the incomplete article does no harm if it stays around for a considerable time while the editor works on it (though even then we shall almost certainly adopt some reasonable limit to remove the very old submissions that are not being worked on). But the first attempt of a COI editor is all too likely to be a pure advertisement or promotion, often to the extent that it would require complete rewriting. There is no purpose in working from such a beginning, and the feeling is that such material does serious harm even if allowed in drafts. We were not so stringent in the past, but the increasing prominence of WP--which of course is what we have all striven for and are proud to have achieved--has an inevitable but unfortunate side effect: Not only does it attract promotion, but it encourages the view of those associated with a firm or organization or cause that a page here is an essential part of their publicity, and something to which they are entitled.

I previous gave you some guidance about the specific problems.Judging whether a draft is hopelessly promotional is not an exact science, and each of us administrators uses our experience--it my case, the experience of someone who has worked for six years now primarily trying to rescue whatever unsatisfactory new articles are capable of rescue. (I will sometime chose to do the complete rewrite necessary for an article that would otherwise be deleted, but I can only do about 5 a week at most, and there are perhaps 200 times that number that must otherwise be deleted. There are relatively few of us who even try, because most people understandably prefer to work on the topics which actually interest them personally.)

I previously indicated to you on your talk page some of the problems. I think you would do better to start from scratch. I'll make some suggestions on your talk p. DGG ( talk ) 03:05, 9 January 2013 (UTC)

Thank very much for your advice. I can see your point about the username, and am happy to change it. Sorry - it was intended in a spirit of openness rather than to boost the authenticity of my edits, but I can see it would be better to so as you suggest!

As regards the page, I see the COI problem with Wikipedia. I'm more than happy to trim the content right down, and just put a basic outline stub article up, just to save a few redlinks and add some basic information. It can then be left up to other people to decide whether it is of enough interest to expand it any further. Would that be an appropriate approach? If you could give me some advice on what would be best on my user page, as you suggest, that would be great. Thanks! — Preceding unsigned comment added by CabOffice01 (talk • contribs) 15:44, 14 January 2013 (UTC)

Yes, that's exactly what you should do. I wish more notable organizations would do exactly that--it gives the reader some information and it provides a basis for expanding the article. Sometimes, as for your organization, enough material is easily available to make it a good school project. 22:20, 18 January 2013 (UTC)

Hi DGG, I have now written up a shorter draft version of the article in my userspace. If you have a moment, would you mind casting a quick eye over it and letting me know what you think? Thanks as ever! TreeBeard (talk) 16:18, 14 February 2013 (UTC)

#smwwiki panel

		The Real Life Barnstar
		Thanks again for appearing on the discussion panel at Social Media Week NYC; it was a great conversation and I'm glad you were part of it! WWB Too (Talk · COI) 13:00, 26 February 2013 (UTC)

Template

I would be curious to get your feedback on Template:COI editnotice and the corresponding RfC on the Talk page if you care to. Cheers. CorporateM (Talk) 01:32, 24 February 2013 (UTC)

I re-wrote it to mimic the semi-protected template and would welcome any copyedits/suggestions you have. I did have another comment I wanted to add. I don't think BrightLine is a good way to distinguish between good/bad faith. Good faith suggests the editor supports Wikipedia's goals, but PR people serve the client - not Wikipedia. Instead, I would label all PRs as "faith-agnostic" who are merely "doing their job" and would instead categorize them in two ways. The first being between those that are willing to follow instructions and those that aren't and the second between those that feel (for whatever reason) they need to do it in some respectful way versus those that feel the best way to serve their client is to be argumentative and undermine us. My clients will produce neutral content, because they must to get the article approved and participate in a way that is lawful, not because of any faith one way or another. CorporateM (Talk) 12:52, 28 February 2013 (UTC)

No, good faith in this context is the intention to benefit the client by editing Wikipedia according to Wikipedia standards. It does not require actually supporting our goals as the primary objective, but it does require a willingness to work within them, and not subvert them for whatever exterior purpose there may be. That's what we mean by it at WP. Bad faith means such things as attempting to game or unfairly influence our system. DGG ( talk ) 16:42, 28 February 2013 (UTC)

paid advocates

Hey DGG, would you mind taking a look at this discussion and letting me know what you think? I'm not sure where the great disagreement or distrust is coming from, but it's something I'd like to get a better handle on. Cheers, Ocaasi ^{t | c} 11:14, 12 March 2013 (UTC)

I have probably said enough in my dialog with SV a little above, but I'll take a look to see if there's anything specific. DGG ( talk ) 01:07, 13 March 2013 (UTC)

Request for help

Hi David, I'm writing to ask if you wouldn't mind filling me in (if you can) about some of the mechanics of paid editing on Wikipedia. I have a vague memory of you saying onwiki that you were paid to edit, though if I've got that wrong, I apologize – I have a terrible memory! (Actually, reading that sentence again it sounds as though I'm saying you may have said it offwiki and I'm sorry for mentioning it onwiki, but I didn't meant it that way – what I meant to write is that you may not have said it at all, and I may be misremembering. I just came back to clarify that.)

The reason I'm asking is that, although I'm opposed to paid advocacy (though not benign forms of paid editing), I haven't been very active on Wikipedia in opposing it, so I don't know how it works, or what the various groups are. And the reason I'm asking you in particular is that I know you've always been in favour of transparency, and I have a lot of respect for your editing, so I was hoping you might be willing to explain some of it, insofar as you know.

My understanding is that some PR people set up a Facebook group, CREWE, on 5 January 2012 to coordinate their editing on Wikipedia and/or to campaign for being allowed to do it openly. Several Wikipedians joined it, and a few became active in it (e.g. Ocaasi, Silver seren). On 6 January, I assume in response to CREWE, Herostratus set up WikiProject Integrity to oppose paid advocacy (it was called Paid Editing Watch when he set it up), and four days later Silver seren created WikiProject Cooperation to help paid editors.

Are there any other groups that I should make myself familiar with to learn about this? I'm also wondering if you could take me through the mechanics of how the cooperation works. For example, are paid editors being given assignments through the wikiprojects, or when companies contact OTRS with concerns? Are the editors who respond to the paid editor help board themselves paid editors, or volunteers, or a mixed bag, and do you know whether they're required to disclose any COI?

I'm not sure what other questions I should be asking. Anything you can do (or point me to) to bring me up to speed would be very much appreciated. Best, SlimVirgin ^(talk) 20:33, 11 March 2013 (UTC)

I think you do remember it backwards. I have never been paid to edit, but I do not necessarily think it wrong to do so. I have been in extended dialog with many of the people who do paid editing, and am very willing to offer them advice, on or off wiki, either about specifics or general matters, just the same as I would any other editor, but I decided that I am unwilling to actually approve their articles, because i consider that as if I were certifying & taking the responsibility for someone else's writing.

Since I often work in the same fields as do some paid editors, and since i have consistently working since I came here primarily on rescuing those borderline articles that are rescuable and removing the ones that are not, I often find myself in a position of improving an inadequately done article that I know or presume to be by a paid editor--sometimes one I recognize, but usually not. Sometimes I rather resent that a paid editor produces a not very satisfactory article, i do the work to make it acceptable, even to the point of rewriting it from scratch, and they get the money. However, I keep a focus on the actual article, and if I think its an article we should have, and I can help it in a reasonable way, I will help no matter who wrote it and no matter what the motivation.

I am not going to talk about specific individuals in this context. Some of those you mention or in groups you mention are paid editors, some are not. Some approve of paid editing within broad limitations, others are much stricter. It's not helpful to generalize.

As I understand it, some people who do paid editing do so by advertising their services or answering requests on the various web sites for free lance work and similar places; some make their contacts by word of mouth in the normal way of any profession, and some do it with their regular clients within the context of a more general public relations relationship. Some of them I know to be highly ethical, and to refuse to do work that would conflict with WP standards or involve whitewashing or other concealment, or to try to get an article accepted for something they know or suspect is not likely to be notable. Others do not have these standards. I will not myself assist someone whom I know to be in conflict with WP practices in carrying out their improper work; I will assist them to learn our standards and do proper work.

I am an OTRS volunteer, dealing mainly with the questions and complaints dealing with educational institutions, but sometimes a little more widely when needed. I would consider this incompatible with paid editing, and I would absolutely never refer anyone having problems at OTRS to a paid editor or suggest they employ one. I am not aware of anyone on OTRTS who does this, and if they do, there needs to be a discussion about this at an appropriate place. I will help them edit, or make necessary edits they cannot make, or advise them what to do within WP. If a paid editor asked for advice or assistance at OTRS I would give it as for anyone else--it is very frequent there to get requests from PR agents.

There are some special situations. Some people having confidential roles with the WMF or employed by it have also done editing; I consider this ethical. If they were doing paid editing on the side, I would not regard it as ethical, except possibly for a contractor or grantee connected with the WMF for a defined purpose. I have been told that a former member of the WMF board was a paid editor--I am not sure of the sequence of events, but if he was a paid editor while he was on the board, I consider it totally unethical and an inexcusable conflict of interest--how the board may regard it I do not know. Woyj rtes[ect to anhyone who may have been a member of the Borad or an employee of any WP chapter or other related group, I

There is another case: that of Wikipedians in Residence. I am a WIR on a part-time basis for the New York Public Library for Performing Arts, and part of what I consider my role there is to make proper edits on the articles about the NYPL, and when appropriate make links to their collections, though I so far have done very little along that line, and am mainly involved in developing relationships and running workshops. The edits I do while physically there are with the account User:DGG (NYPL), in order not to compromise my admin password on their very insecure network, but edits involving their materials I may sometimes do from my regular account also. I am a volunteer--they are not paying me. I would make such edits whether or not I have a relationship with them, and I make such edits with respect to any other library of cultural institution I may happen upon. Most other WIRs are paid, and here I do not think it incompatible with the joint connection with the institution and WP to edit. There have been frequent problems with PR and other staff for educational institutions making improper links and promotional edits, and it is much better for such edits to be made by known experienced and trusted WPedians who are publicly identified and take responsibility for their work. So far I believe we only have WIR relationships with nonprofit organizations, but I would not think it completely impossible to do so with a commercial organization also, by someone aware of the possible problems and taking public responsibility.

There is one thing of which I am certain. It is not possible to simultaneously ban paid editing and also maintain the principle of permitting anonymous editing. And I am pretty sure, that of all COI editors, the specialists in writing Wikipedia articles are the least dangerous--the in-house PR generalists employed within organizations are more likely to do low quality work both because of the closeness of their employee relationship and their general lack of WP-specific knowledge; but even worse, the advocates for a cause will do much more harm than all the paid editors can possibly do, because people who write for pay will stop writing if it becomes unprofitable, but nothing stops a dedicated zealot. Money may be a problematic motivation, but there are much worse things in the world than money.

I have advocated and I continue to advocate encouraging all editors, including paid editors, who know how to work in mainspace and are certain that what they are doing is neutral, to work in mainspace , where their work will be visible. But in the current environment here, this is not safe advice to give, and I therefore do not give it, but warn against it. When I am giving advice, especially in a position where I have a certain experience and people may however incorrectly assume a certain authority, I do not think it right to advise people to test the limits. Rather, I have a responsibility to give conservative advice that will not get them into trouble: I advise them to follow the practices in Wikipedia:Plain and simple conflict of interest guide , which I regard as accepted by the general consensus at the present time.

At the present, some of the people giving help to paid editors, or reviewing suggested edits, are indeed paid editors. To the extent of my knowledge, they are doing so properly and carefully, being fully aware of the pitfalls. I admit this makes me a little uneasy, and I wish more of the rest of us would get involved in this. But in general my attitude is good work is good work, whatever the motivation. I think it difficult for someone with long experience writing PR to learn to write as necessary for WP, but it isn't impossible. What we can best do to encourage good editing is to reject bad work, from whatever source. I therefore have recently been adopting an informally higher level of doubt about the notability of promotional articles--or perhaps it should be best worded as an informally higher level of doubt about the promotional nature of articles about subjects of borderline notability. I have asked good PR editors what would make their job easier, and they agree that the best thing we can do to help them resist the pressure to adopt a non-neutral promotional POV, is for us to maintain our high standards

I am not an active part of any organized group except the NYC chapter. I am a notional member of many Wikiprojects and other groups on and off wiki ,some of whose activities I am somewhat skeptical about; my intention is to stay informed. I have always worked here by myself, not in coordination with anyone--except in the sense that someone might choose to follow my advice. I do not want to say that my manner of working is the only good one, or even the best--it is what suits me at present. DGG ( talk ) 23:16, 11 March 2013 (UTC)

Thank you, David, this is all very helpful. First, allow me to apologize for having confused something you said a few months ago to imply that you had been paid to edit. There was one post in particular that made me think that, and I will try to find it. Either I misunderstood it (perhaps you were talking about your voluntary work for the New York Public Library) or I am mixing you up with someone else.

I'm glad to hear you say that OTRS ought not to be used that way. I'm concerned that it may have happened inadvertently, so I hope a discussion can be started somewhere about how to take steps to minimize that risk.

I know what you mean about feeling resentful when you tidy up after a paid editor. I usually just leave articles when I stumble across one that seems to have been paid work. It's one of the issues that saddens me about the whole business. Articles that need improvement don't get it, because someone who could improve it is unwilling to fix for free what someone else has been paid to start. It's going to change the whole dynamic of Wikipedia. SlimVirgin ^(talk) 22:06, 12 March 2013 (UTC)

I don't mind fixing articles after anyone, paid editor or not. I dislike it when I have to rewrite the article entirely for someone claiming to be expert enough at it to earn money for it. The solution is the same as any editor: to teach them if possible, and if they cannot learn, to deal with it as with any other uncooperative editor. The problem is like other problems here: the greatest difficulties are the large backlog, and the inconspicuous articles. DGG ( talk ) 23:14, 12 March 2013 (UTC)

(talk page stalker) I'll add as an anecdote, I've encountered a paid editor on Wikipedia who was completely up front about what he was doing. His practice was to create an account for one editing job and abandon it when finished. I wish there were a way I could search my contribution history so I could dig up the conversation. Anyway, while I felt somewhat offended that this was going on, I really had no cause to complain because the guy was creating pretty good articles in compliance with all the policies and guidelines. I just accepted that content trumps intent, and moved on. ~Amatulić (talk) 22:58, 12 March 2013 (UTC)

I remember an incident involving someone constructing fairly low quality but not overly promotional articles on Brooklyn hip-hop artists. The conclusion after AfD discussion was that they were notable enough to have articles. There are many similar. For all the ones that are not, see the deletion log. DGG ( talk ) 23:14, 12 March 2013 (UTC)

It's sometimes, or often, true that any editor can judge the content on its own merits. But for long or complex issues, you have to be familiar with the body of source material – not only the sources mentioned in the article – to be able to judge whether it accurately reflects what's out there, per NPOV and UNDUE. That can take days or even weeks of work. So when we say "judge the edits, not the editor," it works only for very simple articles.

For the more complex pieces we have to take them on trust according to what we know about the editor. But if we know the editor's a corporate communications officer for the company, that trust breaks down. And when people say, "but it's just the same as having a POV about something," no, it really isn't. We can all put our POVs to one side; we might even change our minds according to the arguments if we're reasonable people. But people can't just as easily decide to lose their jobs because Wikipedians have persuaded them that they must highlight the company's controversies in the lead.

This perhaps goes back to what David says – that Wikipedians who are being paid to edit are more likely to produce good work than company employees. While I agree with that, it's going to depend on how much the Wikipedian comes to rely on that source of income. This is why the whole dynamic of the project is going to change, where one group is doing it because they want to, and another because they need to. SlimVirgin ^(talk) 23:17, 12 March 2013 (UTC)

As I see it, the more notable the subject, the easier it is to find material, and the more likely it is that there will be at least some really reliable and extensive sources. Personally, I take nothing on trust. Some people with a commitment to a political or religious or nationalist or other cause can edit neutrally. Some cannot, including people who are very reliable on other subjects. When I said I take nothing on trust, that includes my own ability to edit articles on some causes which I very strongly support. I find it easier to put aside negative feelings, than my desire to make sure that something is as fully supported as I think it ought to be. DGG ( talk ) 23:31, 12 March 2013 (UTC)

SIgns of promotionalism

For anyone watching, there are some internal signs of promotional-style biographies for businessmen that are almost always copyvio as well (besides the obvious giveaway of a statement of how important the company is, and especially a statement of how important their duties were in previous positions in the firm.)

Headings that use <big> instead of our formatting

Placing the education at the end, with a final sentence about spouse and children.

Not giving the positions in chronological order, and often not including earlier positions except the one just before coming to the firm.

The corresponding signs for academics are slightly different, depending on whether they're done by a central office or by the individual. For senior administrators they characteristically include multiple junior executive positions and in-university awards. For any faculty, if the individual wrote it, it will often includes full details of all publications however minor; if the central office, it will omit most exact titles, especially for journal articles. DGG ( talk ) 01:39, 29 June 2013 (UTC)

deletion of Certified Penetration Testing Consultant

Thank you for deleting the Morning277 articles I tagged fro CSD G5. However, the block on Arifhasan23 was removed after I tagged Certified Penetration Testing Consultant. I wrongly decided not to remove the tag. —rybec 02:55, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

restored. Thanks for letting me know, because this in the 1/2 of 1% of false positives in this group of several hundred socks. DGG ( talk ) 08:19, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

Thank you for restoring the page. I don't believe it's a false positive, but I'll take that up with the admin who unblocked. —rybec 15:02, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

yes, there are problems in how to deal with this and the similar not quite certain cases in the group. There are two possible ways of thinking about them: In the past, we have usually tended to AGF; at present, the extent of the problem is inclining us otherwise. My own feeling is still to use G11 instead of G5 when in doubt, but to use G11 rather more liberally than in the past. I think others feel the same about G11 at least--in practice, the G11 criterion is becoming "too promotional to be worth fixing" DGG ( talk ) 00:56, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

After you restored the page, I took a closer look at it and identified several more accounts that look like sock-puppets. I belatedly realized that I should have looked more carefully at all those other articles, too. I also read a remark by Dennis Brown explaining that deletion would make investigation more difficult. Is there a way to make them viewable again, in furtherance of the SPI, without causing too much work for the administrators, and is that something you'd be willing to do (I was thinking temporary undeletion, moving to subpages of the SPI, moving to my user space, or use of Special:Export)? Here's a list that includes most of the deleted articles (namely, the ones I had watch-listed and which were recently deleted):

Extended content

4Cabling Aasted American Writers and Artists Inc. Amvona Bizible Brendan Wallace Brosix (Company) Bunndle CHMB (company) Campus Apartments Certified Disaster Recovery Engineer Chris Hobart ClassDojo Cleeng Confio CrowdOptic DDC Advocacy David Kiger David Schwedel (entrepreneur) Digital Prospectors Corporation Dominique Molina Echopass Emmanuel Gregory Lemelson Ethan Bearman Fundology Game Cooks GatherSpace (company) Genius Inside Global Met Coal Corporation Go Try It On GroundWork Heel That Pain (company) Heliospectra ITelagen Inflection (company) Inigral John Uustal Jonathan Cardella Junk It! Legitmix Loyaltyworks (company) MarketLive Max Cartier MediCortex Mike Macadaan Misty Lown Neal Creighton, Sr Network Capital NewYorkStay ONEHOPE Oren Laurent PCN Technology (company) PeopleSmart Pneuron PressPad RepairClinic.com ResumeBear Review Boost (company) SJ (musician) Security Innovation SocialSoft Steven M. Neil Sweetcouch TableTopics Talk:Brendan Wallace Talk:Confio Talk:CrowdOptic Talk:David Kiger Talk:Dominique Molina Talk:Ethan Bearman Talk:Fundology Talk:Genius Inside Talk:Kevin R. Foote Talk:Legitmix Talk:Max Cartier Talk:Mike Macadaan Talk:NewYorkStay Talk:ONEHOPE Talk:Oren Laurent Talk:RepairClinic.com Talk:SJ (musician) Talk:Steven M. Neil Talk:Tee Ashira Talk:Tom Dyson Talk:Tsebo Outsourcing Group Talk:WorldEscape Tee Ashira Telly (website) Tom Dyson Tom Hoban (entrepreneur) Tom Kemp (entrepreneur) Tsebo Outsourcing Group Virool Waterfield Group WorldEscape Zipwhip

I realize that this request is likely to be annoying and I'm sorry, but I hadn't made an SPI report before. I don't mind going to Deletion Review but thought I'd ask you first. —rybec 20:49, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

AnchorFree

Hi DGG,

Were you aware that AnchorFree was created by a suspected Morning277 sockpuppet? Do you consider the edits you have made to the article to have pushed it out of the realm of G5? Thanks. Someguy1221 (talk) 09:25, 8 August 2013 (UTC)

yes,I was aware; I thought it was important for use to have this article. It was not an easy decision, but they have political role. I explicitly did it to put it beyond the range of G5. If you think it should be deleted anyway, AfD can always decide to do so. DGG ( talk ) 14:07, 8 August 2013 (UTC)

What about BofI Federal Bank (company)? You declined to delete it in April, and the creator was only uncovered and blocked months later. I'm honestly just trying to get your opinion here on what should be kept, what is worth keeping. I am truly torn on a lot of these sock-created pages. Someguy1221 (talk) 22:56, 8 August 2013 (UTC)

As I've said before, it's a dilemma to which I have no solution, but I'm trying to think of one. We can't remove everything that might be by a sock, because while still letting anybody start an article. Our removing articles by known socks has not stopped people from persisting at it. (Some have certainly acted as if it were a contest, and been willing to keep going for many years.)

1. The way I've been approaching it, and the way at least some others have, is keeping anything sufficiently important where a known reliable editor will taker responsibility for fixing the#REDIRECT [[]] article. This at least has the merit that the people who pay for editing who certainly ought to have an article will have one, and the borderline ones won't. (They could get an article just as soon by asking someone here to make it for them, and perhaps we will find some way of communicating this, because in a sense it's the consequence of our own failure to have enough good editors interested in these topics to make the articles beforehand.) A difficulty is that as this discussion shows the standard is very variable, because quite apart from what different editors want to do, whether any one person is willing to do it varies--myself, there are days when I'm more patient than on others.

2. Apparently a typical contract for paid editing is that the article stay for a certain length of time. Perhaps we could re-creating the most worthy articles--but after a year or so. That way the person won't get paid, but those who clearly warrant articles will have them.

3. A partial solution will be to do what the German WP does, and allow organization accounts, under the name of the organization. Then at least some of it will be identified, and people can judge the reliability with the information of who did the editing.

4. Ultimately, it may become a choice between the principles of not accepting promotionalism and allowing anyone to edit. If it comes to that, I'd choose requiring identification. We would no longer have a fully free encyclopedia, but we'd at least have an encyclopedia.

in the meantime, AfD is the normal step when a speedy is declined. Of course, the decisions there can be almost as inconsistent as a random selection of admins at speedy. DGG ( talk ) 05:10, 9 August 2013 (UTC)

Recent Wiki-PR scandal

I'm sure by now you've seen this. A lot of editors I've talked to are saying they want WMF to pursue legal action against them. I wonder if that is in part because of my influence, or if it's always been on everybody's mind. But I brought it up here. It seems like a stretch to me that WMF would actually get involved, but I'd be interested in your comments. CorporateM (Talk) 14:01, 10 October 2013 (UTC)

it would be foolish for the WP foundation to pursue legal action against anyone, on the basis of their contributions. This opens a door to all sorts of legal interventions to control our content, some no doubt based on motives in total opposition to out basic principles. This is a user contributed encyclopedia, and the users control the content, not the foundation. The WMF should never interfere with that. I consider it perfectly plausible that the underlying puppetmaster is of the honest opinion that WP ought to cover such institutions, and accept content prepared on their behalf, and that consequently writing the articles is a reasonable commercial pursuit, and our attempts to keep them out show our narrow-mindedness and intolerance, and that they are therefore justified in circumventing our policies. Our most essential defense is to maintain standards, and this can only be done by attention to articles that are created, no matter who makes them. but if we ourselves created articles on notable commercial enterprises, there would be less scope for these activities.

I am just as concerned with articles about non-commercial organizations, and advocacy of all sorts; they are even more of a threat, because they often get even less attention. In my own subject, most of the university articles here are indistinguishable from press releases, and not very good, transparently self-serving press releases at that. There is rarely one that adds much to the information available from the web site.

But there may come a time, as I have in the past suggested, and as I now see also suggested by others, where we may have to choose between the principle of anonymity and the principal of NPOV. There can be encyclopedias written with or without identification of the actual writers, but without NPOV there can be no encyclopedia at all. DGG ( talk ) 03:09, 13 October 2013 (UTC)

Lists of customers are "advertising"?

DGG, I have issued a bit of a challenge for you here. If Wikipedia is not intended for articles to list customers of businesses, then there are hundreds of other problems for you to address. I suspect you're applying a different standard to Comcast Business because it arose from the Reward Board. Have you checked Silgan Holdings, which also appeared on the Reward Board at the same time as Comcast Business? - I'm not that crazy (talk) 03:48, 11 November 2013 (UTC)

Silgan gave a mention of two firms, and put it into context, rather than giving a list. And I am not happy with the last paragraph of that article, which I think trivial criticism, But you are correct that many existing articles in WP are far more unsatisfactory than the one you wrote. ( What I think your challenge is, is to find a way of saying something worth saying in an encyclopedia about the firm that would not fit into the overall article. DGG ( talk ) 05:28, 11 November 2013 (UTC)

With all due respect, I wrote much of it, including the section that was gutted, and I'm not even sure that I'm not that crazy worked on the article. I will look at the above example (Silgan Holdings) to see where I went wrong. :( Westin D^odger 15:39, 11 November 2013 (UTC)

It's not that lists of customers are advertising per se but when it is a list sourced to press releases (which are self published) then it is impossible for the article to be neutral as the customer list is WP:UNDUE. SmartSE (talk) 19:38, 11 November 2013 (UTC)

Metaswitch and the Bright Line

What about Metaswitch? Weird, they seem to be following the Bright Line, but nobody fulfilling their requests have bothered to clean up the dedicated sections to awards, executives, etc. I noticed a disclosed engaged participant, so figured I would skip it for the same reason. CorporateM (Talk) 21:54, 11 November 2013 (UTC)

The problem with the Bright Liner is the same as with AfC or NPP -- it works well only if the reviews are competent and careful. So far, most of the people doing Bright Line work have been fairly good, which is reasonable as they are mostly people with a great skepticism about the quality of most PR work. ASs the method becomes more widely used, this is unlikely to continue. You are quite right that in general you shouldn't review the work of your competitors. I'll deal with this one. DGG ( talk ) 22:43, 11 November 2013 (UTC)

Agreed. If I help a PR rep, I am accused of whitewashing it for my PR colleagues. If I do not make the edits they want, I am sniping the competition. OTOH, company articles are my primary area of editing and it is difficult to avoid COIs in that area. Editors sometimes ask me to help other COIs, but I think in the future I will just abstain when asked. Anyways, I have cleaned up a lot of the promotion in the articles that show up in those searches. I was aggressive about sending promotional, unsourced articles to AfD per NOT, V, and OR and expect some editors to disagree with it. A lot of client lists I left up when they seemed potentially informative. I may check back in a week or so to see if the promotion was restored. CorporateM (Talk) 23:49, 11 November 2013 (UTC)

Yes, we need to discuss client lists. The sort of client lists that merit removal are the ones from , say, a paper clip company, listing all the large corporations that use their paper clips, which is about the equivalent of an article on the WSJ listing everyone who quotes it. In the other direction, if a company is the exclusive supplier of a major product to the largest user of such product in the world, we should include it. Where in the middle to draw the line is not all that obvious. One thing that certainly helps is to have it as a sentence or two, not a bulleted list. (If I could, I'd outlaw bulleted lists from articles the same way we outlaw writing in FULL CAPS.) For comparison, the practice I have with scientists is to list not all of their cited work, or none of it, but the 5 papers that have had the most impact. (I picked the number 5 to match the number asked for by many grant and promotion committees, the ones who rate quality more important that bulk.) DGG ( talk ) 00:19, 12 November 2013 (UTC)

The article I wrote on Waggener Edstrom comes to mind, because they are arguably best known for their work with Microsoft and that client is the focus of much of the article. When it comes to lists in general, I sometimes give my clients a rule of ten, because the GA reviewer at RTI International asked me to list all 11 divisions. However, for products my rules is that we cannot name them individually if there is more than 3-5.

I imagine the criteria is the same we use for everything; it should be sourced to strong secondary sources, informative and in good taste, but all that depends on the circumstance and the sources. They should not be listed arbitrarily, but to communicate something to the reader such as providing an example of the market they target, identifying the adopters of something bleeding edge, or identifying where a large portion of their revenues comes from. CorporateM (Talk) 01:49, 12 November 2013 (UTC)

On a completely unrelated topic, do you think I could solicit for your input here on the Yelp page? My comment was that instead of documenting every single allegation a small business owner has made against them, we should only include those that have more than just local media coverage. CorporateM (Talk) 17:54, 12 November 2013 (UTC)

McKinsey & Company

I'm working offline on some draft material (do you still have an interest in this page btw?). I have a stack of five books on my desk I am thumbing through. It's quite a project as a very notable major business marked as a high-priority by Wikiproject Business that also has a polarizing and confusing reputation and is a unique organization in general.

Anyways, one of the things they are known for is publishing the McKinsey Quarterly and a plethora of other academic research, 50+ business management books, etc. A few books authored by their consultants have sparked the creation of an entire industry or altered the focus of the business community. I have a list of about 3-5 I need to research. Some of the books like In Search of Excellence have their own Wikipedia articles and mixed/controversial reputations themselves.

So my question as I work on the draft is, how much detail should the McKinsey page include about these books? At the moment I'm writing about a paragraph on each one, but I can't help but wonder if it should only be 2-3 sentences. OTOH, some have negative(ish) reputations and I would want to avoid the appearance of marginalizing the criticisms. CorporateM (Talk) 17:42, 4 December 2013 (UTC)

The article on In Search of Excellence is not the example to follow: it is a mostly unsourced essay & something will have to be done about it. For each book you include, describe who the authors are, describe the contents in 1 or 2 sentences, say how many later editions & translations (Worldcat is the best source), give the library holdings withe a link to the book's p. on WorldCat, & write one sentence about the reception, not going into details about the reviews but making footnotes to the reviews in the most important relevant publications. Question: are these books with an academic impact, a professional impact, or both? Describe any subsequent discussion briefly in one sentence also, with footnotes linking to the actual publications. Later, perhaps some of them can be expanded. DGG ( talk ) 19:42, 4 December 2013 (UTC)

Thanks. I think whether it has a business or academic impact - the answer is both - probably in every case. I was wondering, because so far I was just putting "two McKinsey consultants" as the authors without naming them. user:Keithbob often urges editors not to name people when it can be avoided, especially in the context of sharp criticisms. In this case, at least one of the authors is famous and I believe actively seeks the spotlight. Should they be named? CorporateM (Talk) 22:39, 4 December 2013 (UTC)

If a book has authors, they must be named. But is the book a book from the authors with their original ideas, which presumably they developed for the company's purposes, or the authors as the people doing the writing for something which is basically the company's work? (Of course, this can be hard to tell, which is why for scientific papers the good journals now have rules that require the exact role of every named author be specified.) In the second case, the authors can be named as part of the complete bibliographic reference, and put in a footnote. Omitting them entirely is a direct implication that they are mere figureheads, as we omit the name of just which corporate officer made a routine announcement in a press release. (The article on the book you mentioned does explain the role as it should, tho it does it very clumsily.) Whether or not someone seeks the spotlight is not relevant for encyclopedia articles. Publishing a book with one's name on it exposes you to criticism. If you don't want it, you use a pseudonym, as is not unknown in controversial work from people in corporations. All that is necessary is to fairly select and quote the comments, avoiding not just imbalance, but also avoiding quoting irresponsible comments from marginal sources. What also should be avoided is repeating the name unnecessarily,whether for the purpose of expressing a hostile or for that matter a favorable POV. For example," the company announced it had earned (or lost) $000," is right; "The president of the company announced ..." is unnecessary. "John Smith, the president of the company announced ..." is not good practice. "John Smith , the president of the company announced ... Smith said that...." is plain wrong, no matter what Smith said. DGG ( talk ) 23:34, 4 December 2013 (UTC)

Argh, that makes it difficult, since I have in my notes somewhere that there was a dispute between the author and McKinsey over who deserves credit. So... now that you paint it that way, it would seem like I am taking a side in that dispute either way I go. Anyways, I'll just roll with it the way I have it for now - I'm sure either way would be fine. This article is particularly challenging, because a lot of information that is not normally a part of a company profile is notable, where it isn't normally, and their reputation is very polarized. CorporateM (Talk) 01:10, 5 December 2013 (UTC)

If it's in dispute, and the dispute has published material on it, it can best be dealt with if the book is notable enough for a separate article, or if the individual is. Otherwise, the safest way is just to give the citation for how OCLC records it in the footnote. That's not taking sides. DGG ( talk ) 03:56, 5 December 2013 (UTC) .

2014

PrintingForLess

It looks as though the article at PrintingForLess will be kept as either "Keep" or "no consensus". Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/PrintingForLess. How valuable is it to get the drek out of the article history by TNTing it? --Bejnar (talk) 22:28, 7 January 2014 (UTC)

responded there. thanks for letting me know. DGG ( talk ) 23:36, 7 January 2014 (UTC)

I commented. IMO, you will get a lot of resistance with arguments that focus on the contributor and not the content. I think the better argument is that we would prefer having nothing at all over having an advert. The standard should be whether the article is neutral-enough to be sufficiently useful to the reader without damaging Wikipedia's credibility as a high-quality, neutral resource.

I believe you are the one that planted the idea in my head, that we should have a policy about company articles that defines what is neutral. Not like the BLP policy, but something that takes a strong stance both on promotion and unsourced contentious material and encourages deletion of both with the same fervor as copyvio. I would be well-equipped to write it, but.. well... you know. However, you are even more qualified to do so.

Like the BLP policy to an extent, it wouldn't actually introduce any new rules. We can already delete unsourced contentious material per V, NPOV, etc. We should already delete adverts per WP:NOT. It would just provide an interpretation of those rule for this type of article. CorporateM (Talk) 15:18, 8 January 2014 (UTC)

It is always possible to write a neutral article by writing a directory entry. The GNG is based on the principle that if there are substantial references, there will be something worth saying. Unfortunately, when references are themselves based on PR, this isn't the case, so the rule is the references have to be independent. But in some areas, no references are independent.

It is straightforward (though sometimes technically difficulty) to decide if something is copyvio, and the material can always be preserved by rewriting if anyone thinks it worth the trouble. It is not as clear what material is promotional, because information about a person or organization inherently promotes their activities, by letting those potentially interested learn about them--though if it is fair it may lead the reader to want no part of them.

The rule about contentious material is that it needs referencing whether positive or negative. Te rule about particular care for negative material in BLP ( including even sourced material if minor and not directly relevant to their notability ) is necessary to avoid undue harm to living humans, and even though a laudable purpose is so a frequent cause of dispute that I would not extend it further--it is often at odds with NPOV. Since anything is potentially contentious, we usually interpret the need for sourcing as a good-faith challenge, But since it is hard to tell if a challenge is reasonable, this leads to our current practice of over-referencing some types of BLPs. If only NPOV independent secondary sources of high reliability are accepted, most material in many areas cannot be referenced. And since all references must be selected and used in context, even the best references can be used for propaganda. (e.g. we accept a quote from a person about his beliefs, but a person says different things at different times for different purposes.)

As a variant of what you said, we need is a policy for BLPs, organization articles,and everything else, which describes what is desirable content in a positive sense; we have too many business articles without financial information, too many BLPs which try to add a personal note by giving the names and ages of a persons children, too many BLPs or organization articles both that describe minor charities, and no rule for deciding which ones are major. We have no rule that the amount of detail in an article is proportional to the subject's importance, so we have many absurdly detailed though perfectly verifiable articles about people & things of trivial importance where there are for example, good local histories. We have been unable to get a guideline that the extent detail in describing creative works should depend on the significance of the work.

Perhaps the reason we care about inclusion and not content is that our procedures are not suitable for resolving disputes about content. Perhaps such decisions would require a reliance upon editorial authority here , rather than the rule that anyone can edit and decide.

About motive both the consensus and myself has been of two minds. I consider the need to pay attention to motive an emergency procedure, justified by the infrequency of paid editing it writing NPOV content. I did not support it until a year ago. At AfD, decisions go both ways, depended upon the participants and what they think of the subject of the article as well as what they think about the article. One approach is to seek out puppetry and use speedy to at least remove subsequent contributions, but I and many others have never been happy with removing the contributions that are good & necessary article, especially in the absence of real evidence that it does in fact discourage the continuing offenders.

If it becomes too difficult to work on commercial organizations I will work on other things; the quality of WP does not depend only on me. And there is the inevitable bias that those things any effective editor will choose to work on will be better covered, and covered according to their POV. DGG ( talk ) 01:02, 9 January 2014 (UTC)

I think WP:BALASPS provides some guidance on this issue by saying content should be included based on "significance to the subject" but it is a good example of how NPOV requires interpretation and explanation. There is already rough consensus on the bar trivial lawsuits and awards must meet to be "significant to the subject." It should not be forbidden to use primary sources, only to use them exclusively on a topic that has zero truly independent sources. The only similarity with BLP is that such a policy would cover a group of articles in a certain category. If anything, given the anti-corporate culture here, it may have the opposite effect, of leading to overly negative articles. CorporateM (Talk) 13:07, 9 January 2014 (UTC)

That deals with balance within articles, and is very helpful; it does not deal with the problem of the extent of an article to be written. But it may help with the problem in articles on organizations (and people) of the use of valid refs to very minor events (e.g., he gave a speech at X, or they gave $10,000 to the YMCA) because there happens to be a reference to it and refs are needed for GNG. The really necessary thing to do for a rational encyclopedia is to get rid of the GNG as the basic standard. That isn't likely, but I hope to contijue persuading people to actually decide on other bases while still pretending to rely on it. DGG ( talk ) 17:38, 9 January 2014 (UTC)

Response to proposed deletion of Kavi Workspace page

DGG, thank you for your attention to the Kavi Workspace page. I have removed the proposed deletion notice, but I will of course abide by whatever decisions are made. I have reviewed the guidelines for creating Wikipedia content at some length and feel that I have a solid grasp of the principles. In creating the page, I have tried to emulate and be parallel to other software product pages linked from List of collaborative software. Many parallel pages seem also to lack significant levels of notability, or refer simply to articles generated by press releases or commercial web sites. Projectplace (software), Telligent, and ProtoShare are three of many examples. I have reviewed Wikipedia:Notability (organizations and companies). Do you have recommendations for how to proceed? Thank you. MisterPendrake (talk) 19:46, 1 January 2014 (UTC)

many parallel pages ought to be deleted also. Not all, of course--it depends on the importance of the company, now or in the past. we measure that here by references providing substantial coverage from 3rd party independent published reliable sources, print or online, but not blogs or press releases, or material derived from press releases. For products like this, the most convincing references are substantial independent signed product reviews in publications of acknowledged responsibility and authority, (but not mere notices or announcements). If you can add them, the article is not likely to be deleted. Otherwise it probably will be. If I (or anyone) think that they have still not been added adequately in a few days, I will nominate the article for discussion at WP:AFD. The consensus of the community as expressed there about whether it meets the guidelines will decide, as judged by some other administrator. Good luck with it--I hope you are able to show it notable by our standards.

Of the pages you mention, one seems to be adequately sourced, and two less adequately, but I (and possibly others who may happen to see this) will take another look at all three of them. A great many insufficiently notable articles have been aded in the past, and we ought to remove them if they can not be improved sufficiently.At the very least, we do not want to add to their number. DGG ( talk ) 20:20, 1 January 2014 (UTC)

Thank you for your response. In lieu of signed product reviews in publications, I submit that the product page earns its notability on the basis of its use. Specifically, it is used widely in the US standards development community. Good examples of entities that rely on the product are the OASIS Open organization, INCITS, and many other ANSI-accredited organizations. The smooth functioning of these organizations and their consensus-driven output relies on the product. While the product does not warrant mainstream press, it does warrant the attention and participation of a large number of technical professionals who use it daily to conduct committee work that results in important American standards. Can this level of participation justify inclusion?

I am seeking parity with other product pages. To explore the comparison further, Sharepoint is a collaboration environment which underlies a large range of business activity, some of it important, some not. As a part of the Microsoft portfolio, it garners large amounts of attention. But as a product, it is not inherently any more important than any other development environment. In the case of Workspace, it is a niche product performing a specialized function in an activity generally considered important to the US economy. I submit this line of reasoning for your consideration and ask that it be entered into the debate. Is there a more direct way to do that than here on your talk page? MisterPendrake (talk) 04:42, 2 January 2014 (UTC)

This is WP, a community project, that has no way of expertly judging anything.. WP was built on the principle on relying on what other publications said, those that do have expert editing. If they cover something in a substantial way we include it , and we include what they say. It was almost universally thought 12 years ago that in the absence of such expertise a reliable encyclopedia could not be constructed. Nonetheless this seems to have worked, worked much better than any of those who started it, or anyone else for that matter , would possibly have imagined. It is not the only way to make an encyclopedia, but it is the way this particular one is being made, Those who have chosen to work on it, almost all of us volunteers, are fundamentally determined to see it through--to see how far we can carry this concept.

To avoid expert judgment of our own, we avoid considering intrinsic importance. Other publications in the world do, and we rely on them. I sometimes get impatient at the apparent indifference to common sense and the occasional inconsistency that the implies, but I have to acknowledge that it does seem to work. Even were you to persuade me otherwise, all that I could say is that it would be necessary to start another encyclopedia on a different principle. Neither I nor anyone here would want to take the chance of compromising what we have done with our current way of working, for we have done collectively something which nobody ever thought ordinary humans collectively could accomplish. I dreamed of this as a child, and it is amazing to see it accomplished only half a century later in my own lifetime. .

We do not try to meet every need; we try to meet the needs of those who find what we are doing worthwhile. Among the people whose needs it does not meet are those who seek recognition or publicity for what has not yet been recognized in external reliable sources.

So much for the rhetoric. You come here to ask my advice, and I would not be honest if I did not give you the most accurate advice I can give about what will happen here, based upon my seven years experience working primarily with incoming challenged articles. Regardless of your desires or mine, the article will be deleted without the sort of sources people here consider necessary. I've told you what they are. if they're not here by monday, I will do what I am supposed to do , and list the article for discussion.

I am not going to go into a debate and say things other than I think. I shall say it does not seem to meet our guidelines, and let others argue as they will and decide what to do with it. You can enter what you like into the debate, but I don't think anyone has ever succeeded with an argument along your lines, and I have seen hundreds of people try. It may be much less than your merits deserve, but it's what will happen; the experience of others is the best predictor. DGG ( talk ) 06:40, 2 January 2014 (UTC)

Input requested

I've been working on it a bit more seeing as nobody was interested enough to pick up the task. Depending on any feedback I get at the Idea Lab, I was considering whether it would be less controversial for me to just post it as an Essay. CorporateM (Talk) 00:13, 10 April 2014 (UTC)

Gravity R&D & PR agent's work

A second opinion on Gravity R&D would be good (I'd deprodded it). Same problem as Wevorce? Or a different one? Jodi.a.schneider (talk) 20:27, 14 May 2014 (UTC)

same fundamental problem, with the additional questions of whether runner up for a prize is significant information, and whether a prize for "best startup" or any similar wording has any significance beyond "not yet notable." I have often brought up these two factors in dealing with an article on a firm that might appear to meet the GNG if looked at without considering what information is being reported by the source; they have sometimes been accepted as reasons for deletion. My AfD at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Wevorce is an attempt to open the general question of the applicability of the GNG to small companies. Soon after I came here I once made the naïve keep argument: "it meets the GNG. Why do we have the rule if we're not going to use it?" and the article whatever it was got kept. I've learned better since then; the question is whether WP has learned also. DGG ( talk ) 00:53, 15 May 2014 (UTC)

Thanks. :) Jodi.a.schneider (talk) 05:57, 15 May 2014 (UTC)

Gravity can be deleted under regular GNG rules, because all the sources are primary, including the awards (see my views on awards as primary sources here) Wevorce is clearly notable in my opinion. DGG, I think this is more in-line with your set of arguments. In this case the PR agency that wrote the Wikipedia page and secured the corresponding media coverage specializes in hiring journalists that write feature stories and shop them around to someone who will publish them as-is under their own byline. So it is impossible to confirm if the sources are truly independent as required by GNG, because there is legitimate reason to speculate that they are actually written by the PR agency, despite the byline. In this case, since there is actual evidence of this practice, my instinct is to delete all the corresponding articles as a matter of erring on the side of safety. CorporateM (Talk) 15:41, 16 May 2014 (UTC)

Other COI edits

I am working on responding to each of the pages. For here I wanted to research what you said about features only in promotional articles. All three other articles I've found in the industry have the same feature! I could use your advice on what I should do, if I have a potential COI in the industry. It's important to me that similar industry articles be handled similarly, but I don't want to make that too important.

• this edit does not show direct evidence of COI, although User:Shiply was created 2008 and active 2011.
• yes, this edit shows evidence of COI, and User:Tompey should be blanked.
• this edit shows mixed evidence; but earlier I searched requested articles and didn't find the alleged page referred to ("Creation of the uship page as requested in 'requested articles/internet'"), so that's significant.

Perhaps I should be more jaded and say that you're right, such statements themselves are evidence of a promotional article no matter what? Founding stories are automatically unencyclopedic unless the company is big, maybe. Can you please give Anyvan, Goldgenie, Shiply, User:Tompey, and UShip the same scrutiny you gave the articles I wrote for, as I did not want to take any edged weapons to them myself for obvious reasons? Frieda Beamy (talk) 16:40, 15 July 2014 (UTC)

You will probably find at least 100,000 promotional articles in WP , or 2% of the total. They exist for two basic reasons: First, our standards in our early years were much lower, and not all of the poor quality work done then has been revisited; in particular, a change occurred over the period 2010-2013 in large part as a response to the great increase in paid editing once our growing importance had become generally recognized. Second, many problems have simply been not noticed even for current articles there's about a 5% error rate in screening submissions here, in both directions (it used to be worse--when I came here in 2007 it was at least double. It ought to be lower, but given the wide community of people who participate, it may never get much better. After all, everyone has a non-zero error rate. My own is about 1% that I know of, so it's probably 2%. Some people do better, either because they work only on cut-and-dried decisions or in a limited field where standards are very solid--or because they're geniuses at what they do.

there's also a frequent situation, where an otherwise good article may have one bad section, and people have passed over the problem with the bad section, in order to concentrate more on removing the weaker articles. Sometimes such a section is added afterwards, and unlike new articles, we have no good method for reviewing such edits, It has sometimes happened that a promotional editor, after failing to get their promotion in the initial article, has managed to insert it afterwards; we remove such material when we notice it, but we do not always notice it. We tend to concentrate on detecting and removing downright vandalism in edits, not the insertion of subtle bias. And, inevitably ,we pay more attention to the most important articles; it is perhaps the most noticed weakness of WP that manipulation of the less important ones cannot easily be prevented.

Sometimes :origin stories have actual evidence; sometimes they are of such importance that they pass into legend, regardless of their accuracy (a traditional example is the myth of Newton's apple)--so they can sometimes be appropriate.

I noticed the other articles on firms in the industry, & intend to work on them. (I normally do check for related articles on the same subject or by the same editor) The similarity is indeed striking, considering they are all competitors. There were some you mentioned I had not noticed, and I will work on them. DGG ( talk ) 21:15, 15 July 2014 (UTC)

Thank you, honestly. Here's just another thing, and don't feel a need to work on the following: I looked again at [23], and I find that this source is used about 130 times in mainspace, but it also features in about 60 deletion and spam discussions, and there's only one really useful link after wading through that. I judged this SEO aggregator site as unreliable twice now but who can argue with 130 other editors? Such is the tragicomedy of our situation. Frieda Beamy (talk) 03:18, 16 July 2014 (UTC)

This one is worth following up. it probably is also appropriate for putting on our blacklist. You've just shown one reason why we rely on new people joining; they will see things others have been missing. DGG ( talk ) 05:31, 16 July 2014 (UTC)

Drowning in spam and other pre-cooked meat substances

Yay, you rock! FYI this is how I found this stuff. And much, much more. I really don't have the bandwidth to keep this up, even just the tagging, so I'll gladly take all the help I can get. (And before you accuse me of hounding, please read this.) --Dr. Fleischman (talk) 18:45, 16 September 2014 (UTC)

I, like you, frequently follow a trail of bad edits,or bad article, using any means available. I've been aware for some time that most of our articles on US non profit organizations were copyvio, promotional, or both, except sometimes when they were the product of a good editor or group of them trying to exhaustively cover a particular geographic area. (And I say US, because the UK has a higher proportion of good editors doing just that, and elsewhere I can't as easily judge sources) My personal impression is that most of them are not from an editing collective of some sort, but the spontaneous work of the individual organizational public relations people, all of whom work in a similarly bad pattern & imitate each other. The worst of them are at universities, who seem to selectively employ the PR incompetents, and that's where I've been concentrating.

If anything I'm doing is interfereing with attempts at detecting particular puppets, let me know, privately. If you want an opinion,ask as best suits the case. I don't check spi unless there's a special reason.

I'm not sure of the best strategy. I don't usually tag, just fix the worst of them as I encounter them, aiming at particular features: I usually remove anecdotal accounts of how they got established, officers other than the ceo, and lists of branches. I will oftem nominate for deletion organizations limited to a small area or within a particular larger institution; there is rarely anything worth merging. Another possible strategy I'm considering is a general stubbification, but that will end up looking like directory entries. (A rather radical possibility is to change policy and accept directory entries.)

Except for universities, I'm not going to concentrate on this--my general strategy here is to work on a particular track for a short period to try to make an impression and leave some examples, and then deliberately move on. It lessens the frustration at not being able to fix everything. DGG ( talk ) 22:38, 16 September 2014 (UTC)

What concerns me most is this combination:

• The overwhelming majority of these articles were created by SPAs.
• Most of the article created by SPAs were introduced fully formed as the creator's very first edit (precocious to the extreme).
• Some of these SPAs have eerily similar editing styles.

--Dr. Fleischman (talk) 00:27, 17 September 2014 (UTC)

In my experience, most organization's PR agents put in a full article at first, because they write it off line. But yes, there is at least one very characteristic & inappropriate style element. A question I wanted to ask you, should we remove things like that, or leave it there for the spi? To make sure we're talking about the same thing, I'd need to email you. DGG ( talk ) 00:48, 17 September 2014 (UTC)

I'm mulling it over. --Dr. Fleischman (talk) 21:20, 17 September 2014 (UTC)

OTRS at ANI

If you feel a dead horse is being beat feel free to leave me a note on my talk page. If you think my five point summary warrants address please post to ANI. I appreciate your input there and at FTNB. I also appreciate the work of OTRS agents. Best. - - MrBill3 (talk) 00:56, 30 September 2014 (UTC)

The OTRS question is a very difficult one, involving the basic principles of WP editing, and I intend to pursue it. I've made a comment yesterday atWikipedia talk:Volunteer Response Team, [24], and I will comment on the AN/I page. I think a major strategic mistake was made in the discussion, not distinguishing the actual edits made from the claim of privilege in making them. DGG ( talk ) 03:24, 30 September 2014 (UTC)

I now consider this issue in the hands of those with more experience and knowledge and will now be mostly adding a "editor at large" perspective if I see fit/a need. I prefer to return to content development and research (while keeping an eye on EW and vandalism). On an unrelated note WP Library has given me access to Cochrane, BMJ, OUP and HighBeam if something would be helpful from one of these drop a note on my talk page. Thanks for your time and attention addressing the OTRS issue and for all your contributions to the project. Best. - - MrBill3 (talk) 14:22, 1 October 2014 (UTC)

I think a policy require COI disclosure is needed and have posted in a number of venues. - - MrBill3 (talk) 05:31, 4 October 2014 (UTC)

Darryl Willis & PR people

I've been spending some time cleaning up Category:American public relations people. I find that about one-third to one-half are good PROD or AFD candidates. Many are chalked filled with brief mentions, quotes, primary sources, rankings, blogs and other junk to make it look as if it was sourced, so they've escaped cleanup. This person appears to be notable[25][26] for a single event, that is being a spokesperson for BP during the deepwater horizon spill and being featured in commercials that ran afterwards. I am not sure if this is a ONEEVENT or not, as it is a single event, but not entirely trivial as is usually the case when that policy is used. Wonder what you think. I might keep chipping away at this category, like I used to do for articles with "industry-leading". CorporateM (Talk) 03:59, 6 December 2014 (UTC)

I have never really like BLP1E. it's subject to a wide range of interpretation in any given case; The issue often is over whether something is important enough to be of long lasting encyclopedic interest, and one can reach whatever conclusion one cares to--the written policy is not much of a help. . In this case he did not have very much of a role, but he did make the news, and for all I know, may be quoted forever in histories of the events. This requires guesswork, and can be argued in each direction. I don't think this really belongs in WP, but I have not been emphasising these, for I have found that some of these will be strongly disputed, and the result is that the coverage will be even more erratic. DGG ( talk ) 06:46, 6 December 2014 (UTC)

Detecting coi editors

...maybe DGG will) tell you about how i (or he, in his case) spot possible conflicted editors and how i (or he) deal with them. Jytdog (talk) 19:45, 1 April 2015 (UTC)

The first step is to realize that most people come to wikipedia with some degree of conflict of interest, to write topics about which the really care. The problem is not to keep the out, the problem is to see that what they do contributes positively to the encyclopedia. People who are firm believers in a cause , for example. can be great problems, because they care so much about something (hat may well be in fact really important) that they recent the writing of NPOV articles. Fans of an artist or sports team can be problems also, inserting all sorts of unjustified material in their praise, worse than a publicist would dare even try. Even for products or companies, there are great fans who want everyone to share the POV--those fixated on particular brand of camera or computer or automobile, or on a restaurant or type of clothing, of great believers in the wonderful work of a doctor or financial advisor or charity.

But the problem here is the people with a commercial interest. The come in all sorts: the owner of a business or professional practice; the press agent in a company, and the persona with a small or moderate knowledge of Wikipedia who advertises their services, or now especially those freelancers who answer advertisements on elance and similar websites, Most of these people do not know how to make a decent article even if they wanted to; but few of them want to--they or their clients will not be satisfied by a NPOV articles in proportion to the size of their business with adequate references--they want a web page here, not seeing us a s different fro mother places for posting advertisements. they do not care about our notability requirements--they all at least hope to be notable some day,and want the public to know about them. I and several others have estimated that at least half our article on commercial and noncommercial organizations and their leaders are the products of this kind of editing. t this point WP is so well known ,that it is hard to imagine an organization anywhere that would not want to have a WP page, and it takes a true understanding of the way in which WP is different, to realize that this is not he way to achieve that.

There is thus no reason to get angry at particular instances. The critical thing to do is to remove the pov articles; assuming we have half million, and if a hundred of us set out to do it for an hot a day, , and supported each other , we could mange to keep up with the inflow and clear up the background in a year or two. We did it for unreferenced bios of living people; we can do it here. If this seems unrealistic, for what is possibly the highest-priority category in terms of unjustified advertising, internet businesses, 4 or 5 people could do it.

In the meantime, we do have to pursue the chains of paid editor, who are responsible for perhaps 10 to 30% of the problem. It's not worth the trouble to work on an individual example. What is worth the double is to look for a group of accounts writing articles in identical format in a particular subject, or an individual account using a similar format for miscellaneous totally unrelated minor articles. In the first place, if the writing similarities are close enough , a SPI can be justify.d In the second, a firm explanation can usually stope them. More of the similarities to be looked for will follow in a day or two. DGG ( talk ) 23:58, 1 April 2015 (UTC)

{thank you guys for helping and guiding me, I really appreciate that and I am taking your WP OUTING very seriously. I worked on some col cases and I believe I handled those cases very well without violating any Wikipedia guidelines even though I was not aware of WP:OUTING. I usually kept my distance when dealing with such cases and never asked them to reveal any personal information other than their affiliation with the entity without asking any further explanation about their nature of work or name. I major in marketing and I can easily spot when someone is trying to promote something and I strongly stand against advertisement in Wikipedia.

we have to take advertisement in Wikipedia more seriously, some marketing courses are now teaching how to edit Wikipedia to promote companies coz they see it as important channel for public relations and product promotion, the only reason why we don't see well-written articles about these companies from new editors is becoz of their inability to navigate through Wikipedia and old web Wikipedia editor is still confusing for most of the people,as Wikipedia becomes more and more user friendly with addition such as visual editor, we will see more advertisement and vandalism .There are off course positive sides to these improvements but we should also focus on negative side too. Nicky mathew (talk) 06:54, 2 April 2015 (UTC)

Professional press release writers can and do learn html and the very similar wikicode, and even our peculiar referencing conventions. Their set of expected skills encompasses that. What they have much more difficult in learning is now to write in a different style for different purpose. Their training and experience is in how to write effective press releases and advertisements,and they are lost in an environment which does not accept their well-learned glossy promises, convincing rhetoric, appealing personal claims, vague statement of benefits ,and carefully selected statistics.claims is not wanted, Tbey do not have experience writing where plain neutral presentation is w\excpected, where only a set of narrowly defined reliable sources are accepted, where testimonials and name-dropping are harmful, and where extravert claims are signs of puffery. The best preparation for working in WP is journalism, tho teaching and librarianship and technical writing also do well. can also be successful

So of course , is any intelligent member of the general public-- but unlike professionals, unless they are students who know html, they have great difficulty with our current format. it is these people whom we will be able to better reach when we have a rule workignand non confusing wvisual editor that does not require manual post processing to verify that it; has avoided bloopers. Perhaps we'll get there they year (I seem to remember saying that for several years now.)At theta point, our outreach programs can extent more practically to a much wider range of non traditional editors, many of whom maybe interested in the everyday topics we have such trouble with. and those they may be able to drive out the professionals DGG ( talk ) 08:12, 2 April 2015 (UTC)

Paid Editing Random Thoughts

In regards to the latest number of undisclosed paid editing issues, I was wondering if the creation of a new WP:CSD criteria is in order. The general idea is that if someone is found to be partaking in undisclosed paid editing, than the articles they have written can be deleted more efficiently. On the grounds that undisclosed paid editors COI prevent the content of the article from being written in a balanced manner. Sort of a Wikipedia:Blow it up and start over speedy for undisclosed paid editing. This would serve to more strongly discourage undisclosed paid editing and reduce the ability of businesses to profit off of the practice.

A rough draft of the deletion criteria could read:

A12: Articles created by an undisclosed paid editor while taking part in undisclosed paid editing where the only substantial content to the page was added by its author.

Is this good, bad, awful, would it destroy Wikipedia? You are a very experienced editor within the deletion process so I'm interested in your thoughts on this idea. Winner 42 Talk to me! 16:20, 13 May 2015 (UTC)

the problem with "undisclosed paid editor" is we have no means of proving someone is unless they confess to it subsequently. And if they do so confess, doesn't this to some extent turn them into a disclosed paid editor? Even confession isn't absolutely reliable because there have been a few verified examples of joe jobss where an upe pretended to be a well known wikipedian. As you know, the prevailing view here is that outing is more important than coi. Personally, I would be prepared to see that be reversed, but I unfortunately don't think it would get consensus, considering the defeat of the recent AfC on a very mild exception to the outing policy. Officially (i.e., in my role as an admin and arb), I will as I have always done apply existing policy, not policy as I would like it to be.

To the best of my knowledge, and as confirmed by opinions of some people with experience in this, there has never been an upe making worthwhile contributions, so they can all be gotten rid of otherwise. Of course, this means if there has been one consistently doing so, we obviously do not know about it. I doubt it, because the amount of junk being submitted now and in the past is so great that it is reasonable to assume any new entry on an organization is very likely to be coi at least, and in most cases also violation of the our Terms of Use; I would also say this about to individuals in some fields. This then raises the question of if they are making consistently good contribution why should we want to get rid of the articles--the same as undetected sockpuppets.

I would go a little further: imo, even for the best declared paid editors, the quality of their paid work is not as high as the volunteer work most of them also do.

The best course of action within existing policy is to have stricter requirements on articles in susceptible subjects, and for more people to participate in the afds. I would certainly propose a formal deletion reason , that borderline notability AND a mainly promotional article is a reason for deletion. (It is now, if we choose to do so, but a formal statement would make it easier to explain). I am saying this with great reluctance--for my first 5 or 6 years here, I devoted as much of my effort as possible into rescuing just those sort of article. DGG ( talk ) 16:57, 13 May 2015 (UTC)

Thank you for your thoughts DGG. I don't like the situation either, but the quantity of COI violations that are done on a daily basis is so large (if the quantity of G11s and adv declines at AfC are of any indication) that something needs to be done. I'm just grasping at straws for a solution. Can't we just get Congress to grant the WMF subpoena power or at least file FTC complaints against some of these people. /rant Winner 42 Talk to me! 17:14, 13 May 2015 (UTC)

In a very few extreme cases, where people or firms have been identified, the WMF has taken some legal or regulatory action. I have some knowledge of whom to speak to and approximately what their parameters are. DGG ( talk ) 20:15, 13 May 2015 (UTC)

A good reason for deletion

"so promotional that it would need to be rewritten from scratch" is a good reason for deletion.

You rightly owe someone a private thanks, or some form of acknowledgement for their work. Or are you only the whip? :) -- GreenC 13:58, 28 June 2015 (UTC)

You are apparently referring to my comment at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Canine Companions for Independence (2nd nomination)

if you mean others have used this wording before me, that's very possible, but I've been using it for many years, and I'm not consciously copying anyone.

If you mean it's not a valid reason:

WP:CSD is limited to the reasons specified; any reason the community accepts is good at AfD. See [[WP:Deletion policy]#Reasons for Deletion]], point 14." Any other content not suitable for an encyclopedia"

It is obviously a good reason for AfD, since it can even justify speedy G11; it's a restatement of "would need to be fundamentally rewritten to become encyclopedic." from WP:CSD#G11. Similarly the essay WP:TNT has been used repeatedly by others as an argument for many deletions. Whether any particular article in question is actually that bad, is of course subject to a community decision: at AfD if at AfD, at Deletion Review if it was done at speedy. In this case, it is indeed possible that the decision may be against my proposal.

a related deletion rationale I often give is that "an article that is only borderline notable and is also promotional should be deleted ." That only works at AfD, and only if the consensus agrees with it.

WP:CSD is limited to the reasons specified; any reason the community accepts is good at AfD. See [[WP:Deletion policy]#Reasons for Deletion]], point 14." Any other content not suitable for an encyclopedia" DGG ( talk ) 15:34, 28 June 2015 (UTC)

Peter H. Lin

You may want to have a look at this article and to its history. --Randykitty (talk) 20:19, 12 September 2015 (UTC)

citations are 500, 270, 170, 150 ... , so he's notable, even allowing for the very high citation rate in this area. Even tho its an autobiography, what it needs is rewriting. Once upon a time, I would unhesitatingly rewrite all articles like this, but in the last year or so the number that need doing has escalated to the point where I only do it if it is in my area of interest, it is easy to do, and the article is not hopelessly corrupt otherwise. This articles is a summary of his outrageously self-praising website even by the abyssmal standards for such websites, http://www.drpeterlin.com/dr.-lin2.html , but not close enough to be a copyvio. It's not even a competent summary, because it leaves out some of the actual encyclopedic information, such as the dates of his positions, and makes no attempt to select the most important among the publications.

As we have now learned we need to do, I checked some of the refs. That he was clinical advisor to the bill is referenced to the Senator's web site, but isn't stated there. Some of the rest are also ambiguous. It's implied he developed EKOS--he did not, a/c the references--he merely uses it. And a Reuters article referred to in this connection is not an article, but a press release on their site.

For an analogous case, by a known paid editor, see John Wesson Ashford, where I just removed the minor and stuff and unproven claims to be first in something. He , too, has very high citations.

I am holding off going further until I can decide what I want to do in such cases. I don't want to punish notable people for being naive enough to write their own article or use a paid editor, but I equally don't see why they should get priority for rewriting before all the even more notable people whom we are missing. DGG ( talk ) 23:09, 12 September 2015 (UTC)

I was thinking paid editing more than autobio, given the contributors' names (and didn't look into notability myself, as I have no time right now). You're right that it's not egregiously promotional. I removed some of the minor awards. If only those paid editors could get it through their heads that it is far more effective to write a really encyclopedic, neutral article... --Randykitty (talk) 08:41, 13 September 2015 (UTC)

It might be a group of editors. Look at the main editors and the other articles they have edited. All related.

• JeremyKai4077 (talk · contribs) created 9/10/2015
• Garfield4407 (talk · contribs) created 9/9/2015

• John.freeman.2010 (talk · contribs) created 9/8/2015 (also see their talk page about an article that was speedied)
• Also note that JeremyKai4077 and John.freeman.2010 have also the exact same user page.

Possibly some paid editing? At the least this group has a very narrow focus. Ravensfire (talk) 14:54, 13 September 2015 (UTC)

I have previously encountered obvious but undeclared paid editing devoted to a particular medical specialty, and to other groups of individuals, or companies in the same field, where I assume it was a PR company specializing in the field or working for a trade association. I have frequently encountered it for people in the same or related company, where it has sometimes not been an outside PR firm, but the employer: sometimes in-house PR staff, but sometimes a department manager or the like acting on his own initiative.

Experience has unfortunately shown that most (but not all) people with experience in PR cannot be taught to write a proper article, because they are so completely oriented to writing advertisements or quasi-adevertisements that they honestly cannot see the difference between that an a proper encycopedia article. Declared paid editors here whom I trust have told me they need to turn down most clients, because the clients even if notable will not accept a NPOV article. DGG ( talk ) 20:02, 13 September 2015 (UTC)

paid editing deletions

I'm sure you've seen the outcome of this and this. Personally, I relist at least once before closing as no consensus, but this is an admin's prerogative and is not a reflection on the closer. What I'm more concerned with is that while Cunard's efforts to rescue such articles are laudable, such closures possibly deny us of much needed evidence for finding solutions to Orangemoody and other issues concerning blatant paid-for (or indeed any) promotion. Perhaps one could consider employing G13, G11, and G5 more broadly or more vigorously. Thoughts? --Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 21:44, 20 September 2015 (UTC)

Cunard is taking the same approach I would have taken 6 years ago. I then argued that the most important thing is to have acceptable content, and how it got there is secondary. I still think that the ideal way of looking at it, if it were not for the current epidemic of paid editing (and the realization that it was there before, also, but we paid insufficient attention to it.) You & I have been assuming a deterrent effect. Cunard has challenged that assumption, and I can't prove him wrong. As you said, its "possibly deny us", but just possibly. Based on some discussions, perhaps what it's most likely to do is discourage pd eds. from giving money-back guarantees, but they will still be able to show portfolios of whatever of their work has not been deleted, including that done before they were detected.

Frankly, I am no longer willing to challenge on the grounds of having been started as paid editing any article that he will rewrite and take responsibility for; I started thinking in the course of the discussion that I am not sure my renoms of those two articles was justified.

G5 has never covered articles started before someone is blocked, or articles with substantial contributions by others. I can see permitting it retrospectively, but the sort of thing we're discussing would require removing the " substantial edits by others" part. I'm not sure I would support that.

G11 of course should be more consistently applied, but I am not sure what wording would make it stronger, as every article on an organization or its product will have some promotional effect., We could add something about "promotional intent", but this is hard to really prove.

I don't see what you propose to do with G13 to make it stronger. I still have my list of 500 or sos articles that shouldn't have been deleted but were because the contributor gave up after improper reviewing.

What we need to concentrate on I think is the notability standard for organizations. Even here, it's hard to think of how to reword it so it doesnt remove the clearly notable--our emphasis on the GNG prevents any rational work on this area. DGG ( talk ) 23:47, 20 September 2015 (UTC)

There is already an extra-strict WP:NSOFT-essay, where three coverage-bursts are needed (not just three publishers). If the details of WP:NCORP-guideline are tweaked, so that three coverage-bursts (not just three published sources) are needed, that might ease some of the not-startup-type burden, since most startups only have one product, they get a coverage burst for their first funding round, a coverage-burst when their beta-product actually ships... and then have to wait around for that third coverage-burst (usually a second successful round of series B funding) prior to getting a dedicated wikipedia-article. In the case of Circle, they got their first burst in Oct&Nov'13, their second burst in Mar&May'14, and their third burst in Sep'14, plus their biggest burst yet in Apr&May of 2015. But if the WP:NCORP-guideline standards were shifted to require three bursts of coverage, spaced several months apart, then Circle (company) would have been a redlink (or more likely a WP:NOTEWORTHY mention under Bitcoin#companies methinks) for all of 2013 and most of 2014. Because they had a famous serial-entrepreneur founder, and got plenty of money early on, it would only have taken them a year of operation to get a wikipedia page... but that is still 12 months of WP:FAILN under the three-coverage-burst-test, used by WP:NSOFT-essay already. 75.108.94.227 (talk) 21:27, 24 September 2015 (UTC)

75.108.94.227 (talk · contribs), I don't think the number of coverage-bursts matters--it's rather what gets said. If it's just funding, it doesn't show notability. I agree that a famous founder can be relevant--but if that's all there is, the information should be added to that pindividual's article as part of the list of companies he's funded. DGG ( talk ) 04:53, 11 June 2016 (UTC)

promotionalism and business articles

...

There is no way of preventing promotionalism in an encycopedia that permits anonymous editing. There is no way of preventing undisclosed COI editing either, for the same reason. We have been able to detect those we have, because they've not understood editing here well enough to avoid detection--and because all edits on borderline notable subjects of certain types clearly merit investigation. If we lower the standard of notability, it will be all the easier for them.

We are not in great need of people who will write on local subjects; we are not in need of people who will write on barely notable subjects. We are in need of people who can write on the clearly notable subjects that not enough people have been interested in, and the obvious area properly receiving current attention here is our continuing gender bias. But what we need even more are people who can rewrite the existing promotional editing on the clearly notable subjects. Almost all articles on major corporations and nonprofit organizations need complete rewriting. They've been contaminated by PR from various sources: the PR people who have written many of the articles, the volunteers who write like PR editors because they think that's what we want here, and the inevitably PR writing based on the RW sources being PR in the first place.

It's unfortunate that a few honest paid editors have gotten undue suspicion. But, quite frankly, I would very strongly support eliminating all paid editing whatsoever. Their fundamental mission is not really compatible with a NPOV encycopedia.

However, the proposition that we write as volunteers basic factual articles on all clearly notable organizations is a reasonable idea. If we do it, we shouldstart at the top, not see how far we can go to the bottom. DGG ( talk ) 04:58, 3 October 2015 (UTC)

Well expressed. The only substitute for the editorial supervision that Wikipedia of necessity lacks is to depend on high quality sources that do have editorial supervision that insists on fact checking, a skeptical attitude toward press releases, and disclosure of COIs. The most reliable of sources are characterized by strict insistence on declaring C.O.I.s, and even the appearance of C.O.I.s, and the use of press releases as no more than sources of questions to ask. The more time spent working on articles written from a source-rich environment (the truly notable), the better our instincts become for working in less information-rich environments. This should be the starting point for pulling out the effects of systemic bias by developing skepticism toward hand-outs and coi claims. (The NYT public editor has just written a piece on two Times published book reviews in which the reviewers assigned had undisclosed COIs).

Wikipedia needs properly sourced articles on corporations—for completeness; the same reason Wikipedia needs any article. But not so much that non-NPOV, poorly sourced articles need be allowed. Wikipedia has accessibility, reliability, and completeness to offer. Completeness is getting out ahead of reliability—this is a perversion of our goals. While it may be admirable to strive for completeness (an impossible goal), reliability back-stopped by adequate cites to WP:RS is existential. —Neonorange (talk) 06:19, 3 October 2015 (UTC)

general response on Orangemoody socks

The difficult problem is is how to handle potential articles on the people & companies who have been exploited by the undeclared page editors. Most of the time, the problem does not arise: For orangemoody, 5% at most were likely to be notable ; in previous editing rings, the percentage has ranged from 10% all the way down to zero, depending on the general subject area. Aside from these large rings, there has also been use of undeclared paid editing by actually notable business concerns, sometimes with existing articles--most of the time, they knew very well what they were doing was deceitful, even before the clarification in our terms of service. In any case, I really do not see how anyone can ever have deluded themselves that paying to have an article written about themselves in an encycopedia was ethical, or that any respectable encycopedia would have staff who would accept such payment. True, a great many of those exploited did in perfect honesty not fact realize we were other than an advertising medium; some of the fault for this is in the promotion-ridden commercialized nature of society, but some is in our own lax prior practices.

In those cases where a subject is actually highly notable, I think the only reasonable solution is for someone here to write an article in the ordinary way. In most cases, I would advocate waiting at least 6 or 12 months, to avoid giving the impression that we do not remove paid articles. If someone is borderline notable, it as always will depend if anyone is interested, but my personal inclination is that I have other priorities: the truly notable subjects that are not covered. A practical question is whether the deleted material can be furnished to reliable editors prepared to rewrite. I think this would be subject to discretion, and anyone doing this needs to check that the material is not simply reinserted in altered form. (It would actually be a violation of copyright to do that without giving proper attribution to the paid editor!)

If someone else submits obvious coi material without a declaration of coi, the priority is to check for another member of the ring of sockpuppets, not to see if we can have the article. This is best done by one of the admins at spi; one of the main reasons I became an admin was to check deleted material. For articles written with a coi, deleting is more likely to be needed than rescuing.

...

Several of the checkusers have worked with these in detail, and they're the experts in this in general. But those of us who work with particular types of subjects gain special experience at recognizing problems with them. There have been , and will be, other rings, tho so far some of the Orangemoody techniques are thankfully unique. The attempt at promotional articles will always be a problem , if we retain open editing and anonymous users. The problem intensifies as the RW importance of getting a WP page increases. All we can do is try to reduce a combination of various means to try and reduce the impact. One key step has been taken: the current terms of use, and the general recognition here that they are enforceable policy. There are a variety of other possibilities, and I'd expect everything anyone can think of to be considered. One key change requires no change in written policy, and is a matter of outr individual attitudes: to interpret the notability requirements much more strictly in susceptible fields. There are some areas where we should stop accepting borderline articles if they show signs of promotionalism or promotional intent or possible sockpuppettry. So I argue at AfDs, and the position is often supported. I therefore do not agree with 75.'s efforts at trying to rescue such articles--they are better simply gotten rid of. The time spent in trying to fix them is counterproductive in two ways: it encourages the promotional editors, and it prevents us doing more useful work, such as writing the hundreds of thousands of needed articles on notable people, or maintaining the articles we have already. (I shared 75'a attitude for several years when I first came here, but with the rise in promotionalism my priority is now the opposite, and least in some subjects--including even some of my favorite fields.) The time spent on this article, and one lower down on the page in the last week or so, has made me resolve that I will no longer help promotional editors, unless the subject is so famous I'd write the article myself. DGG ( talk ) 01:28, 30 October 2015 (UTC)

The lightbulb finally went off

In the beginning, I had a bit of a problem latching on to your concerns over "puffery" in the Gabor B. Racz article, but I think your efforts have finally paid off. To better understand the message you were sending me, I studied some of the articles you created and edited. I learn better with a hands-on approach. The first BLPs I reviewed made the lightbulb go on -Carl Joe Williams, Philip Needleman, H. Boyd Woodruff. By the time I got to Theodore Rappaport the light was much brighter and I saw exactly what you were trying to teach me. It appears as though other editors went in to that article and added all kinds of puffery and peacock words that I know you deplore, so I deleted them, and added citations needed templates as needed. Hopefully you will realize that I really am trying to learn to be the "encyclopedic" editor you envision from what your experiences have taught you. Thank you for helping me see the light. Atsme^📞📧 01:09, 17 February 2016 (UTC)

Thanks. Very glad to have the help. But the process of improving articles is never complete. What you did at Rapport was quite good. But consider the need is for proportion: he's a IEEE Fellow, so he's very notable. But he's not a member of the National Academy of Engineering, or any comparable distinction, so he doesn't count as famous. The article is 2 or 3 times the length it should be, and minor material needs to be removed. And it wasn't "various people" who added the puffery, it was one particular promotional editor, with a lot of further tinkering from an ip. Now contrast Woodruff. He is in the NAS, and has received a further --and very exclusive--distinction. The article should be 4 times as long. It needs a more detailed personal bio, and some details about his work and probably a considerable number of other honors. Ditto with Needleman. Williams is OK in proportion, and has been added to appropriately, but needs a little more detail and clarity;

In my own editing, I usually do by successive rounds (tho sometimes I will remove whole sections), and there is so much to work on that I tend to leave an article to work another as soon as I've done the bare essentials. I don't generally recommend that, & I've been criticized for it, but we each have to figure out how we can be most effective. DGG ( talk ) 05:25, 17 February 2016 (UTC)

DGG, I think the article is where it should be now. With collaboration from Derek R Bullamore, who is a citation fixer deluxe, the references/citations are fixed. I'd like to nominate Theodore Rappaport for GA promotion and would very much appreciate a PR from you as the article's creator if you wouldn't mind? Atsme^📞📧 15:17, 18 February 2016 (UTC)

Further good work from both of you. But some more is needed: 1/ a little more bio: place of birth, high school, undergraduate degree, free photo if available 2/the books should be cited to worldcat, not to book dealers. Alternatively the {{isbn}} format template should be used 3/Strictly speaking each individual award needs a reference. But at least the list needs a link to his CV 5/ Many of the citations are a little defective., Press release sources should be minimized. Probably a single link to his cv would replace many of them. 6/the papers selected for citing merely show he worked in a field. They do not show he did significant work in a field. You can fix this by checking citations and listing them. DGG ( talk ) 17:45, 18 February 2016 (UTC)

DGG thank you. If it's ok with you, I'm going to copy your list of what still needs to be done over to the article TP with hopes of recruiting some help. I'm currently helping prepare another article for FA promotion, and as soon as I've completed that chore, I will start back on this one. Atsme^📞📧 22:36, 19 February 2016 (UTC)

2016

Oil Nut Bay (and Notability in General)

Posted in 1 edit, this article is blatantly obviously created as a comissioned work and authored by someone with a perfect in-depth knowledge of article creation. I don't know what to do about it - f indeed anything can be done, but it's the kind of article that makes me want to give up volunteering my time and intelligence for Wikipedia. --Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 23:51, 14 July 2016 (UTC)

We're not helpless. I just listed it for G11. DGG ( talk ) 03:53, 15 July 2016 (UTC)

Just declined, so I listed it at AfD. If it does stay in, maybe we are helpless under current rules for what canbe investigated regarding COI. DGG ( talk ) 09:50, 15 July 2016 (UTC)

I declined the speedy; It may well be a paid editor, but the article isn't unduly spammy, "editor is suspiciously familiar with Wikipedia" isn't a deletion criterion much as some would like it to be, and the notability standards for hotels & resorts on Wikipedia are historically extremely low. I find it hard to imagine any reason anyone would want to pay an editor to create this; I would hope that people looking to buy multi-million dollar houses on private islands aren't basing their decisions on Wikipedia. ‑ Iridescent 09:57, 15 July 2016 (UTC)

This sort of thing is a matter of judgment (which is why I think we might indeed need a way of investigating) I do agree with you about our standards for hotels, which except for the most famous, seem entirely inconsistent. DGG ( talk ) 10:02, 15 July 2016 (UTC)

(edit conflict) You can hope, Iridescent, but I did not join Wikipediand spend literally thousands of hours on it to rub shoulders with this kind of obvious spam. We need to establish a clear policy to condemn this sort of thing, otherwise it will be the 'but other stiff like it exists' defense. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 10:04, 15 July 2016 (UTC)

As you may remember from my getting my fingers burned last time I tried to clean up resortspam (I was accused of "being on a deletion spree" for daring to suggest this might not be notable, and some guy called DGG declined my deletion request for this piece of obvious spam) I have no love for substubs about resorts, but this is a very poor one to choose as a test case. Virgin Gorda only has a population of about 4000, so the construction of this resort is almost certainly the island's largest employer, and once it opens it will probably be the largest populated settlement on the island, since each of those 88 houses and all the shops are also going to require a support staff and if the resort is only accessible by helicopter or ship they're presumably all going to be living in barracks onsite. Thus, either the scheme will succeed and the article will need to be re-created as an article on a significant population centre, or it will fail and undoubtedly be notable as a high-profile ghost town and spectacular bankruptcy. The existing stub isn't unduly spammy and doesn't have any element of "we're great"; if we're going to make "creator has a potential conflict of interest" into a deletion criterion, we'd be deleting half of Wikipedia. ‑ Iridescent 10:21, 15 July 2016 (UTC)

That was in 2010. My attitude has changed with the growth of paid editing. I'm willing to sacrifice complete coverage to prevent it, because it's a danger to the very purpose of writing a NPOV encyclopedia, and a great discouragement to the volunteers we need to be attracting to survive at all. I don't think WP or any community project can really have static rules. For example, the need for accuracy is much higher now that journalists and other people whom we once relied on now use us as a resource. DGG ( talk ) 22:27, 15 July 2016 (UTC)

Are you suggesting DGG that I was paid to start those London hotel stubs? The question is Iridescent, is are there enough sources to validate having those articles. And in most cases, actually, yes, they could be expanded into half decent entries. They should have been start as proper articles initially, I agree, but I think hotels typically get a hard time on wikipedia. There's a huge number of missing notable ones. Me personally, I prefer historic architecturally notable luxury hotels, not generic branches of popular chains, but at the time I felt like I was doing something useful to filling in a gaping hole in wiki's coverage of London hotels, so make no excuses for acting in good faith in starting them. Can San Domenico House be expanded into a better article? Chances are, yes, it could quite easily be expanded into something half credible. So why doesn't anybody do it? By all means, take a load of them to AFD and see how they fare. A quick look in google books tells me that San Domenico House is likely notable.♦ Dr. Blofeld 19:42, 16 July 2016 (UTC)

As I think you realize, the editor who thought it was spam was someone else. What I think is spam, and therefore suggested deletion, is Oil Nut Bay, which was written by a spa. I was explaining why in the past I might not have even bothered deleting such articles. I agree with you, Dr. Blofeld, that most luxury hotels are probably notable. But many of the current articles being written on such subjects are almost certainly paid editing. Opinion varies on whether we should fix them or delete them, and my attitude has switched to the second solution, for the same reason we usually delete articles by banned editors--as the only practical way to discourage the practice.

More generally, I've said many times that to try to distinguish by guessing from the nature of the article and the edit history is very rough work, and would be done much more precisely if we were able to know is suspicious instances who the editor actually is. How this can be done without compromising some of our basic principles is a very difficult question. DGG ( talk ) 21:03, 16 July 2016 (UTC)

The problem we have is that companies and hotels/resort owners don't "own" articles on their subjects. Obviously we need stronger protection against shoddy COI editing and promotional spam as an encyclopedia, but if some PR operative of a firm is trying to get their mits on an article, or start it, I just disagree with the principle that just because the firm and PR are interested in having an article on their subject we must delete or block it at all costs to completely stamp out paid editing and people using wikipedia for commercial gain . There are really a lot of notable firms which are started by PR operatives or CEOs themselves which if started by any neutral editor would never get deleted or be seen as a problem. And the issue is that thse people don't own the articles. Anybody can blast a puff piece written by one of them to smithereens and write it neutrally from scratch and put it on a watchlist. Over time wikipedia is going to increasingly attract the promotional types who just don't get what wikipedia is about. So while I respect your traditionalist view of what an encyclopedia should contain, I don't agree that we should block all article subjects which might have self-interest from companies. What matters is that the article subjects are notable and neutral/reliable. If articles meets GNG and can be written neutrally and sources to reliable publications we should keep them and nurture them. What we really need is a (paid) department of full-time foundation employees here whose job it is to parole company articles, block out the spam from PR operatives and paid editors and edit them neutrally, retaining the articles for the good of knowledge, not because some CEO wants it.♦ Dr. Blofeld 21:16, 16 July 2016 (UTC)

Opinion, obviously, varies. My own view is that the proportion of decent articles from such sources is so extremely low, that on balance we would improve WP by eliminating altogether if we could find an effective way to do so. But as we have not yet found a way, we have to remove on other grounds. Personally, I do make exceptions if the subject is highly notable and the article is truly satisfactory (which happens one time in a thousand) or the subject is highly notable a& it can be quickly fixed and someone is interested in doing so (one in a hundred) can be quickly fixed & someone is interested in doing it, but otherwise I will use whatever deletion process fits the circumstances. Additionally there is a difference between declared and undeclared COI. Undeclared COI , especially if paid editing, is a violation of the TOU, and according to WMF policy we are all responsible for enforcing it. We do not yet have this as a speedy criterion, possibly because of the difficulty in determining just who is violating it under existing practice. As any reason that has consensus is valid at AfD, and we need just convincing evidence not actual certainty, I would be considering using it as a reason; I know others have, and as a closing admin to accept a consensus to do so. As a first step, I would support retroactive deletion of articles started by blocked coi editors if G4 would be otherwise applicable except they had not yet been blocked. 5 or 6 Years ago I would have supported your view on this, but I think that the proportion of commercial promotionalism was not yet so high, and we had not yet realized the danger. (The key promotionalism problem then was ideological promotionalism)

I am, however, not someone who has a traditionalist view of the encyclopedia. I am very willing to find whatever reason we can to reasonably extend the boundaries for what we cover, to the extent we can write verifiable and useful articles. I am much more willing to do this in areas whichcan be relatively free from promotionalism. DGG ( talk ) 01:57, 17 July 2016 (UTC)

DGG, where are you getting Undeclared COI , especially if paid editing, is a violation of the TOU, and according to WMF policy we are all responsible for enforcing it from? This is not and never has been the case, and it's worrying to see that a sitting Arbcom member appears to think that it is. While undisclosed paid editing is forbidden, neither Wikipedia nor the WMF has ever had a policy against editing with a conflict of interest, and whenever such a thing has been proposed it's been shot down; even the relatively weak guidance at WP:Conflict of interest isn't and never has been Wikipedia policy. (WP:Comment on content, not on the contributor, on the other hand, is a formal Wikipedia policy, which you appear to be wilfully disregarding.) The exact wording of the relevant part of the TOU is These Terms of Use prohibit engaging in deceptive activities, including misrepresentation of affiliation, impersonation, and fraud. As part of these obligations, you must disclose your employer, client, and affiliation with respect to any contribution for which you receive, or expect to receive, compensation., and is explicitly and carefully worded to only relate to people being specifically paid to edit Wikipedia.

In the unlikely event that we did bring in a ban on all undeclared COI editing, Wikipedia would disintegrate into open chaos, given that it would mean bulk deletion of entire sections of the project. (As concrete examples, any article on an educational institution will have been written at least in part by attendees and alumni of that institution; virtually every article on an extant military unit has almost certainly been written at least in part by serving members of that unit; any article on a company has probably been edited at least in part by employees and customers of that company, since in most cases they're the only ones with enough on an interest to do the necessary research.) Much as Jimbo may like it to be otherwise, there is no obligation for employees of the article subject to disclose their affiliations unless they're editing Wikipedia as part of their job, and unless a paid editor admits to it or you can find a paper trail on Elance for the commission being offered and accepted, it's virtually impossible to prove that someone is writing in work time, rather than just writing about their place of work. ‑ Iridescent 14:13, 17 July 2016 (UTC)

From Wiki: (Overview, paragraph 2:

The community – the network of users who are constantly building and using the various sites or Projects – are the principal means through which the goals of the mission are achieved. The community contributes to and helps govern our sites. The community undertakes the critical function of creating and enforcing policies for the specific Project editions...

I interpret this as saying that enforcement responsibility here is the responsibility of enWP, and that out policies must be compatible with the TOU. With respect to paid editing, there's also a statement that and one WP's policies may vary if the variation is approved: we have not (or at least not yet) chosen to do so. Therefore, our Deletion Policy must be interpreted to include at least the restrictions made by the TOU.

The problem, as you correctly state, is how we are to do this. In the absence of specific targeted rules, we do this by enforcing the existing policies and guidelines in such a way as to produce the necessary result. Fortunately, our existing rules are so close to the TOU that this does not usually have to be stated explicitly in a deletion discussion; in those cases where they are inadequate, either we have to guess or we can take no action. In my opinion, since any valid reason is cause for deletion, and NOT ADVOCACY is basic policy, we should at least delete such articles if we reasonably think they have been contributed in violation of the TOU, unless we choose to make an exception, though I would much prefer if there were a more precise method. I continue to think that the community would do well to have some more effective way of directly enforcing them which is compatible with outing policy, and various suggestions have been made. I would support most of them.

As for the college and university articles, some have been written by attendees and alumni--a sort of COI that is not paid editing and which we could deal without most of the university articles have been written by university PR staff in the same style they use for their page in a college guide, and they need to be rewritten. There are indeed other such examples. But since we can not trust any paid editing to be NPOV, you seem to be suggesting we maintain biased articles to maintain our size. DGG ( talk ) 05:00, 18 July 2016 (UTC)

Thank you

I appreciate your feedback on my paid work, I've been trying my best to walk the tight rope of neutrality and making the client happy. I'm proud of my non-paid work and I want to ensure that the paid work reflects the same pride and adherence to guidelines. There are quite a few who've balked at the fact that I always reveal my paid status, I've been asked to vote "keep" on like 10-15 AFDs so far and I always tell them that it'd be a waste of money for me to state "Keep - And I was paid to vote". If the client wants to pursue the Born Warriors article in the future I would probably suggest a total rewrite. So thank you I appreciate the feedback.  MPJ-DK  12:22, 17 July 2016 (UTC)

Prolific Sock farm products

Hi DGG. FYI, see Wikipedia:Conflict of interest/Noticeboard#Slew of articles from a prolific sock farm. The farm was just discovered today. I've made a list of all the "articles" they've created and posted them at COIN, as I don't have time to go through them myself. Pinging also Kudpung and Orangemike. How utterly demoralising, sigh. Voceditenore (talk) 17:06, 20 July 2016 (UTC)

I see it's also being discussed at Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents#Undisclosed Paid Editing Farm (re banning the farm and nuking the products). Voceditenore (talk) 17:16, 20 July 2016 (UTC)

deletions are underway; but expect to find more of them as we check further.

but this should not surprise you--1/as we improve WP, it increases in importance and people want their professional and business activities to be in it. 2/most of the are not suitable for articles without compromising nOT DIRECTORY and NPOV 3/most people and businesses cannot write their own well enough to get them kept 4/quite a few people think they have the skills to do such articles and offer these services 5/we cannot accurately detect paid contributions with compromising Privacy.

What it comes down to is a choice between NPOV and Privacy, and almost everyone at WP values Privacy higher. There is no solution if this remains the case. DGG ( talk ) 15:54, 21 July 2016 (UTC)

Hi DGG. I wasn't surprised at all, just fed up. But on the bright side, there seems to be a growing consensus for nuking the articles in situations like this rather than wasting everyone's time with AfDs. Of course, most of these people don't get caught red-handed socking as this farm did. I suppose one small step people can take is to check obvious paid articles and look at the contributions of the creator and those who have edited the same articles or supplied images. See, for example User talk:Seostrategists and User talk:Kkc knight, who uploaded the image at Josh Roush and voted "Keep" in the AfD and who created London & Country Mortgages (subsequently taken over by Seostrategists), although I doubt if there's enough to bring an SPI. Best, Voceditenore (talk) 07:09, 22 July 2016 (UTC)

Bring one and see. I think it's enough. Maybe this is a good time for me to finally try using checkuser. DGG ( talk ) 19:49, 22 July 2016 (UTC)

Anthony Charles Robinson

In this edit to Anthony Charles Robinson, you tagged the article for speedy deletion as G11: "Unambiguous advertising or promotion". I shouldn't have to remind you that WP:CSD is for pages with no practical chance of surviving discussion. Equally, you surely must be aware of what G11 says?

• This applies to pages that are exclusively promotional and would need to be fundamentally rewritten to conform with Wikipedia:NOTFORPROMOTION. If a subject is notable and the content could plausibly be replaced with text that complies with neutral point of view, this is preferable to deletion. Note: Any article that describes its subject from a neutral point of view does not qualify for this criterion. However, "promotion" does not necessarily mean commercial promotion: anything can be promoted, including a person, a non-commercial organization, a point of view, etc.

Are you trying to assert that either (1) the subject is not notable; or (2) that the content could not be plausibly replaced with neutral content? The subject is clearly notable, given the number of articles about him and the awards he's received - not least an OBE. Even if the content were exclusively promotional (which it isn't), with 32 references about him, a monkey with a typewriter could transform it into a neutral article.

I am astonished that an editor of your experience and inclusionist tendencies should make such a fundamental mistake, particularly with the first efforts of a new editor. I see you haven't even noted the CSD nomination in your log yet, so if there is another agenda at play here, I think you should be upfront about it. --RexxS (talk) 13:36, 10 August 2016 (UTC)

A bio based mainly on very minor awards & trivial references is promotional; there is no reason for it except to advertise his speaking career--in fact, quite a few of the paid editors use thie trick of adding a great many not very convincing references. To analyze the G11, let's say he were notable, for example it his award were higher than the OBE, It would need to be fundamentally rewritten because almost all the content is trivial awards , & sourced to local notices about his speeches. The potential G11s that should not be tagged are those that do not need to be fundamentally rewritten and can be easily fixed are, for example, where it's just a matter of adjectives, or a specific section that can be removed. Sot notable or not I do consider it a reasonable G11.

Now, G11 is not an exact criterion, and can be interpreted in many ways. The check on the tagger's interpretation is that I don't delete the articles myself, and anyone else can remove the G11. Even if the speedy tag stays there for more than a day, I take it to mean no other admin is comfortable deleting it, & remove the tag. It is true that I have usually been interpreting G11 more broadly in a sort of desperate response to the increasing promotional editing; it is possible that it has been too broad, and I must look to analyze the results of my CSDs. I'm always re-analyzing something or other from my logs, but this month I'm doing my deletion log, to see which recreations are reasonable and which not. I suppose I should check CSDs next. I like everyone else can drift in interpretation, which is why I do regularly look back. And if I do go too far, I;m glad when someone tells me., so I thank you. I will probably AfD as not notable, but not immediately. DGG ( talk ) 15:25, 10 August 2016 (UTC)

The "new editor" who created this gem, also produced Arthur Charles Evans, which has the same whiff of undisclosed paid editing. Similarly deceptively sourced. Once you look at the sources, like the Robinson article, most evaporate (dead links, trivial mentions, blogs, etc). --Randykitty (talk) 16:46, 10 August 2016 (UTC)

At least Evans is notable , because he has the CBE. DGG ( talk ) 16:53, 10 August 2016 (UTC)

The whole point of having criteria beyond the WP:GNG is that folks who have, for example, received significant awards are very likely to have press coverage and it becomes a short-circuit for the notability debate. It's not a question of how many awards are given out; it's a question of whether receiving that award would most likely imply significant coverage. Now the OBE is "a well-known and significant award or honour", but you may feel it doesn't guarantee that someone will have received coverage. OK, but even leaving aside the OBE, Robinson has significant coverage in an article in The Guardian - that's not a passing mention - and a whole article on him in the The Press (York), which isn't just some local rag, it covers a large chunk of Yorkshire and has a circulation of 25,000 (that's half the circulation of something like the The Washington Times for comparison). Having read the earlier parts of your talk page, I can appreciate your concerns over paid editing - and personally I'd see it banned if I could - but I'd hate for us to get so paranoid about the problem that we start to catch good-faith editors in the net. Now, I have no clue whether LazyLilac is a paid editor, but I can't see an easy way to determine that, and if there is significant coverage in independent sources, we're probably best off just making sure that the content stays neutral, IMHO, as I'd rather "ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer", don't you agree? --RexxS (talk) 19:00, 10 August 2016 (UTC)

• (talk page watcher) Interesting statements by LazyLilac at TeaHouse hereI am a freelance virtual assistant, so I am not his employee and the copywriter has been editing the text and I have been updating it on here, he doesn't know how to create pages on Wikipedia, so yes it's just me doing the editing on here. Time to delete and salt? PamD 21:05, 10 August 2016 (UTC)

@RexxS:@Randykitty: for info. PamD 21:09, 10 August 2016 (UTC)

first step is to take it to AfD and get it deleted. Iff it gets sufficiently edited, it is possible that it might pass, despite the paid editing. DGG ( talk ) 21:33, 10 August 2016 (UTC)

(edit conflict) Thanks, PamD, that clarifies things quite a lot. I'm not sure that's quite enough to block LazyLilac for TOU abuse, but she/he ought to have worked out what COI means by now. As for salting, I think we'd need to run the article through AfD first, and I still think it's more likely to be kept than deleted, given the press coverage. --RexxS (talk) 21:36, 10 August 2016 (UTC)

@Pigsonthewing: for info, as the editor who moved the draft into mainspace. PamD 21:49, 10 August 2016 (UTC)

Comment: Interesting that none of the Teahouse hosts seem to have picked up on what looks like a declaration of paid editing! PamD 21:52, 10 August 2016 (UTC)

Paid editing goes to the editor, not the article, which stands on its own merits. Montanabw^(talk) 08:13, 11 August 2016 (UTC)

Montanabw, as I understand it personally, while declared paid editing certainly is judged article by article; undeclared page editing does go by the editor, just as other TOU violations like sockpuppettry. I certainly will ban undeclared page editors until they declare, though so far I have used the related reason of advertising-only account. The question of whether we should remove all contributions of detected undeclared paid editors is still open, but in some cases we have done just that, when the nature of the editing is reasonably certain-just as we do with sockpuppettry. DGG ( talk ) 13:29, 11 August 2016 (UTC)

I have sympathy with your intent, DGG, but we don't actually "revert on sight" the contributions of sockpuppets, per se. That draconian step is at present reserved for those evading site bans, as it has been agreed that the loss of possibly useful content is outweighed by the message sent to the ban evader that their contributions are not welcome. Nevertheless, I feel that the same message would also be appropriate to send to paid editors deliberately evading TOU. It would really best be agreed via community debate and consensus, rather than one person taking up the campaign, but if you felt up to raising it at VPP, for example, please ping me and I'd be happy to support you there. --RexxS (talk) 14:37, 11 August 2016 (UTC)

Yes, we ban them first. but we ban on the basis of convincing behavioral and editing evidence, as well as CU. UPE are a little more difficult, because there are a surprising number of good faith new editors who write promotional articles, because that's what they mostly see here in some areas, and they think it's what we want. As discussions at various places have shown, it is quite hard to be sure, unless it's obvious or omitted. But we can and do block people who persist in writing promotional articles, after a warning, and at present the TOU are best used as a supplemental argument--it seems to sound more official. It is rather rare for a paid editor write anything else, though it does happen.

In my personal opinion, the only real reason for trying to identify who exactly is a UPE is when we reasonably suspect a ring or an extensive commercial operation. DGG ( talk ) 17:21, 11 August 2016 (UTC)

• Follow up. The book was, as I feared, kept at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Anthony Charles Robinson. I just cleaned it up a little, but the essential lack of notability remains. I think it's worth a renom. DGG ( talk ) 08:19, 26 September 2016 (UTC)

John Travis (physician) - Neutrality of tone

Hi DGG - I saw that you had placed an alert on the John Travis (physician) page regarding the tone, indicating that it came across more like a news release. I'd like to try to rectify this and can see parts that might be at fault, such as the 'Work on parenting' section. However, I wished to check which areas you felt were causing issues?Fbell74 (talk) 06:31, 27 June 2016 (UTC)

You are right that the parenting section is altogether inappropriate, as almost all of it is not about his own work. Asides from that , take a closer look at the section on wellness, and the claims to be first or among the first. the claims here contradict the discussion in the WP articles on the subject.

Beyond those generalities, you are writing as a paid editor for the subject. It is my position that anyone doing so should know in advance how to do it properly, That is, if it can be done, for it seems that almost nobody can make satisfactory article with that degree of conflict of interest. I am always glad to give volunteer editors as much help as necessary, even to the point of personally rewriting articles if the subjects are notable, but I cannot be expected to do extensive work for free, but for which someone else will be paid. DGG ( talk ) 03:35, 28 June 2016 (UTC)

Thank you - the pointers help and I'll work on those accordingly. Of course, free assistance wouldn't be expected when the contributions aren't of a voluntary nature. I appreciate any help, in light of this.Fbell74 (talk) 03:39, 29 June 2016 (UTC)

Hi DGG - I think I've tackled the areas that were causing issues with the neutrality of tone, mainly by removing some details that might be seen as promotional and also paring down the content to focus on the subject (rather than connected parties). I haven't forgotten what you said about not doing extensive work in this kind of situation. I wondered if you might take a look though, as you had raised the alert originally? I appreciate you're probably quite busy with other Wikipedia work Fbell74 (talk) 05:55, 30 June 2016 (UTC)

Hi DGG - you're probably inundated with other work on Wikipedia. When you have a moment perhaps you can take a look at the article? I haven't made additional changes to it, since the time you were looking at rewriting it. However, if it's easier I can have a go again, with regards to the areas you highlighted in the recent posts on the Talk page Fbell74 (talk) 05:20, 11 August 2016 (UTC)

Fbell74 I looked again. I decided to reorganize much further, and I have done so--see my comments on the talk page, which is where this should be continued. Basically, I removed material sourced only to his own site or a blog. I removed claims for first and one of the first. These need good third party documentation, and in any case "one of the first" has no specific meaning.

The connected contributor tag should remain on all paid articles where the paid editor wrote a substantial amount of the material. . I will remove the press release tag after its been sufficiently improved. The problem with paid editing is that a paid editor is typically not willing to make sufficiently radical improvements, because their client would not actually approve of an appropriately length NPOV article--they normally want the article because they want publicity, and this is an inherent conflict with the fundamental policy WP:NOT.

Here's my problem. It is easier for me to rewrite this than to coach someone else how to do it. Six years ago I would routinely rewrite, but I no longer am willing to do work for which other people are being paid. In this case I'm so much involved already that I'm making an exception. (Ideally, a promotional article should be removed, but in practice there's sometimes a choice between rewriting it and having it stay promotional) Most other other editors working with paid articles have no conflict--they simply won't work with a paid editor at all, and generally think that the only solution is to eliminate paid editing entirely. Unfortunately, in a system with anonymous editing permitted, this would simply drive it underground. So an argument can be made for helping the ones who declare, to encourage the undeclared ones to follow the TOU also. DGG ( talk ) 06:17, 13 August 2016 (UTC)

COI & POV Flags On An Article

Hi there, I came across an article Richard B. Hollis that you have contributed to in the past. The article now has COI & POV flags on it. It appears that since the flags have been added, the article has been edited and refined. As a new user I wanted to help clean up the article, but do not know where to start. Since you have vast knowledge of the wiki world and have worked on the article in the past, I was hoping you can take a look at this article and see what needs to be cleaned up before removing the flags. I am just trying to learn the ins and outs of Wiki! Thank you!

Ventanas144 (talk) 17:53, 17 August 2016 (UTC)Ventanas144

first thing I have to ask, is whether you by any chance have a conflict of interest, financial or otherwise. If so, please see WP:COI for out guidelines on how o contribute. And if financial in any way, you will need to declare it: see our Terms of Use, particularly with respect to paid contributions without disclosure

second, I need to tell you, that if you are the same person as any other editor who has worked n the article earlier. such as the editor who worked on it earlier his week, you must choose one single account and use it only.

With a COI, the way to add material is is as follows: Add the material to the article's talk page, not the article page itself, and place a {{request edit}} tag on the talk page, after your suggestion. (include the double curly braces on each side)

As for the article, we need dates and exact permissions for the various firms. We also should not be describing their products unless he persona;ly had a role in developing them, and there are goodthird party references for this. Is the patent in his name? Did he sponsor the project within the firm, or did he just invent the improvements himself.

I know I originally accepted the article, but I need to examine it again to see if he actually meets the notability standard--most of the references seem to be aboutthe firms. DGG ( talk ) 20:31, 17 August 2016 (UTC)

I cleaned up the sourcing and content so that it is about him and is neutral, in my view. I think it OK and meets notability now. I also removed the POV tag. Jytdog (talk) 01:26, 18 August 2016 (UTC)

I think I can do a little more. DGG ( talk ) 13:39, 18 August 2016 (UTC)

Draft essay: AFD and promotionalism=

Another friendly challenge: Help edit an essay on Wikipedia:AFD and promotionalism. First step, do we agree on the wording for what to debate in this essay? Currently is: "Proposed: During Articles for deletion debates, a Delete !vote based on a complaint of promotionalism is valid." -- 1Wiki8........................... (talk) 11:28, 3 October 2016 (UTC)

It does not make sense to get into multiple debates with on the same general topic. We have to pick one place. As far as I am concerned, this page is good because it is very widely watched. As a preliminary, a question such as 'Proposed: During Articles for deletion debates, a Delete !vote based on a complaint of promotionalism is valid." is not precise enough for a debate. It depends on the meaning of valid--I suppose you mean acceptable as one of the reasons for makig the decision, not as something that trumps all other arguemnts. It is explicit from WP:AFD and WP:NOT that any violation of WP:NOT is suficient to delete an article, not just notability or promotionalism--and any argment based on any such provision is therefore to the point, as distinct from ILIKEIT.

I think you mean more precisely the strength that should be given to such an argument. Even that is hard to answer in the abstract. It obviously depends on the degree of promotionalism. If promotional, it also depends on whether someone is prepared to rewrite the article & fix the problems. It depends on whether the article is satisfactory in other aspects. Andd despite what you say above, if the article is fixable I think it does depends on whether the article is worth fixing. We are limited in editors, and in their time, and by their interests.

I propose a somewhat different question. . Small variations to the notability standard either way do not harm the encyclopedia as much as accepting articles that are part of a promotional campaign. DGG ( talk ) 17:31, 3 October 2016 (UTC)

The 'either way' seems imprecise. Shouldn't the proposal take a stance one way or the other: for the variation to keep, OR the variation to delete. For example, I'm going to venture that we agree that an article should NOT get a variation towards keep based simply on the fact that the article is NOT part of a promotional campaign. -- 1Wiki8........................... (talk) 21:43, 3 October 2016 (UTC)

Wiki8...........................]] (talk) 20:31, 3 October 2016 (UTC)

yes, but a non promotional article should if there is an chance at all of notability be moved to draft space for possible improvement; and, if not, the contributor given assistance in finding a better topic.

Let me try some other wordings: what I meant was that being a little deletionist or inclusionist does not matter as much as promotionalism does. It's ok to be somewhat inclusionist or somewhat deletionist and reject promotionalism entirely; it is not ok to be either somewhat inclusionist or somewhat deletionist and accept promotionalism. You are, for example, considerably more inclusionist than I about companies, and I probably more than you about academics, and I consider that fine, & it's something we should be willing to compromise about; but you are willing to accept promotionalism, and I do consider that wrong, and I think it something I would not compromise about.

Worded another way: the decision to keep or delete an article depends first upon promotionalism , and only if not promotional, about notability. I could word it in a single direction: An article should be rejected if it is promotional (regardless of notability ), and it should be rejected if it is not notable (regardless of promotionalism). I consider all these statements more of less equivalent. DGG ( talk ) 22:41, 3 October 2016 (UTC)

I think we're getting close to agreeing on the proposed wording to debate. Lemme ponder a little bit and get back to you soon. -- 1Wiki8........................... (talk) 05:59, 5 October 2016 (UTC)

Another rewording: there are two positions I could support,and I've gone back and forth between them:

1. Any article edited by a promotional editor should always be deleted. This is the only way to discourge people from using the WP for advertising. If the subject is actually important, someone elsew ill create an article. Rescuing it sends the message that if your write an unacceptable article about yourself, someone will very possibly fix it for you, and therefore you might as well try to advertise here. It furthermore sends the message that if you you hire someone to write an article and they take money for doing this, and they write the usual unacceptable article such peoplewrite, then someone will fix it for you free,, while the guy who wrote the bad article gets the money. DGG ( talk ) 21:22, 6 October 2016 (UTC)

The wording "Any article edited by a promotional editor should always be deleted" is good, and should allow for a clear debate on that proposal vs. what I would call neutrality on how the sausage is made. -- 1Wiki8........................... (talk) 21:14, 6 October 2016 (UTC)

I had not finished. I said there were two positions I could support. The second is

2. Promotional articles should always be deleted, unless they are very clearly about an undoubtedly notable subject, and some responsible WPedian is prepared to take responsibility for rewriting them. This would normally be done by moving the article to Draft space. This has the advantage of getting articles about the clearly notable subjects and increasing our coverage, while removing promotionalism and discouraging the bulk of the promotional editors, who are rarely writing about unambiguously notable subjects. DGG ( talk ) 21:22, 6 October 2016 (UTC)

oops! my bad. This one would need some rewording to keep us focused. Perhaps something like Articles with promotional issues should always be deleted if those issues are not fixed by the closing of an AFD discussion. -- 1Wiki8........................... (talk) 21:32, 6 October 2016 (UTC)

as an alternative, you mean, to always be deleted. But I think everyone would agree on that. The question where we disagree is whether we should even allow them to be fixed unless the subject is very notable. DGG ( talk ) 21:35, 6 October 2016 (UTC)

would it be fair to say the general question is: "Promotionalism Overrides Notability" vs. "Notability Overrides Promotionalism". Where Promotionalism meaning an article with promotional content issues. -- 1Wiki8........................... (talk) 13:44, 7 October 2016 (UTC)

Regarding Malaysianboy3 Paid Edits

Hello DGG,

I saw your comments in my talk page, and i disclosed all my paid edits. If i ever do any paid edits, i will disclose my nature of edits. Am i allowed to continue editing the pages?--Malaysianboy3 (talk) 09:55, 28 May 2020 (UTC)