Wikipedia talk:Organization Wants Edit

About this noticeboard

Since Wikipedia's rise to popularity in the mid 2000s there have been organizations seeking to assert control over the Wikipedia articles related to their brand. The tensions between organizations seeking to do promotion and Wikipedia editors seeking objective coverage have been an ongoing conflict. The Wikipedia community of editors report that organizations have massive resources to advocate for their interest and solicit time from Wikipedia's volunteer bureaucracy. Wikipedia volunteers seek to share general interest reference information in Wikipedia to make a nice encyclopedia. In approximately 100% of organizational requests, the organization cares nothing for Wikipedia's nonprofit mission to provide encyclopedic knowledge, and only cares about Wikipedia as a marketing and branding tool. Consequently, volunteers care little for the arduous and nuanced requests of organizations about their brand. However, Wikipedia is a bureaucracy trying to be fair and balanced, and in an arms race, organizations have advocated for themselves collectively and created layers of social infrastructure to make increasingly sophisticated requests into Wikipedia's volunteer processes.

This noticeboard seeks to shift more control over these conversations to the Wikipedia community by encouraging organizations to post their editing requests into a public, permanent, archived forum. Organizations tend to want their edits and edit requests to be private and unnoticed. While the Wikipedia community does offer private communication for issues such as harassment, danger to individuals, attacks, and matters for which privacy protects against an injustice, the Wikipedia community does not offer private conversation or discretion on matters of negotiating corporate marketing and branding.

When any organization requests edits related to marketing, branding, or the routine maintenance of the Wikipedia article for the organization, then direct them here. This board is especially a place to direct private organizational editing requests directed by email to infowikimedia.org, which is a queue that the Wikipedia:Volunteer Response Team answers. Blue Rasberry (talk) 16:52, 13 October 2019 (UTC)

Sent to English Language Volunteer Response Team mailing list

Hello, Increasingly companies are writing to the Volunteer Response Team / OTRS to make edit requests. This is an abuse of the service and not the reason why this email queue exists.

Anyone who has been around in Wikipedia projects for a few years knows that there have been multiple attempts to control paid advocacy. The wiki community has tried lots of interventions. There are still some things which we have not tried.

I set up a new English Wikipedia noticeboard to try a new service. This is the "Organization Wants Edit" noticeboard, or OWE / WP:OWE, for organizations which think that Wikipedia volunteers owe them free labor. Any organization can make editing requests on this board. The Wikipedia community can respond as it likes.

I am suggesting the use of this board to the VRT / OTRS team. Now, instead of performing edit requests for or having conversations with organizations, companies, and corporations, just tell them to post their request into this public, permanent forum. Unless they have an extraordinary reason for a private conversation they can discuss their edits on wiki like normal humans. Through this board the VRT team can divest itself of any responsibility to answer these requests and also bring them out into the open in a way that will assist us in documenting corporate activity in wiki.

Somehow, I think the wiki community contracted mass group insanity to get into the habit of responding to corporate email requests for edits with volunteer labor. For anyone on this board, save your expertise and labor for causes which support the Wikipedia nonprofit mission. Supporting organizations in their marketing does not accomplish that.

See the board at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Organization_Wants_Edit

Comments welcome on the talk page. Test edits welcome on the board. thanks

Blue Rasberry (talk) 20:56, 13 October 2019 (UTC)

My thoughts

While I think this is a good idea, it likely won't work for a few reasons. First off, anybody who posts there and didn't disclose per WP:PAID would be likely be instantly banned, so many companies will see it as "POST HERE TO GET BANNED" and will still send it to info-en. Also we already have a response for people requesting updates on OTRS, and that mostly will stop most companies. Third, the page itself itself is WAY to BITEy for my tastes and even with companies we still need to AGF. I would oppose this notice board as it's just not really going to solve anything and most volunteers don't edit the page when a company wants an update anyhow, but send a response that basically says "you can fix it but you have a coi" which explains all of our policy on COI editing. CodeLyoko^buzz 22:36, 13 October 2019 (UTC)

Thanks CodeLyoko for your feedback and I respond below with your numbers.

1. Yes - anyone who posts here is subject to usual Wikipedia rules, and this board might identify a user whose actions merit a block. That is one of the purposes of this board! Too often a public relations professional writes to Wikipedia:Volunteer Response Team (VRT/OTRS) begging for a Wikipedia editor to give them free labor for marketing their client. Sometimes VRT/OTRS agents actually get tricked into performing that work, and furthermore, they unnecessarily extend privacy protections to the corporation's illegitimate edit request while doing this. I created this board because I want agents to have a tool which assists them in thinking more about which corporate edit requests are fishing attempts at free labor, and which ones are legitimately sensitive and merit a VRT agent email response. Too often companies view emails to the VRT and info-en as a back door for requesting marketing edits from experienced Wikipedians. Somehow, agents at info-en should be able to easily divest these requests, and this page gives an option for a quick referral: "Take your request and post it here."
2. The other options at OTRS are not creating logs for public examination. If companies routinely request edits and marketing support in the private info-en email queue, that information is of general interest to the Wikipedia community, but only designated agents can actually see this. As this board gets used, we make requests transparent, reveal the company, and reveal what marketing support they want.
3. I would not compel any Wikipedia user or company to use this board when there are many other options. Yes, I made the page, then I specifically posted a bite-y image of a taskmaster with a whip because I feel abused when I read info-en emails where corporate agents make entitled demands of volunteers to do marketing for them. AGF applies to paid corporate advocates, but the way we treat paid advocates has to be different from the way we treat people who are WP:Here to build an encyclopedia. Paid corporate advocates attempt to extract as much value as possible out of the public commons and Wikipedia to the benefit of their shareholders. Among a hundred thousand+ processed corporate requests in English Wikipedia, we do not have a single profile or case study of any company which has ever given anything back to the public commons, and we scarcely have any interactions with any company with the minimal decencies to acknowledge our public benefit, expertise and labor. Corporations pay agents to lobby and advocate for their interests in Wikipedia, and they create a volunteer labor drain which is an ongoing emergency of corporate exploitation. A company might pay some charismatic friendly minion to ask us for free labor, but if that friendly person fails, the corporation will play good cop/bad cop hiring and firing PR agents to demand repeatedly for years in the long term. PR agencies routinely start Wikipedia consulting by asking for US$5000 retainer then billing $250/hour, and with that money, they devise tricks to prey upon the good will of our volunteers. I support companies making their requests, but they need to do it in public and not have a private back channel to make appeals to individual Wikipedia editors in high pressure personal communication under the pretense of a need for privacy when all they want is marketing. I would support changes to this noticeboard, such as being bite-y in a different way, or someone could make their own variation of this page in another style, but I think the right attitude to take with corporations is to direct them to a page which is obviously unprofessional, obviously not corporate, where they can obviously see that we are not extending a paid service (they feel entitled to make demands because they think we are paid to serve them), and where they come face to face with the volunteers whose labor they are trying to get for free and without thanks. Anyone who posts here should get complete respect, because we are all slaves to our finances and everyone has to work for someone, including PR agents. The way that we show respect is by setting good expectations and good boundaries for what labor we will and will not donate to a corporate interest.

I much, much appreciate these questions you asked. I can recognize how many people would prefer your perspective and oppose mine, and not much of what I have said actually responds to the view you have. If reconciliation, change, or compromise is possible to make a service which works for more wiki editors and corporate requests then I would want that. Blue Rasberry (talk) 00:04, 14 October 2019 (UTC)

Your making this way to much about "COMPANIES BAD, WIKIPEDIA GOOD" its clouding your vision, and honestly this page in its current form does not meet WP:AGF or WP:BITE standards anyway. 99% of the emails that I see coming in like this are either responded with the "Sofixit but u have a COI" template or not acted on at all. All this is a solution is search of a problem that does not really exist. Also updating an article with new info, esp if it is verifiable by RS, is not really working. Your also assuming that many companies are emailing us for free labor, but in 99% of cases a company will email us with updated info with RS or will provide RS when asked and don't know how to edit wikipedia, and at the end of the day, our vision aligns with us having an up-to-date article. You are making this "Wikipedia editors vs. Corporations" when its mostly just new editors not knowing how to edit a page or how wiki syntax works. We already have {{requested edit}} and that seems to work fine it its current state. CodeLyoko^buzz 04:25, 14 October 2019 (UTC)

Also on your it does not create a log statement, you can say that about anything that we do on OTRS, not just making maybe one or two edits about incorrect info on a companies page that they kindly ask us to fix. CodeLyoko^buzz 04:29, 14 October 2019 (UTC)

@CodeLyoko: Okay, I see your points, and also I am imagining what other related points people can make. I want to attempt to make some changes to this idea to get your support. I would like to reflect on this, maybe for days or a few weeks, then propose something. The general change that I want to make is to move non-private, non-sensitive requests from OTRS into a single place on wiki. I feel that many such requests go into OTRS when they are appropriate for on-wiki management, and I want to divert some of them from OTRS to a public place. There are lots of possible ways to get to that. Introducing negativity for any reason is unhelpful. I want to be a bit defensive, but you are right, there is no need to be offensive. If you have an idea then share it, otherwise, I will be thinking for a while on my own.

Again, thanks a lot for the feedback. You are right on some major point and I have been in error. Blue Rasberry (talk) 13:47, 15 October 2019 (UTC)

Spintendo deconstructs the use case

Most regulars in the English Wikipedia WP:COI space know Spintendo for being highly active, remarkably patient, and consistently precise in responding to support requests through the "{{Request edit}}" template queue. I asked Spintendo for their feedback on this noticeboard and in response, they articulated the idea better than I could on their talkpage. I like the way that they described this queue as a support service for COI editors, which was exactly my original intent of this board.

I also think that as a Wikipedia:Volunteer Response Team/OTRS editor, I could be sending more support requests to this board rather than handling them in private.

I have hesitated with experiments because of CodeLyoko says about being friendly and not isolating COI editors into a queue where they will necessarily get a special class of service. That is already what happens in OTRS, and I agree, I wanted our service offerings to be more consistent.

See Spintendo's diagram copied here, but check out the original on the talk page.

NEED COI editor w/ editing needs

CAT:EDITREQ

OTRS (private) Volunteer Response Team

WP:OWE

I also want to thank Spintendo as the single most point of my inspiration for doing this noticeboard. I have been watching how that "Request edit" flow, originally CorporateM's development, has been operating for years. I have been especially impressed with the consistency of how Spintendo responds to requests in that system and wished for a way to make it easier for myself and others to scale up to that.

Along with these posts I have some semi-private feedback in the semi-private Volunteer Response Team email queue. Others have said what CodeLyoko has said - be friendlier and be more inclusive. I want to think this through for some time more before proposing some changes to hopefully get more support for this than currently exists. Blue Rasberry (talk) 20:53, 20 October 2019 (UTC)

Similar service for non-organizations

Wikipedia:Editor assistance/Requests

Blue Rasberry (talk) 15:24, 21 October 2019 (UTC)