I'm as interested in what pops up for Wikipedia in that search.

Wikipedia:Paid editing (policy) is shown as a Failed Policy. This is part of what failed:

Wikipedia:Paid editing (guideline) is also a "Failed proposal."

Wikipedia:Paid editing simply says "Wikipedia does not currently have an official written policy or guideline on paid editing." That page links to some stuff, such as Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Paid editing What fun? Great comment from Thekohser there, and some really rich comments from some, the usual Wikipedia hostile lunacy. I prefer crazy friends who are nice. I loved this from Greg:

My response to Johnuniq would be, "So, Wikipedia should damage the "sum of all human knowledge" in order to punish someone? What sort of process would make this determination? Of course, no policy was accepted. Did he think Wikipedia would have subpoena power?

The really nutty thing here matches my life experience. I've found it far easier to deal with people who were motivated by money than those who were motivated by "doing good." Landlords who thought they were doing my organization a favor were awful, tendentious, and quick to sue and to refuse to negotiate, landlords who were just out for a buck were much saner. People on nonprofit boards would stab each other in the back and lie and cheat much more easily than seems to be the case in most ordinary business, etc. Something about "doing good" makes people crazy.

I've been reviewing certain situations on Wikipedia and found that editors whom I thought were relatively "reasonable," when I looked carefully, were serious POV pushers who took every opportunity to get anyone banned who disagreed with them. The reasonableness was a pretense. I have someone in mind, and he's not being paid. If he were, I doubt that he'd be what he is.

More power to Greg. Reading that RfC, I got the impression of someone who truly understands ethical business, in a modern environment, where being unethical is, long-term, stupid. No wonder he was banned. Unethical is stupid and it seems that stupid may be unethical.

In the land of the unethical, the ethical are outlaws.

Ah! I get it! If I'm doing good, and you oppose me, you must be Bad. Therefore whatever I do to stop you is Good The ends justify the means. The end is Good, i.e., what I do. Go away, you Bad Person.

Take a look at Slide 11 of this research output that was (obviously) intended to be delivered orally by the presenter, Judd Antin. Antin is a research scientist in the Internet Experiences Group at Yahoo! Research.



Where do these crazy notions come from?

That was an older truck driver. Or I'd have said that the ideas come from some kid in a basement somewhere who never worked for a living.

Why in the world would one imagine that someone would pay for a pile of bullshit?

And isn't "putting their heart and soul into it" an indicator of possible bias?

It all depends on what one is being paid for. Anyone being paid to vandalize Wikipedia?

If the payer is a government or large corporation, they might be paid to harass opposing editors.

But if the client is small, paying for a wikiwar would be way expensive. Rather, they will pay for skilled editing, designed to satisfy Wikipedia guidelines, albeit with a possible slant. If they start a war, any slant will get buried in the avalanche. Not what a skilled editor will do.

Wikipedia is full of slant promoted by editors who imagine themselves neutral. To recognize slant is easiest when one has an opposing POV, that's why diversity in editors is so important, and why the failure of Wikipedia to encourage real consensus-formation is so telling.

With all of the grace of a bison in a crystal shop, Jimbo tries to clearly portray how he feels about paid editing. Jimbo even comes down rather firmly against the Campus Ambassadors program, funded by the Wikimedia Foundation via a Stanton grant:



The "community" has begun its familiar process of conveying to Jimbo -- without themselves getting banned for saying so -- that he is mostly an idiot.

Certainly better than being a complete idiot, I assume?

It's been said before and it will be said again: Who cares about paid editing as long as the information is correct and of high quality? Wikipedia is supposedly an "encyclopedia." I want good, current, high quality information from my encyclopedia. Who cares how the sausage is made?

Ingredients:
Mechanically separated paraphrases, filler, UCE, BLP (some content may be verifiable but not factual), stubs, coloring, obsession, paraphilia, cruft, and natural flavors (no more than 2% of: ottava, malleus, giano, high fructose porn syrup). Processed in a facility where nuts may be present.

So what this tells us is that Jimbo pays no attention to what WMF is doing. Anybody here surprised by this?

Not I.

Wanna see a prime chunk of "slant"?

Try Best_of_the_Super_Juniors (T-H-L-K-D). 85k bytes of massive detail and beautiful charts about a Japanese professional wrestling tournament that very few people outside Japan have ever heard of. And proof that young male douchebags edit Wikipedia obsessively. Have a look at one of the guys who did the Super Juniors page.

(I'd say something about the Best Buy article, but that's your problem.)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Jim...days_of_the_web

i don't think was posted here yet (but feel free to delete if it has ...), jimbo posted this to his talk page ...

----

A story from the early days of the web

(This ended up being a bit of a mini-essay, but it's worth being really clear about my position here.)--Jimbo Wales (talk) 11:53, 31 August 2011 (UTC)

This is just a story related to the discussion of paid editing, up above.

In the pre-Google days there was great competition between Yahoo and Altavista and several others. One of the questions out there was the question of algorithmic search versus human curated directories. Algorithmic search won out for the most part, in the long run, but my story is not about that.

Yahoo hired teams of editors to review websites and list them in their directory. I don't remember now exactly how many people this was, but I think it safe to say it was in the hundreds. These editors could find websites any old way, of course, and include whatever in their judgment was worth including, but there was also the possibility of submitting your site to Yahoo.

Yahoo at the time was incredibly powerful and so of course the submission queue was voluminous - to the point that it was nearly useless.

Someone at Yahoo then had the idea of "paid submission". It still exists today. It costs $299 annually(!) for most sites, $600 annually for "adult content and/or services".

Yahoo insisted that paying for expedited review of your website was not a compromise on the editorial neutrality of the directory. But the public perception was very strongly negative.

Once they took that step, the obvious incentive structure means that it's in Yahoo's interest to give a favorable review. Let's say I have a movie website, and I pay to get one page of it reviewed by Yahoo. If that page is rejected, I won't submit again. If my page about Clint Eastwood is accepted, and the amount of traffic I receive is worth it, I'll pay again and again. Maybe I'll submit 1000 pages, and pay $300,000. That's real money.

Acceptance of a really crappy page might be bad for Yahoo, of course, but notice that the cost/benefit analysis has shifted for Yahoo. They have a strong financial incentive to list my site as long as I don't do more than $300,000 per year in damage to the Yahoo brand.

Yahoo liked to insist that this wouldn't happen, but the public trust in Yahoo was diminished. Today, of course, Yahoo is no longer regarded as a dominant leader, and I think that shortsighted moves like this are a big part of the reason why. (That algorithmic search turned out to be the right answer in most cases is of course also a part of it.)

If you want to buy Google today, well the total market value of the stock is 174 billion. Yahoo, one tenth of that at 17.4 billion.

Now let's apply this line of thought to newspapers. We all know that newspapers make money from advertising, and that quality newspapers do take steps to isolate the editorial department from the advertising department. It's not perfect, but the system does mostly work.

Now imagine that the New York Times announced a program. For a $10,000 fee, you can pay them to send around a reporter to write a story about you. Imagine that it is claimed that this is no guarantee of the story actually being published. It still has to go through the normal processes and procedures, it is said. How would that impact the credibility of the newspaper?

My view is that it would be incredibly destructive. As per what I outlined above, simple financial incentives suggest that large companies would give it a try a few times, and if it resulted in favorable coverage they wouldn't have gotten, they'd do it again and again. And if it was a waste of money, they wouldn't do it again.

With advertising we worry about the indirect influence of the money on the editorial staff. That's problematic enough. But when connection between pay and getting coverage is made direct in this fashion - bleh.

Now imagine that you're a member of the general public and you read a story in the newspaper about Wikipedia. Two possible story lines. In one version, it's "Wikipedia announces paid submission program" - in a sudden change of heart and policy, Wikipedia has decided to allow a formal program whereby experienced Wikipedia editors are paid by PR companies to write articles for Wikipedia. Oh no, we insist, nothing changes about our editorial policies, of course not. People would rightly be deeply concerned about that. Suddenly people would read articles in Wikipedia and wonder - how tainted is this by the formal acceptance of Wikipedians being paid to write on behalf of companies? In the other version, it's "Wikipedia reiterates its stance against PR firms editing Wikipedia". The story is that Wikipedia editors have firmly rejected the concept of allowing people to come into Wikipedia as paid advocates to edit articles, due to the wrongness of the financial incentives, and the blurring of the passionate pursuit of the truth that has been a hallmark of the Wikipedia community.

For me, this has been, and continues to be, an absolute principle. Paid advocacy is banned from Wikipedia.

The objections that are often raised are not remotely compelling. Claiming that banning it only pushes it underground doesn't make sense, as there seems to be virtually no evidence for it. Most responsible PR firms understand that editing Wikipedia on behalf of clients is forbidden, and they have rules in place internally to prohibit it. Of course, this is a big place, and everything goes on to some extent - the goal is not to achieve perfection, but to have the right principles in place.

Another response to this objection is that it ignores that PR firms have a perfectly valid way to interact with Wikipedia, well-respected by the community, totally above-board and ethical. And that's to post to the talk page, declaring your conflict of interest, and asking people to take another look at something. That's the ethical approach, and it works. It completely prevents the question of whether or not what ends up in Wikipedia ended up that way because the Wikipedians themselves are corrupt.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 11:52, 31 August 2011 (UTC)

Thank you, Jimbo, for being so completely wrong about multiple claims made in these two paragraphs of yours.

Also, your imaginary story about why Google outperformed Yahoo! is also amusing.

[quote name='thekohser' date='Wed 31st August 2011, 2:23pm' post='283911']
[quote] Also, your imaginary story about why Google outperformed Yahoo! is also amusing.
[/quote]

yeah, he wants to think this was important but that's just silly. i vaguely remember yahoo deciding to charge for submissions, but what drove people to google was that its product was so much better than altavista, etc. in finding what you wanted. yahoo's directory was already crap by 1996.

i guess jimbo's calculation is that it is better to ignore evidence of paid editing, because him saying there is "virtually no evidence of it" is all 99& of reporters need.

Jimbo happens to mention the New York Times' own Wikipedia-suck-up, Noam Cohen here.

The thing is, when Noam Cohen publishes something in the New York Times, that's it. It's not open to "community" revision the way a Wikipedia article is.

So, when Jimbo is ranting about how awful it would be if paid editors started manipulating the content on Wikipedia on behalf of a specific client, he fails to remember that other paid editors (perhaps for the labor union fighting that client, or a non-profit cause that works against the client's track record) are also at liberty to go and "undo" all of the first paid editor's work.

He just doesn't grasp that Wikipedia is awful, regardless of his stance on paid editing, because whether you "ban" it or not, it's always going to be there. He is so dumb.

ArbCom twit, Coren, also shows his profound lack of clue:



Most of my customers ask for exactly this -- an encyclopedia article that is appropriate for Wikipedia, faults and all.

What is it with Coren and Jimbo and other Wikipediots who think that every notable person, company, organization, or activity has this horrifying laundry list of "unflattering" skeletons in the closet, just waiting to be "outed" on Wikipedia?

Oh, wait. Never mind.

Well, you know what to do.

Take 100 WP articles about companies, using the RANDOM button.
Read them, and tote up the sentences that appear to be "neutral", the
ones that appear to be company-generated puffery, and the sentences
that appear to be hostile or defamatory.
Make a pretty color pie chart of the percentages and show it to us.

(It will take a while. Because the percentage of company profiles in
Wikipedia's database is only 1%. There's far more about cartoons
than about the business world. Sorry.)

Eric, I will actually do that (or some reasonable facsimile, such as checking every 5th sentence of each article, as that would be less time-consuming), if someone will have the courage to ask something of Jimbo on his talk page in the next 24 hours...

It appears to me that the big hub-bub about this centers on the word "advocacy". Even Jimbo seems to be saying it's okay to receive compensation or academic credit if your mission is to edit Wikipedia in a neutral way about subjects that do not inherently benefit those doing the compensating. But, it does suddenly become a problem if the editing takes the form of advocacy.

So, the simple question is...

"Jimbo, what is Wikipedia's stance on advocacy editing of the wholly unpaid and uncompensated variety? If advocacy editing of any variety is not tolerated on Wikipedia, then this notion of 'paid' advocacy being wrong is rather redundant."

Once that question's been posted to Jimbo from an established, long-term WP editor account in good standing, I'll get started on the business article analysis. My work will take many hours to complete. Posting the question to Jimbo would take about 3 minutes.

I'd post that from my old account, but they will probably revert it and ban me, since I'm a "critic" and a "troublemaker". How to proceed. Hm.

Advocacy editing is essential to Wikipedia's ongoing survival, so I don't imagine you'll see Jimbo come out against it. Jimbo's policy is, of course, stupid and incoherent, but there's barely any point in observing that because the Wikifaithful will simply ignore anyone who says that. It's simply not permitted to notice that the emperor is naked.

Greg's problem seems to be one that we Fed contractors have to put up with There you go talking logically again.

I particularly like Greg's explanation on Slashdot a couple of years ago

Sounds like a clear case of Don't Ask, Don't Tell

Is it OK if you're Rachel Marsden?

Paid editing is a problem for Wikipedia because the concept offends the emotional self-justification of the loyal unwashed (literally) peons who slave away in their parents' basements writing in the obscure Sanskrit of Wiki-markup furiously, without pause, and without compensation. The idea that editing Wikipedia could result in getting any sort of benefit to one's life and livelihood independent of the Wikipedia circle-jerk threatens the very premise of the website. To become an "anyone" that "can edit", it is required that one join the cult completely and without reservation instead of having any of the more normal vetting processes (based on education, intelligence, maturity, and professionalism) that exist in more sanely-constructed institutions dedicated to promulgating knowledge. Additionally, those sanely-constructed institutions have all adopted compensatory schemes and quality-controls well beyond whatever slapdash communitarian and administrative blundering passes for such in the labyrinthine metapages of Wikipedia "discussions". To even admit that people are being legitimately compensated to edit Wikipedia threatens Wikipedia itself.

Wikis as technology work when they are used by an already-established community. When they are used by just "anyone" on the internet, you end up inventing the "Wikipedia community" along with the hellscape that characterizes it.

There is much truth in this, but maybe it goes a little too far. There are precedents for substantial volunteer, unpaid and unsolicited contributions to serious works of reference. The first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary was mostly produced by members of the public. One of the major contributors, W. C. Minor, was in a lunatic asylum for murder. Even worse, itturned out that he was an American! When the Concise Oxford Dictionary was published, the editors received a stream of unsolicited comments that led to major improvements in later editions.

Of course, in both cases the contributions were filtered through the editors, not added instantaneously to an online file. Still, if you had proper revision procedures on WP (a huge if) and good people to implement them (an even vaster if), you could use volunteer, unpaid and unsolicited contributions effectively.

The way to allow for the unwashed to give contributions to a serious reference work is to wash their contributions. How many submissions to the Oxford English Dictionary were simply tossed aside because they were not worth including? The ex post facto "review" processes that are in various states of existing on Wikipedia are simply unable to handle the sheer amount of refuse that ends up on that website. And the false senses of entitlement and stewardship stoking the egos of the exploited laborers grow and grow. And the world turns.

Don't hold your breath for Wikipedia to hire an editorial board or get content experts on retainer.