Reaching six million articles is great, but we need a moratorium

From the editor

Reaching six million articles is great, but we need a moratorium

Wikipedians should be proud of all our achievements

Wikipedia is the jewel of the internet. We're an educational website, an encyclopedia, designed to be free of advertisements and commercial influence, trying to provide every single person on the planet free access to the sum of all human knowledge. We should celebrate all of our achievements. The English language Wikipedia marked the creation of its six millionth article this week (see News and notes, Community view and Humour) and its 19th birthday this month. Wiki Loves Monuments has announced the winners of one of the world's largest photo competitions (see Gallery). My personal favorite achievement this month is the 15th anniversary of this newspaper, The Signpost.

But we need to stop the spam immediately

Commercial organizations and their undeclared paid editors are overrunning Wikipedia, using our educational content as camouflage for their hidden advertisements. The Wikimedia Foundation seems unable to do anything about it. It's time for the community to take action to protect our encyclopedia. Among other actions we can take is a moratorium on all new articles about businesses until the WMF takes action against the most notorious spammer, Status Labs, or until we can remove all the spam that is most dangerous to our readers.

Unequal financial power

The WMF has a difficult job. It supports the servers that provide over a billion people a month with immediate access to the encyclopedia, maintains and upgrades the software, and provides grants to editors' projects throughout the world. Their budget is about $100 million per year.

Taken together, the hundreds or thousands of businesses who commercially insert advertisements into the encyclopedia likely bring in many times that amount. Just one of the more notorious companies, Wiki-PR – now known as Status Labs – declared operating revenues of over $7 million for 2017, had 200 active clients in August 2018,^[1] and currently employs 48 staff members[1]. In 2014 CNBC reported that Status Labs was apparently a "small shop" and that one of CNBC's freelancers was solicited by email for payment by Status Labs to slip "a client's name into copy."^[2] If Status Labs will spam a large national cable news organization, they'll likely spam anywhere they think they can get away with.

Its clients pay high fees for their services. "Fees for reputation management can range from a few thousand dollars a year to hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, depending on the clients and his or her needs," according to Status Lab CEO Darius Fisher.^[3] One of their clients, Jacob Gottlieb, was interviewed by The Wall Street Journal during a recent investigation, and said he paid $4,000 to $5,000 per month.^[4]

Status Labs was contacted for comment for this article but did not respond before publication.

A long-term problem

You'd think they would have gotten the message

Darius Fisher's firm Status Labs, the successor firm of Wiki-PR, has continued editing for six years after they were all banned by the Wikipedia community. The Wall Street Journal published an in-depth investigation of Status Labs activities and documented their Wikipedia editing in the December 13, 2019 article titled "How the 1% Scrubs Its Image Online".^[4]

The WSJ documented Status Labs "reputation management" for five firms and individuals including Jacob Gottlieb, former owner of the defunct hedge fund Visium Asset Management, billionaire Kenneth C. Griffin, owner of Citadel LLC, Omeed Malik, Betsy DeVos – before she became U.S. Secretary of Education, and Theranos, a failed blood testing company, whose former CEO is now facing criminal charges.

Citadel LLC admitted Griffin's use of Status Labs to edit Wikipedia, according to the WSJ. Gottlieb and Theranos were directly tied by the WSJ to Wikipedia edits by banned sock puppet jppcap. DeVos's link to Wikipedia was not made explicit. Malik can be tied to editor Stevey7788 who was banned for "excessive involvement in reviewing articles created by" sock puppets. Stevey7788 reviewed the Malik article at WP:Articles for Creation and promoted it to article space. The article was later trimmed and redirected, apparently as part of an investigation by Wikipedia editors requested by the WMF.

An investigation by The Signpost, focusing on the accusations against Theranos, detailed the extensive editing by jppcap to that article.

Other than the redirected article, The Signpost could find no evidence that an investigation by Wikipedia editors had taken place before the WSJ article was published.

WMF response

When contacted by The Signpost this month, the WMF said they would continue to monitor the situation but that they were not planning on taking any action against Status Labs at this time. They received an inquiry from The Wall Street Journal reporter in October and sent that information to the community per the Paid editing policy.

All the information they got from the WSJ reporter was sent to volunteers as soon as they received it. The information was sent to the Arbitration Committee, the OTRS mailing list for monitoring paid editing (paid-en-wpwikipedia.org), and the volunteers who were speaking with the WSJ. In January they also provided it, when requested, to The Signpost.

This information provided to The Signpost on this particular matter is very short, 120 words long. Two arbitrators contacted by The Signpost did not remember receiving the information. When contacted at short notice, paid-en-wpwikipedia.org did not respond. Only one of the other volunteers who was sent the information could be identified by The Signpost, and she has not replied to an email request for comment.

The WMF does not expect to issue a report on the investigation.

Any community members who have information on this investigation are requested to contact The Signpost, or include the information in the Comments section below.

The WMF position is that they will only take action, based on requests made by the English Wikipedia community through its usual governing processes.

Proposed moratorium

Please understand that The Signpost is not accusing the WMF or any Wikipedia editor of intentional wrongdoing, but the current systems used to protect the encyclopedia against abusive undeclared paid editors clearly are not working.

Since Wikipedia volunteers are now overwhelmed with advertisements masquerading as encyclopedia articles, and since the WMF seems to be unable to take any action against even the most obvious purveyor of this dangerous material, the responsible path open to Wikipedia editors is to just stop publishing all new articles about businesses.

Make no mistake about it, Wikipedia's business articles are dangerous to the finances of any reader who might be persuaded to invest based on articles written by scam artists like binary options companies or some cryptocurrency companies. Our articles are dangerous to investors who might be persuaded by the unethical executives of companies like Theranos who used Status Labs to manipulate the article on the company. Since Theranos was a medical testing company, the paid edits by Status Labs might have even turned out to be dangerous to people's health. In an everyday sense, our articles are dangerous to readers who might base even a simple decision on article content.

If the WMF does not take swift action to protect Wikipedia from already banned firms like Status Labs, nobody should trust any business article on Wikipedia. I wouldn't base any decision – not even a $3 purchase of canned meat – on a Wikipedia business article. Rather than trust any business article, it would be better to delete them all. But we don't need to go quite that far, I propose that we place a moratorium on all new business-related articles until we have time to clean up the mess we already have.

Formally, a moratorium requires a request for comment that may take a month or more to complete. In the meantime there are actions that any editor can take. Don't promote abusive business articles from Articles for Creation. If you see a new business article, you can remove all of the promotional material, even if that is the entire content of the article. Taking the article to WP:Articles for deletion is the more common practice. And here are 24,164 old articles you can start with right now.

References

^ Rogers, Patricia (August 2018). "The List: Austin-area public relation firms". Austin Business Journal. Retrieved 25 January 2020.
^ Wastler, Allen (September 11, 2014). "PR pitch: We'll pay you to mention our clients". CNBC. Retrieved 25 January 2020.
^ Chambers, Jennifer (June 9, 2018). "Utica school district taps tax funds to manage online reputation". Detroit News. Retrieved 25 January 2020.
^ ^a ^b Levy, Rachael (December 13, 2019). "How the 1% Scrubs Its Image Online". The Wall Street Journal. Retrieved January 25, 2020. (pay wall)

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In this issue

27 January 2020 (all comments)

From the editor

Discuss this story

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I oppose a moratorium on all new articles about businesses. I am an editor who has written several articles about notable businesses without having any conflict of interest other than being an occasional customer of those businesses. This is an encyclopedia with six million articles and we should be improving rather than curtailing our neutral coverage of notable businesses. I am all in favor of monitoring disclosed paid editors, blocking undisclosed paid editors, deleting spam and promotional content, and enforcing NPOV. But for Smallbones or anyone else to tell me that I am not allowed to write a neutral well-referenced article about a notable business is not acceptable to me in any way, shape or form. Cullen³²⁸ Let's discuss it 02:20, 27 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
- Cullen - I don't like a moratorium either - but what's the alternative? We have banned Wiki-PR for 6 years and nothing has been done. Nobody will enforce the community's ban on the very worst offender. Nobody really even tells us how they decided not to do anything. Well the WMF said nobody of the community members that they informed asked them to do anything, but it's real hard to even find out who those people are. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 03:01, 27 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  - The alternative is no moratorium, plain and simple. Cullen³²⁸ Let's discuss it 03:03, 27 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
    - Status (Labs) quo? Smallbones_(smalltalk) 03:14, 27 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
      - In the 2-1/2 years that I have been an administrator, I have blocked over 1000 spammers and deleted over 1000 promotional articles and drafts. I am doing my part, every single day. Some administators do much more, because I am a very slow and careful worker. Cullen³²⁸ Let's discuss it 08:19, 27 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Without supporting or opposing any particular action, less extreme alternatives would include things like limiting creation to extended-confirmed editors, or to those with a specific user right such as 'autopatrolled'. Sunrise (talk) 16:37, 27 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

I also oppose a total moratorium, but I understand the frustration with the crapflood of spam and puff. However, I did notice this portion: The WMF position is that they will only take action, based on requests made by the English Wikipedia community through its usual governing processes. How about we start an RfC to ask them to take action? Doesn't need to be complex, just "This group is banned by our community; they're openly defying the ban and have said as much in the media, please get Legal or whoever else is needed after them." At that point, they'll no longer have a "Well, nobody asked us to do anything" excuse. Seraphimblade ^{Talk to me} 02:30, 27 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
- @Seraphimblade: ~~please do start such an RFC.~~ The Legal department is willing and able to hold panels for Google to explain how the problems with news organizations' ad revenue is not their fault, without proposing any solutions but apparently they need us to jump through that hoop to enforce the Terms of Use that hurt us the most from their inaction. ~~Please ping me when the RFC is ready.~~ EllenCT (talk) 02:48, 27 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  - RFC Created: Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)#WMF Legal should enforce the Terms of Use against Status Labs to the fullest extent of the law. EllenCT (talk) 07:32, 27 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
- I'd like to see such an RfC as well, but suspect we'll need to do a lot more. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 03:03, 27 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  - @Smallbones: which WMF official said they would only take action based on requests made through usual governing processes? EllenCT (talk) 04:28, 27 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
    - I generally do not deal directly with the top tier folks, though it has happened, see e.g. my interview with K. Maher in May(?). I appreciate the work that the folks I deal with at the WMF do, and I think they are good people trying their best to do their job, though the organization may be a bit crazy at times. In short, I really can't say. The flip side of this is that I would never ambush these folks. They had a pretty good idea what this column was going to be about, and I'm pretty sure their bosses did as well. I was getting the straight "organizational line." Smallbones_(smalltalk) 05:16, 27 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
      - @Smallbones: understood, if they might not have thought that they were speaking for attribution, sure. But if you think it's an authoritative statement, why do you suspect we will need to do a lot more, and, do what more? EllenCT (talk) 07:07, 27 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
        Thanks for creating the RfC and I'll note that the !votes are now 19-0 in favor. Someone said "keep it open for a month" so that a larger number of votes can accrue, but I'll suggest, for the sake of time, to snow close it at 100-0.
        
        Actually, there shouldn't be any doubt whether the WMF was speaking for attribution. I just don't like putting the spotlight on individuals whose name wouldn't be recognized by many people, nor do I think that parsing out the supposed exact meaning of the words usually helps. But I'm sure I could find five more WMF attributable quotes from at least 2 people saying essentially this " From our perspective, we are doing everything within existing processes developed by the community regarding paid editing." Smallbones_(smalltalk) 15:55, 27 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
        I think we should leave the RfC open for a fixed period -- say 3 days, or maybe even as long as a week -- to allow everyone who might be interested to take a stand. Especially since at the rate people have been signing it may receive 100 votes within a few hours, & leaving it open for 3 days might attract many hundreds of votes. -- llywrch (talk) 21:24, 27 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
- While I commend the WMF for deferring to community processes on this... If anyone is to start an RfC, I recommend writing it up as a group, for, shall we say, safety reasons. --Yair rand (talk) 05:55, 27 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  - If Seraphimblade doesn't want to, I don't mind. EllenCT (talk) 07:07, 27 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
    - Why are you striking things out? I'm not scared of the big bad WMF; I've disagreed with them on plenty of occasions. I think they're wrong on some things, but they've hardly kicked me off for it. I wouldn't ask anyone to do something I wouldn't do myself. And while I've disagreed with WMF on more than one occasion, I hardly think they're petty tyrants bent on revenge. They've screwed up on some occasions, but they do want the Wikimedia projects to succeed. Seraphimblade ^{Talk to me} 09:50, 27 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
      - I only meant to indicate that I had gone ahead with the request I had earlier asked of you. EllenCT (talk) 15:58, 27 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
One thing we could do, short of a moratorium, is introduce higher sourcing requirements for businesses. For example, all articles about businesses would need multiple high-quality independent sources covering a period of at least one year (for the sake of argument); lower quality sources would not be included at all; and "me too" sources that were clearly the result of press releases would count as one source only. SarahSV ^(talk) 02:39, 27 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
- that's the obvious answer. WP:NCORP specifically says independent sourcing, not barely-rechurned press releases, etc. The trouble is that it's too subjective to enforce collectively. The sourcing practices on cryptocurrency articles work well there, and might be usable if we can get the editors to collectively enforce something like that - David Gerard (talk) 10:46, 27 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
(edit conflict) Although I can't support a total moratorium, I understand the reasoning behind it. More articles don't necessarily make a better encyclopedia. Miniapolis 02:43, 27 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
It seems to me that if the WMF were to ban Status, then breach of this ban would infringe the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. All the best: Rich Farmbrough (the apparently calm and reasonable) 03:02, 27 January 2020 (UTC).[reply]
- They already have, and it already does, but WMF Legal isn't willing to enforce it unless we make a request by our "usual governing processes." EllenCT (talk) 03:06, 27 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
- (ec)Both the community and the WMF have banned Status Labs, the cease-and-desist order says it all and it just repeats the community ban. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 03:11, 27 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  - Sadly, though—in a view I express solely on the basis of personal anecdotal evidence at this time, but it's legit personally experienced professional anecdotal evidence—it would be a tough job to convince a currently sitting federal judge to allow a CFAA claim past the motion-to-dismiss stage based on a unilateral cease-and-desist order with respect to terms-of-use violations like this that don't involve stealing financial information, personal medical information, trade secrets, or something equally objectionable. I kinda-sorta do this stuff for a living IRL (and won't self-out any further) and these are crazy hard claims to move past the initial procedural-roadblock stage if no one has literally/tangibly/demonstrably/understandably suffered monetary damages. This stinks but federal judges tend to be way overworked and more inclined to pay attention to their criminal dockets than their civil ones, and it would take a really vibrant advocate in front of a really tech-savvy (and probably young) judge to be able to move forward with this. Long story short: We, as community members, are in the best position to make these buzzword-vocabularied spammers take their "bold solutions" else-the-heck-where. - Julietdeltalima (talk) 22:09, 12 February 2020 (UTC)[reply]
I am also opposed to an outright moratorium. However, I do concur that this is a serious problem. I have long supported a no exceptions ban on paid editing. In the case of business related articles perhaps we might consider posting some sort of disclaimer or notice near the top of the page alerting readers that although the practice is prohibited, it is known that some articles dealing with business and finance are edited by parties attempting to slant the presentation of the subject, or words to that effect. -Ad Orientem (talk) 03:09, 27 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Ad Orientem, the other positive point to a flat out ban on paid editing is that, if we had such a rule, organizations like Upwork have already told us that they would remove requests for Wikipedia writing since they won't accept requests which if fulfilled would breach another site's terms of use. Seraphimblade ^{Talk to me} 03:38, 27 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Ought the rules be similar to WP:BLP? Jim.henderson (talk) 03:34, 27 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
- I think there is merit in tightening the sourcing requirements for articles about existing businesses, making that similar to the policy for living persons: "All quotations and any material challenged or likely to be challenged must be supported by an inline citation to a reliable, published source. Contentious material about [existing businesses] that is unsourced or poorly sourced — whether the material is negative, positive, neutral, or just questionable — should be removed immediately and without waiting for discussion." -- John Broughton (♫♫) 03:47, 27 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Support the moratorium on the grounds that, although its damaging to the project to stop making articles about businesses, its more damaging to have the current situation. Pissed that the Foundation won't do anything, since an RfC has no real chance of a supermajority (the Foundation knows this), because:

Lot of people don't care, and since they don't care are inclined to be against something drasic like this
Lot of people are of the mind "the solution is for editors to roll back individual bad edits, not to make blanket judgements; judge the edit, not the editor" which of course is naive
This project attracts libertarians to a certain extent, and libertarians are of the mind that anything a business organization does (including this sort of thing) is both their right and usually a net benefit to society, overall
There are probably plenty, or anyway some, accounts that are run by the spammers just for voting against solutions like this

But, you never know until you try. Herostratus (talk) 04:09, 27 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

I never understood to desire to have a Wikipedia article. Anyone can add controversial or negative sources that might otherwise be less visible (eg. Europe Business Assembly). See also this study:

"Crowd Governance", a study finds that after the creation of a Wikipedia article about a publicly traded company, its stock price drops. Apparently, insiders and institutional investors see an article (ie. transparency) as signifying they no longer have an edge on investing information.

Wikipedia can actually harm the prospects of businesses and people. We need to do more to protect living businesses and people from unethical sharks who charge money to create an article without their understanding the risks. We need a general purpose living people/entity policy, beyond BLP, something like a LE (Live Entity) policy. -- GreenC 05:37, 27 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

The enhanced sourcing requirements of BLP has not stopped spam about businesspeople, thought leaders, motivational speakers, etc - which is the second biggest category of spammed subjects. There's also a problem with enforcement - what good is a rule when there aren't enough editors with the patience to enforce it? MER-C 08:03, 27 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
I would support a moratorium for new users. And by "new", I mean users with less than 1000 edits and a year of experience. There have to be clear-cut rules to combat this spam avalanche. Individual investigations and case-by-case scenarios are not working. Renata (talk) 09:32, 27 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Hear, hear. Just go to any random stub category about businesses, a good chunk of the entries are WP:CORPSPAM. Of course, moratorium won't fly, but we need more people policing this type of content. --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 09:36, 27 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Let's have a bit more clarity here. I start plenty of new pages on historic businesses, and there is no reason for special measures to be taken here. So we are talking about existent businesses. I agree that it needs more people policing the area. I do a bit when I come across it because it really pisses me off. I also do my bit about corporate Wikipedia:Presentism, e.g. when a historically notable building or district is overly presented in terms of its contemporary corporate image and thus obscuring a more important historical narrative.Leutha (talk) 09:55, 27 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
I'd Oppose any moratorium - we'd be hitting a significant number of editors writing excellent articles and wilfully adding a hole into the encyclopedia. More pragmatically, it would just cause the PR companies to focus on corrupting current business articles, while we wouldn't have any guarantee that genuine editors, deprived of their focus, would shift to counter it. There are absolutely some possible routes, all still very controversial: creation of a business article (not NORG) could be limited to EC editors. Creating EC socks for UPE...individuals... takes much longer. Alternatively, some form of BLP-equivalent is possible "corporate inline sourcing" (CIS), however that would be a staggering task to handle - we'd be overwhelmed. Perhaps require for new articles as a trial, and slowly roll backwards if it works? A sourcing increase short of CIS is one possibility. I specifically refute expansion of DS/GS to cover the whole area. Nosebagbear (talk) 11:04, 27 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
- Restricting business article creation to extended-confirmed users sounds very promising. – Teratix ₵ 12:54, 27 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Question I generally oppose any proposals to create new policy, as I believe the Wiki already resembles Nomic far too much. But in this case, I see a proposal without any backing by metrics. I read new wiki articles every day. When I have free time, I use the "Random Article" button on my mobile. I've read hundreds of articles since the start of the year and not one of them was corpspam. That may be because of the superhuman efforts of the admins, or maybe its just not the problem that is being claimed? Can anyone say, for instance, for every 1000 new articles, how many call into this category? Maury Markowitz (talk)
- Very, very rough calculation: ~6,000,000 (articles) ÷ ~24,000 (in Category:Articles with a promotional tone) = 250. 1 in 250 is promotional = 4 in 1000. A substantial amount of articles may be untagged, but this will be offset a bit by articles in the promotional cat not covering businesses. The proportion of spammy articles may also be higher for new articles (and the calculation overlooks articles that are quickly deleted without being tagged). So, on the whole, the ratio is probably a tad higher. For reference, in the same sample of articles you could expect to encounter around one FA and five GAs. – Teratix ₵ 13:06, 27 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Useful. I change question to oppose then. I would consider extended-confirmed, but it seems that simply moves the administration load from one place to another, I question whether this would change anything. Maury Markowitz (talk) 13:59, 27 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

I've said my peace about how we can't any longer assume good faith in the face of constant spam; see Wikipedia_talk:Assume_good_faith#When_everybody_knows,_and_it_puts_us_at_risk,_can_we_still_assume_good_faith?. Bearian (talk) 14:27, 27 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
I don't know what the hell is going on here why is everybody so mad -Gouleg (Talk • Contribs) 15:00, 27 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
@Gouleg: Agreed. –MJL ‐Talk‐^☖ 17:34, 28 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Today, an article about one of the BBC's 100 Women was deleted. The subject is the executive director of an NGO – Divers Clean Action – which is helping to clean the ocean of plastic waste. Is that the sort of company you want to suppress? If you want to read that article, you'll now have to go to one of Wikipedia's mirrors such as this. This and other cases such as this show that our deletion processes are out of control. I can give lots more examples and they indicate that we need a moratorium on deletions not creations. If all such content is driven elsewhere then this is an existential threat to the project as search engines will always take people to where the content is, not where it isn't. If there's a disreputable company doing bad things then it is better that we cover it in an impartial way rather than readers having to go to a churnalist site or the company's own website. Andrew🐉(talk) 15:14, 27 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
This is well written and merits consideration. Paid editing is a major time sink and distraction for Wikipedia community volunteer engagement, labor, attention, and brain cycles. I have an essay at Wikipedia:Measuring conflict of interest editing on Wikipedia calling for a conversation on the cost to volunteers of dealing with this low quality, low traffic, low impact content which is outside the scope of what volunteers want to support and what readers want to consume. I feel like a discussion on a moratorium should start with some consensus on the the cost of accepting this content. Paid editing is not something that we get for free, but something into which we invest our scarce money and labor. Corporations take undue advantage of this system which we designed for public benefit and general education. There is corporate exploitation here of Wikipedia, and if we had a conversation to determine how much we spend in this sector and compare that to our choices on other investments, then we could have a more informed conversation on how to respond to this exceptionally costly content. Blue Rasberry (talk) 15:58, 27 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
A moratorium won't solve the problem, it will just move the paid editors onto biographies of company employees or onto twisting the existing articles of rivals to make the new company seem more favourable. Perhaps we need a business equivalent of WP:BLP. From Hill To Shore (talk) 16:25, 27 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
If the Foundation is willing to take action on our say-so, it makes a lot of sense to ask. I don't see the connection to any moratorium. I do worry that on-wiki anti-spam activities drive away good possible editors interested in areas where spam is a problem more than the effectively control spamming. Wily D 17:20, 27 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
The Foundation needs to file a lawsuit. These companies are illegally profiting off of Wikipedia when they violate our ToS. These are literally fraudulent activities conducted to turn a profit. The WMF has every right to sue because that's the only way this type of editing will stop; when there are real monetary penalties to what they're doing. Admittedly this goes against the spirit of the WP:NOLEGALTHREATS policy but in this case these people are no longer editors; they have been permanently banned. They are now vandals actively harming Wikipedia for pay. Grognard Extraordinaire Chess (talk) Ping when replying 19:09, 27 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Restrict article creation to extended confirmed editors forcing new articles to go through AfC before they show up in search results. This would get rid of the worst of the spam that I see at NPP while allowing good faith contributors to keep up what they're doing. b uidhe 19:41, 27 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
When it comes to articles on businesses, the community could probably take a leaf out of the medicine WikiProject's books, specifically the WP:MEDRS guideline, which defines which sources are acceptable for medical articles. The obvious goal being to ensure that only accepted scientific information is presented, rather than quack doctors, tabloid (and other media) sensationalism, one-off studies, unproven herbal remedies, or other dubious content which could cause genuine harm to the public if taken as medically accurate. And by and large the guideline works, enforced with zeal by the regulars in that project. Our medical coverage is good and accurate. When it comes to businesses, particularly those that the public might trust with their money or security, we want to similarly present only mainstream accepted information, free from biased coverage, either pro or anti. Of course, even as I write this I realise that the body of research and sourcing on financial topics probably lacks the academic rigour and depth of the medical pantheon. But I'll hit save anyway, as there may be some mileage in tightening sourcing rules on a topic specific basis (and this would be preferable to outlawing new business articles altogether, which just creates an artificial boundary between the crappy content already here and possibly good content that may be written in future ) — Amakuru (talk) 19:44, 27 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
- WP:NCORP makes much more sense when you read it as a list of particular spammy nonsense that Wikipedia spammers have tried previously. These spammers are determined and persistent - David Gerard (talk) 20:22, 27 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
One more thing - if we can't deal with the typical Upwork freelance spam, which we can't already and is one level down in sophistication than Status Labs, then our chances of deterring state sponsored disinformation are precisely zero. MER-C 21:05, 27 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Well said, Smallbones. I wonder how the German WP is going with its different approach. I recall that they've historically allowed companies to register a transparent username to edit their own articles. Does that system still protect us from the commercial leaches? Tony (talk) 06:18, 28 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Support. This is a microcosm of democracy and its Achilles heel. Openness and transparency will inevitably be abused by those with the time and money to do so. Idealism becomes self-defeating, because to fight the problem we need resources we just do not have. The pragmatic solution is therefore to retrench. No shame at all in that. On the contrary. Rollo (talk) 07:18, 28 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
We are far too tolerant of dubious sources in business articles. I'm fairly certain that a number of supposedly reliable sources take payments to publish content from PR agencies. When an article about a company based in Dubai is nominated for deletion on 19 January 2020‎, an Indian newspaper has an article about them on January 27, 2020 5:28 pm (local time, 11:58 UTC). An IP then posts that as a source barely 6 hours later, 17:50 (UTC) But we still consider The Statesman (India) a reliable source. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Vexations (talk • contribs) 13:00, 28 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
We should have a much, much higher bar for inclusion. In general, but more so for for-profit organizations, and people. - Nabla (talk) 18:02, 28 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Our problem of promotionalism has not been much with the mighty. The likes of General Motors and Samsung, and their top officers, are clearly notable and carefully watched. Same goes for stars of show business. They have little need for paid promotion and little chance of success with it. The big problem we've been having is with the little ones, the marginal artists, actors, politicians, corporate promoters and such who want to climb to the other side of the margin of name recognition. For those, the risk of bad publicity is minor; they have no reputation to lose and much to gain. A moratorium on new BLP, new corporate articles, new medical procedures would be rather a blunt instrument, depriving us of genuine contributions. Better to apply the principles that propel the existing biographical and medical rules. Jim.henderson (talk) 18:28, 28 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Non-random break

Hooray for the 15th anniversary of this newspaper, The Signpost, which is indeed the achievement of the month! It is not at all to be taken for granted that this valuable internal service has been continued at that high quality standards for all these years. Thank you to the editoring team! - And I do appreciate the critical edge of the editor's campaign against biz spammers and WMF staff members who wash their hands in the manner of Pontius Pilate. We need debates like that again and again. -- Just N. (talk) 22:56, 28 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
- @Justus Nussbaum: On behalf of all Signpost writers, thanks! It is always nice to get a birthday card. This was quite an important issue for us: 6,000,000; WLM; top 50 articles of 2019; ... We got so busy we didn't have time to write up anything for our anniversary, though we did reprint the 10th anniversary article - a history of The Signpost I promise we'll fill in the next 5 years in the next issue. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 02:51, 29 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Paid editing is not and never has been a problem. Content in violation of the core pillars of Wikipedia is a big problem, and yes, money can motivate people to edit in their bias, but it's not the only motivator. I have absolutely gutted a lot of one-sided business articles that I'm sure the creator was not paid to write, and I know there is similar cruft in many other areas, like gaming and fan spaces. I don't find it difficult to identify when the writing isn't from a neutral point of view, or the sources are neither reliable nor verifiable. I don't give a rat's patootie why bad articles exist; I try to improve them, and occasionally recommend their deletion. Rather than wringing hands over how to identify and thwart motives (which is not only difficult, but downright Orwellian), the focus should be on editor recruitment. Consensus breeds bureaucracy, which continues to become a larger and more imposing barrier to editing the encyclopedia that anyone can edit. Focus on problems that can be fixed.~T P W 03:06, 30 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

A moratorium is indeed a bad idea. To my opinion, it would be sufficient when admins respond far better on AfDs for spam. Now it is too often that you get a response like "the problem can be solved by normal editing" while that is not the case. In most cases - in my experience - the ones making that claim never alter a letter to make an article less spammy. Effectively, that approach is protecting the spam and spammer. So what I advocate is not a soft approach (fix it though editing), but a hard and sometimes harsh approach towards spam and spammers (blocks, protections, removals). The Banner talk 17:49, 1 February 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Oppose we need to solve this instead with a clamp down on RS. We have unofficially implemented a strict RS only policy for Cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, etc and all others that fall under WP:GS/Crypto and it has worked great. I think if we did this for all articles in the business category, it would also solve the problem. Smallbones (talk · contribs) has been around in the crypto space for some time and has seen that it worked. Thanks Jtbobwaysf (talk) 18:23, 2 February 2020 (UTC)[reply]
- You were one of the editors I was thinking of when I noted that even pro-crypto editors are just sick of the spam. When I explain Wikipedia's practices to outside crypto advocates, I generally include "spammers mean we can't have nice things" - David Gerard (talk) 22:00, 3 February 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Comment This systemic bias is tragedy of the commons, a solution may be internalizing externalities. Alternatively, as volunteer time costs nothing, it may just be comedy of the commons. Plug my essay at WP:BOGOF. Widefox; talk 20:40, 3 February 2020 (UTC)[reply]

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