The Covert World of People Trying to Edit Wikipedia for Pay
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
Articles that are in a niche people care (politically charged subjects) about have pretty strong biases that are impossible to remove because it doesn't matter which side follows the rules or the intended spirit of Wikipedia, all that matters is which side has more people and which side is more vocal. When making community decisions, the number of people voting is all that seems to matter, even if they vote with zero explanation or with an explanation that uses the rules incorrectly.
I gave up after probably 60 hours accumulated editing time, most of it spent not editing but dealing with other users and their bullshit.
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Important: Wikipedia really has become accepted by the establishment. I have seen decision makers, at the table, with Wikipedia open during tumor board. I have seen staff physicians showing patients information and even reading up on side effects and mechanism of action. I have seen a dean ask a presenter to pull up the wikipedia page on a cutting edge test, in the middle of a discussion about whether to bring in said test.
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Usual, unimportant wikipedia banter: I edit almost exclusively in biological sciences and almost never run into edit wars. The one time I did, I tried to start the article on DigitalOcean, and it quickly boiled over into an extremely dissatisfying experience. It makes the DMV look efficient and cordial.
My guess is that it happens when people dive in to fix something that they "know" is wrong, and feel strongly about - and then get upset when it's reverted because they provided no evidence. No one likes rejection, but some take it far too personally.
If your first foray led to escalating to dispute resolution then maybe you don't have the right temperament. Not everyone is well-suited to being an encyclopedia editor, and there's nothing wrong with that. (Pro tip: Post your suggestions/argument in the "Talk" page first).
While the system is easy enough to use, there are also cultural/social/bureaucratic skills to learn.
BTW: The articles on "politically charged subjects" are the result of years of work and are generally pretty OK, if bland. Undoubtedly you could change them in ways you would find more acceptable, but it's unlikely that those of an opposing viewpoint would agree.
I think that it is more interesting that the article suggests that this is (at least partially) the result of an increase in paid editing:
"What changed in his absence, Wood says, is that employees of public-relations firms began to understand the value of a Wikipedia page, and tried going in to make edits themselves, with little regard for the site’s standards. The result was that the burden of proof became even heavier on newcomers, and, Wood says, even valid information was getting rejected out of hand by seasoned editors."
There are examples on probably every page of Wikipedia (ie millions of examples) of well-sourced information that is censored. Biased pages are the standard, not the exception. Editors are routinely harassed on both contentious and non-contentious topics, just ask any woman using the system. I was harassed online and offline for well over a year for trying to add completely factual and well-sourced information to the site. I was targeted by one of the site's most famous admins because I dared challenge one of the many ambiguously worded policies on the site.
During that process I learned a lot about Wikipedia's culture and I realized that on Wikipedia "might is right' and only the most aggressive and fanatical editors survive. If you're not prepared to fight then you won't get anywhere. BTW, any Wikipedia editor knows your suggestion to post suggestions to the talk page is completely useless.
Most people simply don't want the hassle, and to be honest, the fact that new editors are scared off so quickly probably does them a favor. Why waste months trying to get factual information onto the site when faced with a bunch of opponents who will use very wiki rule available to deny you, bend the rules when necessary, and will bully and harass you? It's not worth it. But while that may entrench the power of the people who survive, it's no good for the long term future of the project. So please stop trying to blame the newcomers. Blame the toxic culture and the crap software that it is built upon. Maybe then it can perhaps be fixed.
What could be the replacement? How about Stackoverflow style reputations that one must accumulate overtime and then they translate to privileges. The beauty of Stackoverflow is not its content but this community model they have sharpened to almost perfection. It feels far more scalable than Wikipedia's arcane model of emulating print world editorial team and beautifully takes advantage of gamification combining rewards with career profile.
Why do you say that? I doesn't seem obvious to me. I can imagine an endless stream of non-garbage churning out of the complex world we live in.
What I'm saying is that before you form a knee-jerk rationalization about the reason a downvote happened (because of course I do the same thing), stop and consider that there's at least a 50% chance that your argument is not in fact as airtight as your brain's emotional connection to it, and perhaps you are being downvoted for reasons totally unrelated to what you so hastily ascribe to the anonymous voters.
If I need accurate information from an encylopedia, I now use Britannica.com (Encyopedia Britannica); it's informative, well-regarded, serious, and succinct. Coverage isn't as broad, of course. I'm not sure how the paywall works but a lot of content is free; I don't have a subscription and generally it's not a problem. Highly recommended.
It's convenient and "good enough" for unimportant things is what I'd guess.
A simple example are WP articles about the same topic in different languages, an even more stark contrast is any western encyclopedia compared to one that was created in a socialist country. I still have access to the latter and, especially for historic events, enjoy reading the other side of the story.
What each encyclopedia should do to nurture critical thinking: put "might be wrong" in bold above each article.
And we could get used to not referring to "WP article XYZ", but instead to "WP article XYZ, Version N" because otherwise our references to those articles are absolutely useless for people who want to do serious research.
PS: I think wikimedia is (was?) on the right track by building some kind of "fact engine" where different, even contradicting versions of the same facts could be registered and some algorithm would then determine which would automatically be included in pages as the "most probably correct". (Sorry, I don't have any links to back that up, this is what one of their devs told me about 2 years ago.)
In the Edwardian era in UK, London was dotted with gated enclosures, private gardens solely for the rich - During the Second World War the hates were torn down for their metal content, and almost none were replaced, the community gains had been so great. Taxes to pay for the upkeep of the gardens, laws to ensure they could not be re-incorporated.
Somewhere in this is the solution to what Wikipedia has started.
There was an article about ships owned by a major commodities trader dumping poison in the ocean, and they got their PR company to edit the article. I'm quite confident this is actually true because someone (inside) alerted me to the guy's name used to edit Wikipedia, and then showed me the PR company's people page.
Hard to see what can be done about this though. If someone is being paid, they have a lot more time to cleverly word their story. In some cases legitimately, in others not.
First, in most cases PR spin has a "smell". Spotting that in an article an editor may dig into the edit history - where the story will be pretty clear of which links are removed, wording changed etc.
There are about half the editors that there were a few years back, but many will work on a very wide variety of articles, and in many cases spotting and resolving "spin" issues doesn't require special expertise - and just highlighting that spin is going on can be useful in itself.
Pro-tip: When reading anything on Wikipedia it's often useful to check the associated "Talk" page for any ongoing controversy, and the "History" page to see what the article said 6 months ago.
How do you know?
I'm not a pro at Wikipedia but you can see the accusation at the end of the first paragraph here: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Dairy_Queen&diff=...
Which is sourced to: http://www.aurorawdc.com/ci/000185.html
Which sources: http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/chatterbox/2...
Which sourced: http://www.houstonpress.com/news/moovin-on-up-6554495 The link in the Slate article no longer works, this one does.
In essence the controversy was a number of sites working to get some ad dollars. I never bothered to figure out how to fix this, luckily some volunteer did.
Also yes the name Moolatte is not racist.
Sometimes the vigilant editor is the problem, not the solution.
There is something like that: Conservapedia[0]. Reading it is fairly infuriating. Mostly because it is so extremely one sided and trying to argue an agenda in every single article.
I think you mean hilarious
With that example in mind, imagine there being no trusted force for everyone, because every other source could be dismissed as "Conservative brain-washing" or "Anarchist propaganda."
We barely trust our governments and our bosses' bosses. Not all of us live where we can trust our news. I know a lot of us on HN are business- and libertarian-minded, but we should recognize that places on the web like Wikipedia are special, and for all of us.
There is no trusted source for everyone. Anyone with a bias they can't get into Wikipedia is free to spread FUD on the egregious nature of its biases and misinformation.
Assuming that the conventional perspective of white straight males with an interest in sci-fi is neutral. ;)
This means that while anyone can edit an article, almost everyone gets their edits reverted.
In over 10 years of editing, I've never come across an issue that couldn't be solved by one of the above methods. If you think there is some article that is having a problem, please post it.
Their are cabals that require extreme investments to fight. Most people aren't willing to put in that investment. Much the same that many people who face discrimination don't take it to court because they don't have the resources to throw at it and the expected return is too small.
Just because a system exists to resolve issues doesn't mean that everyone has equal access to the issue resolution.
It is already true for Wikipedias in different languages, which are maintained almost like separate websites. I didn't check, but I'm sure that Armenian and Turkish wikipedia don't have the same content on the matter.
https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/files/textbook_vs._...
From the article: "He pulled up the page’s revision history to identify the offending editor. He saw that the section was co-written in 2006 by two users, Rhys and ChyranandChloe, and that it was updated in 2010. He jumped back over to the textbook and saw that it was published in 2011. It turns out Heilman had it backwards: It was someone on Oxford’s side, perhaps Lloyd, who had taken from Wikipedia. (Lloyd did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)"
"The plagiarism was barely concealed. For reasons that remain unclear, some of the original citations from the Wikipedia page dropped out, and were replaced by pointers to other articles—articles that didn’t appear to support the claims made in the text, according to Heilman. In that sense, the Oxford textbook did not simply contain plagiarized text from Wikipedia; it appeared to make it less reliable."
"Christian Purdy, a spokesperson for Oxford University Press, acknowledged that some text was copied, but says this didn’t qualify as plagiarism. Instead, he called it an “inadvertent omission of an appropriate attribution.”"
Yes, there is. You can get uninvolved editors to help by posting on various project boards. You can also get admin intervention, arbitration, etc. There are lots of options if you take the time and effort to look for them.
Most of the conflict of interest cases are simple promotion of a band/company/product/self by one person, usually someone with no other editing interests. Some are detected automatically by programs which check new Wikipedia content against the web for duplicates. Those are checked for notability, and many are deleted because they don't meet Wikipedia's criteria for inclusion. A few years ago, this was mostly a problem with garage bands; now it's a problem with garage startups. Those are easy to deal with.
Then there are subjects where there's unquestioned notability, and the subject of the article is trying to look good. Those usually involve content that reads like a sales brochure. Sometimes it's well-cited, but to weak sources. A typical example involves a company trying to list every flavor in which their product is available. The usual response to this is to delete promotional language and unnecessary product detail. The result can be a cold but well-cited article about the company's financial history. For individuals, resume inflation can be a problem. The requirement for a reliable source usually deals with that. Wikipedia, remember, is about "verifiability, not truth".
Promotional editing can backfire. Badly. When promotional editing is found, standard procedure is to look in Google for other information about the subject. If this turns up clear negative info, it will probably go in the article and stay there. Criminal convictions, regulatory actions, accident reports, investigative reporting, and criticism by consumer groups reported in the mainstream press tends to displace PR-type material. If the person or company has done something really bad, their article is likely to focus on that. This can result in frantic efforts by a company to make the "bad stuff" go away.
I was involved with the "Banc de Binary" mess, where the company was desperately trying to remove their legal problems. (The SEC and CFTC had booted them out of the US for a long list of blatant securities-law violations. Banc de Binary is not a bank, or a broker; they're an online casino set up to look like a brokerage. They're the "house"; if you win, they lose, and they set the odds.) Banc de Binary at one point offered $10,000 on eLance for someone who could "fix" the article their way. That was noticed and got press coverage. After much discussion on Wikipedia message boards, the article ended up rather negative on the company, all their accounts were blocked, and many people have that article on their watch list in case somebody tries something.
That's unusual; it seldom gets that bad.
That's the blatant stuff. More subtle spin is hard to detect. Minor changes to obscure medical or technical articles to make some product look good are tough to deal with, because they require subject matter expertise. This is a growing problem. But the usual procedures work; if only vendor X is mentioned, a search for a competitor may turn up vendor Y, which can be added to the article.