Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2014-01-29/News and notes

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A very well written article—conveys the facts without unneeded hyperbole or speculation, yet still manages to lay out a pretty damning critique of Wiki-PR's self-PR efforts. Nice work. Kaldari (talk) 02:00, 2 February 2014 (UTC)

+1 from me. Nick-D (talk) 05:04, 2 February 2014 (UTC)

The Wiki-PR case gets more bizarre every day. They are still advertising on their website that they'll help businesses create articles on Wikipedia, but "Our consultants help you abide by Wikipedia's community rules and guidelines. We respect Wikipedia and its rules against promoting and advertising. And we never directly edit Wikipedia ourselves." Their "Page Monitoring" and "Crisis Editing" services make clear that they intend to assert ownership of the articles. How this can be done while they are under a community ban is a serious question.

Perhaps they mean that they just write the articles and the reactions to "crises", and their clients actually post the Wiki-PR material on Wikipedia. But that would just mean that they are advising their clients to break our rules.

The ban has obviously hurt their business, as they've been on a PR campaign, giving interviews saying that they have or had hundreds of editors but that they weren't sockpuppets. Of course, hundreds of meatpuppets is as bad or worse. They also claim that they are being demonized because one of the reported sockpuppets didn't work for them. But, of course hundreds of sock/meatpuppets did work for them.

The following about CitizenNeutral (presumably a Wiki-PR editor) is quite disturbing, and I hope you'll clarify it.

"Much of CitizenNeutral's early editing was filled with tagging articles for conflict of interest and puffery, which Wiki-PR commonly did prior to contacting the article's subject."

It doesn't seem to make any business sense to tag articles as breaking the rules, and then contacting the subject, unless they then solicited business. That sounds a whole lot like a shakedown -should we call it a "wiki-shakedown"?- trash the article, then go to its "owner" and say something like "don't worry, just pay us and it will be fixed."

If that is indeed the meaning of the quoted sentence, I'll ask that this aspect of the investigation be pursued further. If it checks out, both the community and the Wikimedia Foundation have to do something about it. We cannot allow Wikipedia to be used as a stage for shakedowns.

Whatever the final resolution of the Wiki-PR case, the overall paid editing problem isn't going to just disappear. Every 3 or 4 months another paid editing scandal comes along. Sooner or later we need to take decisive action, sooner would be much better. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 02:43, 2 February 2014 (UTC)

Hi Smallbones - I didn't write this piece but have contributed a lot of research to both this and other Wiki-PR pieces, and was talking to Ed while he was writing it. I can confirm that, yes, that is the intended meaning of the sentence. Multiple people in positions to know had previously suggested to me that Wiki-PR explicitly trashed the articles of businesses before approaching them in many instances, especially in the earlier stages of their operation. The CitizenNeutral user account is the first non-IP user account that obviously fits that pattern that can be definitively linked to Wiki-PR. (It's worth noting that Jordan French has reached out to me via email to state that Wiki-PR and CitizenNeutral had no connection whatsoever. He declined to suggest a possible alternative explanation for CN's behavior when asked, and to me - and multiple admins who reviewed CN's editing patterns, no other explanation appeared even remotely likely.) Kevin Gorman (talk) 21:39, 2 February 2014 (UTC)

I can see what you mean from CitizenNeutral's contributions and on his talk page. If you can really connect him to Wiki-PR, and if they really did contact the subjects of the articles he trashed with offers to make it all go away for a fee, then it starts to look like racketeering. In which case I'd think you should just contact the Wikimedia legal department

Smallbones_(smalltalk) 03:49, 3 February 2014 (UTC)

Page monitoring and crisis editing don't necessarily involve asserting ownership, if all they do is explain policies and guidelines, advise people which noticeboards are available, etc. That is the sort of thing Jimmy Wales explicitly welcomed. It's clear that that is not what Wiki-PR have been doing in the past, but it is something a paid consultancy is absolutely entitled to do (and I understand it's what companies like Wiki Strategies e.g. do). Andreas JN466 13:59, 2 February 2014 (UTC)

See also related discussion here. Andreas JN466 14:06, 2 February 2014 (UTC)

Wikipediocracy shows up again. I wonder what their interest is in this? Nobody should try to invent a distinction between "owning" an article and "managing" an article. From my experience with Wikipediocracy, there is no point trying to discuss paid editing with them - they are for it, no matter what. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 15:21, 2 February 2014 (UTC)

It's worth noting that Jayen has publicly said that he isn't fond of Wiki-PR's behavior, thinks they belong banned, and has gone as far as to run a blog post slamming them, as well as inviting me to run a more detailed blog post about Wiki-PR than has been run elsewhere, and one with more details than I could provide on-wiki even if I wanted to. I haven't done so, but I don't think he would've extended such an offer if he was terribly fond of all forms of paid-editing. Kevin Gorman (talk) 21:39, 2 February 2014 (UTC)

• WLM got 8 in 1000 images to FP/VI/QI ... that is actually pretty good. The background rate for all commons files is 3.1 in 1000. These are mostly QI, and many many more images would qualify if they were submitted for review. 17% usage also sounds pretty good relative to the usage of all commons files. --99of9 (talk) 03:08, 2 February 2014 (UTC)

“[CitizenNeutral] was blocked as recently as 27 January”

For what reason ?

“A later focus was on recreating deleted articles, nearly all of which had been deleted for being authored by Wiki-PR.”

Deleting an article for being authored by Wiki-PR is against Wikipedia policies and guidelines.

--Nnemo (talk) 19:38, 10 August 2014 (UTC)