
The Covert World of People Trying to Edit Wikipedia for Pay - ohjeez
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/08/wikipedia-editors-for-pay/393926/?single_page=true
======
beeboop
I recently tried to get involved as an editor but gave up. It can take
literally hours out of your day going back and forth with some other editor
who decides he or she wants to debate you on the world's dumbest, most
pedantic thing ever. One time it literally took 3+ hours to make a change of
less than a sentence on some stupid article like a particular model of
motorcycle and it required escalating it to dispute resolution. Eventually a
few more people chimed in and unanimously supported my position but my several
hours were lost.

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.

~~~
snori74
This seems to be a commonly-aired complaint when these discussions come up.

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.

~~~
martey
> 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.

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._ "

~~~
sparkzilla
This is a false argument because the number of PR edits is so small in
comparison to the total number of edits. The culture is toxic, period. See my
other post on this thread.

------
sytelus
The most enlightening thing in this article is a graph which shows numbers of
editors has declined by 25% while articles are more than doubling over past 8
years. There must obviously be breaking point sooner or later where Wikipedia
has more garbage then useful bits. My take away is that Wikipedia's model of
small tribes of editors is not working and is demonstrably unscalable.

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.

~~~
sparkzilla
I'm not really sure why you've been downvoted, as this seems like a non-
controversial statement. I am working on a crowdsourced content site, a large
part of which is a replacement for Wikipedia's biography and news-based pages
(see profile for link). We do gamification (badges for adding certain types of
content) and we pay our writers in revenue share. That said, in my experience,
the issue is not one of personal reputation, but one of creating a system
where quality data can be added irrespective of the quality of the person
adding it. The focus should always be on the quality of the edit, not the
quality of the editor. This may seem counter intuitive, but a well-designed
crowdsourced site does not actually need experts in the subjects it is
compiling.

~~~
sytelus
I'm surprised at downvotes too. I suspect there are lots of n00b on HN who
thinks downvotes is way to express disagreement. I use downvote for not-nice
and spammy comments. If I want to express disagreement, I would just put that
in reply. But apparently new HN population does things differently.

~~~
rspeer
Is pg a n00b? Long ago, he said, "I think it's ok to use the up and down
arrows to express agreement."

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171)

~~~
sytelus
I'm surprised at that comment because his writings had given me a different
impression. PG's view basically means that people with different opinions and
minority views would be punished heavily by the community effectively leading
to strip them out of all karma. This guideline would encourage people for
groupthink and make them hesistant to offer any perspective that might be
remotely perceived as controversial. I truly hope pg's above view was
transient and has evolved.

~~~
fapjacks
Doesn't it, though? I see reasonable but unpopular opinions blasted into
background color all the time. I make it a point to upvote these posts, even
if I disagree with the original opinion, because of this behavior shaping that
takes place on HN these days. And if I didn't know better, I'd say it was a
conspiracy. :P

------
hackuser
I'm not sure I can define why I still use Wikipedia. The information is not
dependable, and I never know when I'm reading nonsense. But I do use it at
times.

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.

~~~
jlg23
More often than not accuracy is in the eye of the beholder. Only a fraction of
the articles in any encyclopedia cannot be disputed. If one relies on only one
encyclopedia then one is bound to copy the errors
([https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Errors_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Errors_in_the_Encyclop%C3%A6dia_Britannica_that_have_been_corrected_in_Wikipedia&oldid=671820885))
or some specific perspective on historic events, personae and even
significance of scientific achievements.

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.)

~~~
pekk
"Can be disputed" doesn't mean there isn't a specific interest group jealously
guarding that article to protect a specific POV.

------
lifeisstillgood
At a certain point we need to give up on the idea we can sustain these public
spaces without public support - taxes to an extent, laws of the form of "Net
neutrality" (that might be free speech) and well plain old public approbrium

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.

------
lordnacho
This probably happens quite a lot. Not every subject in Wikipedia will have a
vigilant editor.

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.

~~~
snori74
Yes it's a problem, but perhaps less than you might think.

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.

~~~
Joeboy
> First, in most cases PR spin has a "smell"

How do you know?

~~~
snori74
Got me! Re-read as "many".

~~~
Joeboy
Sorry, can't help but...

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weasel_word#Forms](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weasel_word#Forms)

------
rm_-rf_slash
While it seems there is little we can do to prevent the influence of money in
our politics, truly democratic spaces like Wikipedia remain an important place
for knowledge to be shared and verified. If we allow centralized sources of
trust to become bought, sold, and politicized, then we risk fracturing into an
Internet dark age, where your source of information is a function of your
world view. What if instead of one Wikipedia, there was a pseudo version for
people who strictly believe in creationism, or a version imposed on residents
of Turkey that actively omits and reports to the government any complaints
about the prime minister or references to the Armenian Genocide?

~~~
Nicholas_C
> What if instead of one Wikipedia, there was a pseudo version for people who
> strictly believe in creationism

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.

[0]
[http://www.conservapedia.com/Main_Page](http://www.conservapedia.com/Main_Page)

~~~
random28345
> Reading it is fairly infuriating

I think you mean hilarious

~~~
yitchelle
Agreed. I think the problems is that he is reading it the wrong way by taking
what is written as factual. Clearly it makes more sense if you consider the
articles are written in "the onion" style.

~~~
mejari
Except they aren't. The founder of Conservapedia certainly takes it seriously,
and he zealously guards the site to make sure it fits his viewpoint

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Schlafly](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Schlafly)

~~~
CyberDildonics
Just because he takes it seriously doesn't mean anyone else has to.

~~~
mejari
The point is that it isn't written in an "onion" style like the person I
replied to claimed

------
davidf18
A long article, but what I found most astonishing was an Oxford University
Press Medical Textbook plagiarizing from Wikipedia!

[https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/files/textbook_vs._...](https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/files/textbook_vs._wikipedia.jpg)

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.”"

------
cpncrunch
I'm not sure this is really much more of a problem than POV pushers in
general. Usually it's pretty obvious when someone is pushing their own agenda,
and easily solved (assuming people are actually watching the page in
question).

~~~
pekk
If the incumbent editors watching the page are the source of POV, then the
mechanism is to prevent the correction of POV rather than to correct POV.
There is no mechanism to prevent this.

~~~
cpncrunch
>There is no mechanism to prevent this.

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.

~~~
Lawtonfogle
And as long as the other side has more time (for example, by being better
funded so they can contribute more time or by having more people invested in
maintain a bias) it makes is near impossible. Technically grandparent is
incorrect because they claimed the mechanism doesn't exist, when the real
issue is that it is broken.

~~~
cpncrunch
In my experience the number of funded editors is tiny compared to the army of
volunteers. What article is having the issue you mention?

------
Animats
As someone who works on tasks reported on the Wikipedia conflict of interest
noticeboard, I've been dealing with the paid editing problem for some time.
Wikipedia is worth some effort to preserve; it is, after all, the highest
rated non commercial site.

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.

