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Major Wikipedia Donors Caught Editing Their Own Articles
An anonymous reader writes "As reported before on Slashdot, one of the most terrible sins on Wikipedia is to edit articles for pay, or otherwise violate the 'neutral point of view' policy, per their co-founder Jimmy Wales. And yet, the Wikipedia-criticism website Wikipediocracy recently began a study showing that dozens of the Wikimedia Foundation's largest cash donors have violated that policy. Repeatedly, and wantonly. In short, they wrote articles about themselves or their companies, then gave the WMF big donations — and were not confronted about violating the NPOV policy."
Do the proposed TOS changes address this? Note that they also found that many of the donors adequately documented their conflict of interest.
All that money has to buy something. The donations are likely part of the advertising budget.
Editing your own article on Wikipedia is not prohibited as long as you disclose your conflict of interest and follow the rules, so I have trouble seeing how this submission is anything other than yet more manufactured controversy and/or anti-Wikipedia astroturfing.
It's true that in theory, it's a conflict of interest to edit an article about one's self/company, but these are also the people most knowledgeable on the subject and have the most to contribute. I imagine the people who are large cash donors aren't trying to do it as a bribe, they're just heavy wikipedia users that wanted to help the site. Ideally they should document a conflict of interest, but that's not very clear how it should be done.
I'm sure others will tell me why I'm mistaken, but this doesn't bother me so much, mainly because it doesn't surprise me.
Basically, you're telling me that a document that can be edited by anyone is being edited by people to show themselves in a more positive light, ToS be damned.
Well, yeah.
I'm shocked, shocked to find non-neutral points of view in Wikipedia!
Wait, this is Wikipedia. How could they not be confronted, when anyone can do the confronting, even the writers at Wikipediocracy.
Did the anonymous submitter disclose their ties to Wikipediocracy?
As long as documentation is given that somebody is paying for editing an article, and of course if the contributed text respects NPOV (and the subject is considered worth to be present in Wikipedia), there is no problem at all. After all, you may use Wikipedia articles in a commercial work: it is sufficient that it is released under CC-BY-SA. So what's bad in being paid for writing?
Companies and individuals edit articles about themselves, if they ARE or ARE NOT donors.
Please explain the logic that says you should not donate to Wikipedia, if you have edited an article about yourself?
OK, just because you edited your own article doesn't mean it's not NPOV. But let's say it was biased in your favor...
So what if the article is not NPOV? Other editors will participate in its development.
Also, if you can't prove your notability beyond a shadow of a doubt, there turn out to be an army of deletionists visiting all the articles who will be more than happy to nominate you for deletion in a few heartbeats.
For example, I have need for the data about all the radio stations in the U.S. Who else but the radio stations themselves would have set up those pages?
If they "adequately documented their conflict of interest" then they were not "caught."
Wikipediocracy, the Internet’s foremost Wikipedia criticism community, has embarked on....
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The summary seems to have the wrong idea about what the NPOV policy actually means. Straight from the link it provided to Wikipedia's definition:
Editing from a neutral point of view (NPOV) means representing fairly, proportionately, and, as far as possible, without bias, all of the significant views that have been published by reliable sources on a topic. All Wikipedia articles and other encyclopedic content must be written from a neutral point of view.
Note that it does NOT indicate who can or cannot participate in editing an article. So long as their interests are disclosed, it's quite possible that people with vested interests in a subject will be able to contribute more meaningfully to a page than those without firsthand experience on the subject. Their contributions may in some cases need to be revised by others to better conform to NPOV, but they may bring to light facts and sources that would have otherwise gone unnoticed.
It's one thing to edit articles for pay--where your obligation to your employer exceeds your obligation to the policies of the site--but if you're just someone with an opinion or a vested interest, you should be perfectly capable of setting those aside in order to help construct pages that are balanced, fair, and neutral in their approach to the subject at hand, and that's exactly what I've seen people do. Though, I'll certainly grant that the cases where someone hasn't done so are much more memorable. ;)
And is it really any surprise that the people donating to Wikipedia are the ones editing it? It's a self-selecting sample: people donate to Wikipedia because they're the ones getting the most out of the site, rather than the other way around, which seems to be the perspective that the criticism is coming from.
This is from HRIP7 in the comments section who actually examined the edits of the the article's example of a conflict of interest case:
Hmm ⦠the eleven edits by Jsdillon, ten of which were made within the space of one hour on 12 June 2011, are a little underwhelming at first glance, as four of them are self-reverts. The net effect of these ten edits was to add the names of the creators of the game to the article, to change âoerandom chanceâ in the infobox from Low to Medium, and to change the number of players from 2+ to 3+.
His edit the next day changed the number of players from 3+ to 4-20+ and the targeted age group from Intended âoeFor Adultsâ to 17+, and added a picture of the product.
This edit by Hyperfine Cosmologist is more interesting in that it says hard-copy distribution would begin 15 June 2011. The edit was made the very day before that launch date, on 14 June 2011.
The article itself was (re-)created on 11 June 2011, i.e. four days prior to sales launch. Page views predictably spiked in mid-June 2011, although the overall total was relatively modest (the article was viewed 3,030 times that month, most of these page views occurring around the launch date).
The timing does suggest that the article was created to support the productâ(TM)s launch, and it probably enhanced sales to some extent.
The page had healthy page views in last yearâ(TM)s Christmas season: 121,047 in total in December 2013.
If this is an example of the worst case of a conflict of interest violation that Wikipediocracy can find, the all I can say is big fucking deal. Ironic that article is written by Greg Kohs who owns a business that offers to write Wikipedia articles for money.
looking for 15th century german dukes and shit, it's great, looking up politicians and large corporations, not so much
So some people made donations, then followed all the rules for editing their own stuff ... and you're getting your panties in a twist because?
No one is even bitching that what they wrote was misleading. The entire complaint is simply that it happened at all.
Thats fucking retarded, shut up and crawl back in your scumbag, drag others down to your level hole. Slashdot should go with it for posting this kind of crap.
What the fuck is wrong with you people, most of the big donators are fucking editors, these people are 'in to' wikipedia, of course they edit stuff THEY KNOW ABOUT ... which is THEIR STUFF.
Unless they are lying, misleading or misrepresenting, then whats the problem? Come up with an actual problem with what they did before you blow it out of proportion.
They followed the rules and aren't a problem, STFU FFS.
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The neutrality of this article has been disputed.
Does it matter as long as they provide sources for the information they add to wikipedia?
To me, the problem is that it breaks promise of neutrality, and deceives anyone who believes it's a neutral piece. I don't fault anyone for spinning their story in a way that benefits themselves; that's inevitable. But don't show me a NPOV policy that implies otherwise.
The article's example is quite poor.
Basically, one of the founders of Cards Against Humanity created an article for the game which was correctly deleted as self-promoting. Later, someone else created an article for the game (which I think everyone can agree meets notability requirements). After that occurred, the founder who had previously created the article made a series of several small edits to minor details--changing the number of players in the game's infobox, for example. Later, someone from an IP address made an edit to the article.
Then a few years later, Cards Against Humanity (itself a Creative Commons project) donated to Wikimedia and there's no evidence anyone involved with the game is still editing the article.
Certainly the initial article creation was ill-advised, and maybe you could argue the person in question shouldn't have made the edits, but this is hardly a smoking gun about widespread Wikipedia corruption. Although the article purports that this was a mid-level example of donor abuse, it seems more like an incredibly minor case to me.
For people who hate "deletionists", they are remarkably concerned over an article's resurrection.
Disclaimer - I work for the Wikimedia foundation, but expressing my own opinion.
Donations go to the Wikimedia Foundation, covering various technology/organizational costs, but the foundation is not involved in the actual editing or reviewing process - that has always been done exclusivelly by the community. Donations would never affect the content of an article simply because its a different group of people - those who receive the money spend it on internet/development/building/conferences, while volonteers independently decide what should stay and in what form. An analogy here would be donating money to ISP to support the service, while abusing one of the web sites on the web.
Did you read the summary past the first sentence or so?
"In short, they wrote articles about themselves or their companies, then gave the WMF big donations and were not confronted about violating the NPOV policy."
That said, I've routinely come across articles on Wikipedia that were not tagged NPOV yet were clearly cut+pasted from marketing material or written in that unmistakable tone. It's especially common on articles that aren't very popular.
Example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y...
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What else do you expect from their kind? We knew from day one that Wikipedia was biased, and their continuous spewing of hate for progressive causes, like Occupy, proves that they hate the people and represent corporations. Just look at how the deletionists have destroyed the site. They try to stomp-out facts as fast as they can. They really have ruined it. Wikipedia had so much potential to be a source of information. Too bad the deletionists and CONservatives have ruined that.
Of course they did it. 99.9% of the people on this planet are fucking assholes.
But Wikipedia isn't neutral, they refuse to teach the controversy on the evolution page, and also fail to tell the conservative point of view.
The Wikipedia article on Conservapedia is hardly neutral.
one of the most terrible sins on Wikipedia is to edit articles for pay, or otherwise violate the 'neutral point of view' policy,
I'm shocked, shocked to find that illicit editing is going on in here!
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
From summary (and presumably TFA):
"one of the most terrible sins on Wikipedia is to edit articles for pay, or otherwise violate the 'neutral point of view' policy"
but...that's not what NPOV is about. NPOV isn't a conflict-of-interest policy. It doesn't say anything about editing articles for pay.
His first version of the article, which was promptly deleted:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/inde...
His second and last batch of edits, after the article was resurrected by a third party:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/inde...
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
The article lists only one Wikipedia article, and it's for a silly game. The article isn't particularly bad, although it could be trimmed a bit. It looks more like fancruft than promotion. A better (worse) example is needed.
Wikipedia maintains their no-ad policy on the ground of preventing potential "conflicting interest", yet I don't see how a small ad word buyer can have more influence than a donor cited in TFA. It's more of an ideological reason than anything else, very much like their debate of adopting mp4 video format.
I fail to see any problem provided that the information is accurate and that is ensured by the very nature of Wikipedia's open editing. If someone puts up false information someone else quickly corrects it.
Wiki is beautiful.
It's this kind of hard hitting, no holds barred, painstaking research that makes me proud to see nanny sites like this. I don't know if I could ever take the time, or put forth the effort, to dig deep enough to find admitted and well documented conflicts of interest like this. They even took the time to present it to us in a that makes us want to believe in their hard work. Truly amazing. (The preceding is entirely a work of sarcasm.)
I did not donate, yet I edited "deadbeat". Is that a conflict-of-interest?
Table-ized A.I.
I note the link in the edited version on the front page is just the Wikipedia page about Wikipediocracy. Here's the link to the actual post on the site: http://wikipediocracy.com/2014...
You can't talk about Wikipedia's flaws on Wikipedia
"Thats fucking retarded, shut up and crawl back in your scumbag, drag others down to your level hole."
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No wonder they have problems with content bias, crazy people, misogynists, bullies, and outright corruption and incompetence.