User:Doc James/Paid editing

Ideas that may help address the issues of paid editing for discussion. Please feel free to add more ideas. My hope is to sit down with the legal department in Nov of 2015 to discuss possibilities in person.

Notification of this discussion

• have been posted on Wikimedia-l
• Wikipedia:Village pump (idea lab)
• WP:COIN

1. Ban some types of paid editing

Ban the type of paid editing that occurs via sites like Elance/Upworks. They have agree to automatically remove Wikipedia related jobs from their sites if we do this.

Discuss

• I think this is definitely a good idea, as the handful of disclosed paid editors don't typically use those sites. As an additional point to this, perhaps we could establish a list of community endorsed paid editors to promote TOU compliance (added to a list by community consensus). In principal, I hate the idea of promoting paid editing at any level, and I'm not sure this is feasible, but it is important to give TOU compliant editors tools to compete against unethical non-TOU complaint editors. Winner 42 Talk to me! 05:18, 1 September 2015 (UTC)
• This needs much better definition of what "the type of paid editing that occurs via sites like Elance/Upworks" means before anybody can seriously consider it. In theory at least there is no barrier to accepting a job at those sites and completing it while complying perfectly with the terms of use. Thryduulf (talk) 08:45, 1 September 2015 (UTC)

• Yes so this proposal is to ban the type of paid editing that is funded through sites like Elance. There may be one or two people that edit properly through those sites. And yes we are sacrificing those one or two to deal with the thousands that are not following the TOU and have no intention to do so. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 18:50, 1 September 2015 (UTC)

• What is "the type of paid editing that is funded through sites like Elance" is the crux here. You can't ban something unless you can define it. Thryduulf (talk) 19:01, 1 September 2015 (UTC)

• No that is not the "crux". The crux is are we in principle willing to ban this type of editing. If the majority oppose it no matter what the definition no need to spend our time arguing about definitions. Only once we have dealt with the real crux do we need to discuss the secondary issue of definition and for that I will get the legal team involved. That that is my question to you User:Thryduulf, do you oppose this type of paid editing? Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 00:48, 2 September 2015 (UTC)

• I oppose all editing that does not follow en.wp policies, including undisclosed paid editing. I support all editing that does follow en.wp policies, including disclosed paid editing. Thryduulf (talk) 10:19, 2 September 2015 (UTC)

• Has anybody ever seen good editing come out of an Elance job? If they are out there they would have to be numerous to outweigh the terrible ones. And so far I've seen zero good ones and probably upwards of 100 bad ones. The only good (i.e. non conflicted, TOS evading) stuff I have ever seen was for private Mediawiki sites. — Brianhe (talk) 04:48, 5 September 2015 (UTC)

• I'd imagine the rule would be some variation of "The use of online job soliciting sites (such as elance and upworks) to receive payment in return for editing Wikipedia is forbidden." Winner 42 Talk to me! 19:13, 1 September 2015 (UTC)

• I don't think that would actually have the desired effect, as people would just find other venues that are less visible. There is obviously a market for paid editors, what we need to do is make it clear who is doing it according to the rules and make it easy for potential customers of paid editors to find out who is doing it legitimately and who isn't rather than drive everyone underground. Such a rule would also do nothing about the Orangemoody way of working. Thryduulf (talk) 19:21, 1 September 2015 (UTC)

This is about moving paid editing off of reputable sites. This is about making it more difficult. Yes it is not perfect for all types of paid editing but it is a piece of the solution. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 00:00, 2 September 2015 (UTC)

I strongly disagree with you then - we want paid editors to be recruited through reputable sites where we can ensure that they are transparent and following our rules. A reputable site will work with us to ensure that our rules are followed and that those who do not cannot advertise through them, a non-reputable site will not care. Thryduulf (talk) 10:19, 2 September 2015 (UTC)

99% of paid editors purposely want to add advertising to Wikipedia as that is what they are being hired to do. No one is interested in disclosing who is paying them. The non reputable sites are hiring off of Elance.

How "can we ensure that they are transparent and following our rules" on Elance right now? Elance is not willing to engage with us in a very complicated manner or hand over the details of those on their site so we can double check them to determine if they are following our TOU. An seriously we do not hand the volunteer community to handle this. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 20:33, 2 September 2015 (UTC)

• If we are going to ban all paid editing then that needs to include via such sites. If we are going to continue to allow it within certain rules and codes then we want those sites to promote the types of paid editing that we allow. Allowing paid editing provided it goes through an organisation such as the one behind OrangeMoody and not if it is a direct relationship between client and legit transparent paid editor, would be the worst of both worlds. ϢereSpielChequers 12:00, 2 September 2015 (UTC)

• The proposal is to allow "corporate accounts" that are allowed to comment on talk pages. Than disallow other paid promotional editing.
• Upwork is willing to remove all Wikipedia related jobs automatically if we ban the type of paid editing that takes place through their site. This does not include WiR which we want but those do not work through Elance. It was their suggestion. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 20:36, 2 September 2015 (UTC)

• I support prohibiting the use of such sites. Of course a proper definition would have to be added but that should be easy. If people think that goes too far then we could require that the use of a paid recruitment site be disclosed as an affiliation of the paid editor. The proper place to do that would be at WP:PAYDISCLOSE

• I'll add a subsection here for prohibiting most paid editing of BLPs, as it is also one of " some types of paid editing" Smallbones_(smalltalk) 14:19, 2 September 2015 (UTC)

• As written, this proposal comes down on one side of a major split in our community, a split where repeated proposals to ban all paid editing have gotten a lot of support, but not enough to be implemented. May I suggest a compromise: Restrict such jobs to Wikipedia editors who disclose that they are paid editors? -- John Broughton (♫♫) 17:57, 3 September 2015 (UTC)

• As to how to do that, I'm more interested in seeing if there is agreement on the principle than in diving into (hypothetical) details about how such a system might work. I will note that there could be wins here for a lot of parties: Upwork becomes an authorized source of Wikipedia jobs, which it can market; the community gets the disclosure it wants, along with editors who have an incentive to follow Wikipedia rules (rather than use a throw-away account); businesses have a higher level of trust that whoever they hire in fact is qualified; paid editors who are willing to follow Wikipedia rules get more jobs. So if the principle is agreed to, there are incentives for all parties to commit at least small amounts of time and/or money to making this happen. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 17:57, 3 September 2015 (UTC)

• We have a major corporation were a lot of our problems are coming from make us an offer. If we ban the type of editing of our site that takes place through their site they will remove all Wikipedia related jobs.
• How would we enforce "Restrict such jobs to Wikipedia editors who disclose that they are paid editors?" If it is enforceable / not easily foreseeable it is not useful. We have lots of examples that this Orangemody group is happy to make up stories as needed.
• Upworks is interested in something that is simple. Not something that is complicated and requires lots of paid hours on their part. They are as we are all aware a business. Per "Upwork becomes an authorized source of Wikipedia jobs" we do not do exclusive deals. And we simply cannot enforce this anyway. Upworks however was confident that if they pulled all Wikipedia jobs other similar sites would also be willing to do so. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 00:49, 4 September 2015 (UTC)
• A paid editor should have to disclose the affiliation. He should be allowed to edit talk pages only. Exceptions there can be for partnerships of the WMF or a chapter with e.g. a GLAM. Ziko (talk) 16:38, 4 September 2015 (UTC)

• Oppose this as counter-productive. Better to make friends with eLance (et al), and get them to tell us who is being paid, and by whom, and when possible, for what. Driving the paid editing underground is the LAST thing we want. See unintended side effect, blowback, and false choice. Eliminating paid jobs on eLance will not decrease paid editing, in the long run, it will just make it less likely to be disclosed-paid-editing. 75.108.94.227 (talk) 18:47, 4 September 2015 (UTC)
  • I have been in negotiations with Elance for about a year. The idea for use to ban the type of paid editing that occurs on their website and for them to remove all Wikipedia related jobs was the idea of the head of THEIR legal department. They are not willing to disclose to use what you ask as it is against their privacy policies. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 04:13, 5 September 2015 (UTC)
    • They are willing to disclose what I ask of them, and in fact they already do, per our conversation elsewhere. (Just because their lawyer came up with some idea, does not make that idea good.) I'm not suggesting that we get eLance to give us full legal names; I'm just suggesting we get the online-conversations, via the eLance programmatic API, which 99% of the time will be more than enough to clue us into the article-names to watchlist. That is enough of a percentage, to make covert out-of-wiki-policy editing non-profitable, which is in turn is enough to make disclosure the norm, methinks. 75.108.94.227 (talk) 02:42, 11 September 2015 (UTC)

• Actually there is almost no disclosed paid editing now (with the exception of about 5 editors), there has been almost no disclosure in the last 15 months since the ToU terms changed, and there was almost no disclosure before that. The very large majority of paid editors don't disclose not because we are "driving them underground." They don't disclose because they know their edits won't survive scrutiny by independent editors. So why do we want a rule requiring paid disclosure when almost nobody will follow it? It lets everybody know that the undisclosed paid editor is clearly breaking the rules, and that he knows that he is breaking the rules - i.e a "black hat editor". It simplifies blocking and banning the black hat editor. If any paid editor want to be friends with us all they have to do is disclose their paid status and write articles that will survive scrutiny by independent editors. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 19:48, 4 September 2015 (UTC)

Don't you have more disclosed paid editors in en.WP? In de.WP they are quite a lot. Just today I saw this edit made by the Swiss Federal Archives. The "black hat editors" will not disclose, of course, but with a strict rule it is made clear that their edits are not welcome. Ziko (talk) 21:20, 4 September 2015 (UTC)

We don't usually count GLAMs and Wikipedians-in-Residence as paid editors. For them, per the ToU FAQs and per WP:COI, it's basically a one time declaration on their user page. These are the White Hats, of course, and many go beyond this and follow the Bright Line Rule (no edits on article pages). They have no problems finding folks to update articles from their suggestions on talk pages.

One problem we have with paid editors is that we don't really know how many are following the rules. Notice on user pages, talk pages, OR edit summaries are allowed by the ToU, so there's no simple way to count. My guess is 5 editors in the last year have made more than 1 declaration (each edit should theoretically be declared, but nobody would complain if they just declared each article, talk page, or policy/guideline they edited). If anybody has a better guess, please let me know (ping me!). Smallbones_(smalltalk) 00:07, 5 September 2015 (UTC)

• This is the most productive of the ideas, but it needs clarity about what "kinds of paid editing" to ban. The bottom line in this case is that no company can make big business out of editing Wikipedia without becoming publicly known. So absolutely paid editing can be banned, despite the anonymity of contributors, because there are no anonymous storefronts! Wnt (talk) 02:26, 5 September 2015 (UTC)
  • Yes I propose if we do this that the exact definition would be created by legal at the WMF and Upworks. And WiR have always and will always be excluded from a ban. WiR DO NOT operate through Elance. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 04:17, 5 September 2015 (UTC)

1a. Prohibit most paid edits to BLPs

It appears that there are many paid edits to BLPs. This not only distorts our contents, but sucks in naive individuals and helps support and encourage paid editing. Most importantly this rule would be very simple to explain "You can't pay to get your biography on Wikipedia." Simple explanations are very important since we have had problems getting the public to understand our rules. Proposed rule:

"Paid editing of biographies of living people is prohibited, except to remove content that is otherwise in violation of this policy. Content removal by paid editors must be noted on the article's talk page or at WP:BLPN. Paid editors may add information on BLP talk pages as long as their paid status is disclosed."

The proper place for this rule is at WP:BLP. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 14:19, 2 September 2015 (UTC)

The same should apply to medical content. We should not have academics or companies hiring people to promote their new treatment.Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 20:40, 2 September 2015 (UTC)

You've got the medical knowledge - write it up and see what folks think. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 01:03, 3 September 2015 (UTC)

The most common type of 'compensated' edit on BLP-articles is when the BLP edits their own article. We literally have a million BLP-articles. Banning edits on BLP-articles, by anyone with any whiff of 'financial compensation' , and strictly enforcing deletion of said articles whenever such editing is detected, is tantamount to banning a million editors, roughly speaking. We have fewer medical articles, and they are already the most over-regulated articles on wikipedia, which always have WP:MEDRS arbcom sanctions ready to hammer down the least bit of anything remotely related to, say, coverage in newspapers. Do we really REALLY want to only have BLP-articles which have been the subject of peer-reviewed scientific meta-publication-studies in only the most-respected journals, and DELETE everything else? WP:NoEditingBlpArticleUnlessYouNeverHeardOfThem is nuts, folks. 75.108.94.227 (talk) 18:47, 4 September 2015 (UTC)

Frankly your argument is just building up a straw man and then tearing it down. Pure exaggeration and nonsense. WP:BLP articles where the only people to have heard of the subjects are their employees is nuts. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 19:48, 4 September 2015 (UTC)

I see this proposal as just another way to redefine the meaning of WP:GNG for BLP-articles, all million of them. I also see it as a way to drive away the people that know the most, from the talkpage. "It appears there are many paid edits to BLPs". "Frankly your argument is just building up a straw man". Both of your statements cannot be simultaneously true. Not only does is APPEAR that there are many paid and/or personally-COI edits to BLP-articles, I would go out on a limb and say that most of the BLP-articles (aka over 50% of the million we currently have) are edited at least to some degree by the BLP-subject, by the BLP-subject's kinfolks, and/or by the BLP-subjects co-workers. You cannot have your cake and eat it too: either there is a problem with COI-editing of BLP-articles, and you want to stop it with your proposal, or there is no such problem, and my article is a strawman. But it cannot be both. I believe there is a problem with COI-encumbered editing, and I believe your proposal, if enacted, would result in wholesale deletion of hundreds of thousands of articles. Some of the deletions would be justfied by wiki-policy, but many and perhaps even most wouldn't be justified, except the self-referential justification of the proposed rule itself. 75.108.94.227 (talk) 02:51, 11 September 2015 (UTC)

• Support Doc James you should have said at the top, that if the WP agrees to ban freelance paid editing, Upload would remove Wikipedia proposals from their website. That is a huge offer. Thryduulf making it illegitimate to buy and sell edits would be a huge win for WP and would deter companies/people who want WP articles from trying to buy them and it would deter legit freelancers from pursuing that kind of work. Taking away the public market for things ~can~ dramatically reduce their occurrence. (I am aware of the counter-arguments re Prohibition, but this is worth trying - we can always roll it back if it fails) Jytdog (talk) 23:53, 7 September 2015 (UTC)

2. Increase notability requirements

This is especially important in the areas of corporations and BLPs.

Discuss

• I think this is more a matter of enforcing existing notability requirements rather than creating new ones (through increased NPP and AfD participation or similar). I'm not convinced that notability can or should be used as a tool to prevent paid editing. Winner 42 Talk to me! 05:20, 1 September 2015 (UTC)

Kindasortamaybe? Perhaps loosening the CSD for notability? The downside of that is more people are confused about how to create/have a Wikipedia article kept, which is often how people fall for PR schemes. I've thought about this for years and yet to see how this will change what is the overall status quo. We're popular, being on here makes you somebody, and nothing we can do (aside from failing) will change that. Keegan (talk) 06:10, 1 September 2015 (UTC)

Loosing the notability CSD criteria is something I am very, very strongly opposed to - A7 is already misapplied far more than probably any other criterion. Clarifying the notability criteria and possibly raising the notability requirements for corporations would probably help. The biggest thing that needs to happen though is more eyes on AfDs. Thryduulf (talk) 08:48, 1 September 2015 (UTC)

• The problem in this case is that our existing notability requirements meant that deletionists could credibly threaten to get articles deleted that companies were willing to pay to try and keep up. How would increasing the proportion of articles that needed protection from deletionists reduce the risk of future deletionist scams like OrangeMoody? Clarifying the criteria, introducing some specific rules similar to the ones we have for sport or places would help, but I doubt we could get consensus for an "all companies that have ever directly employed more than y people at the same time" type rule. ϢereSpielChequers 13:06, 1 September 2015 (UTC)

• There is an expression that I actually first heard outside of this project, "notable only on Wikipedia". Our notability criteria are far too low for both biographical articles and for businesses in particular, although it could also be applied to many other aspects of our project. Just as importantly, as Winner 42 points out, even when we have notability standards, people do not routinely apply them. It is rare to find an AfD with more than 5 participants, meaning that it is very easy to sway them toward a default keep/no consensus to delete. Anyone who has even the slightest desire to progress to adminship is very wary of tagging articles for CSD or any other form of deletion because any perceived error in judgment can often come to haunt them years down the road. Instead they use "may not be notable" tags, and we now have tens of thousands of articles with those tags whose actual notability is never really assessed or considered. Our low standards of notability have effectively turned sections of the English Wikipedia project into a cross between the Yellow Pages and Who's Who, both of which are fine for what they do but are simply directories for which the subjects pay for an entry. In many cases, we find that Company X located in Country Y (or entrepreneur X whose businesses are mainly in country Y) does not have an article on the "native language" Wikipedia because it would not meet that project's notability standards, but we'll have one on our project. This does not make sense at all. We need to (a) significantly increase notability standards, and (b) change our community consideration about 'enforcing' notability so that page curators and others do not have to "live down" recommendations for deletion on notability grounds. We should also go through all those articles tagged for notability concerns and either decide they're notable or that they're not; if they're notable, we should fix them and if they're not notable then we should delete them. We should aim to have no more than 0.005% of our articles tagged that way, and no article should make it through PROD or AfD with that tag still affixed. Risker (talk) 13:53, 1 September 2015 (UTC)

  I don't know where you find that editors are criticised for ancient errors in deletion tagging, but I can assure you that RFA at least doesn't work that way. We do get RFA candidates with a history of poor quality deletion tagging, but for that alone to derail an RFA the candidate needs to have made multiple recent mistakes. Isolated or ancient mistakes in deletion tagging are not on their own enough to stop an RFA. As for having no more than 0.005% of our articles tagged for notability, that simply isn't realistic. You would have to ration the deletion taggers to 34 notability tagged AFDs per day between them.... ϢereSpielChequers 18:21, 1 September 2015 (UTC)

• I'd support this, but not for any reason to do with stopping paid editing - I just share Risker's concern that our bar is set too low with it comes to businesses, biographies and news, resulting in inherent problems with how we portray living people. In regard to paid editing it would make a dent (a lot of jobs are along the lines of "if my competitor has an article, why can't I"), but I'm not sure how much. - Bilby (talk) 07:33, 2 September 2015 (UTC)

• Totally agree. The "two substantial references" for wp:corp is much too vague since the business press exists to fill its pages with content regardless of the actual importance of the information. I find the business press not unlike the music or film press -- these are essentially "fan zines" that will eventually cover every company/band/movie with an article or two. wp:corp needs to be tightened. As it is, there is an "arms race" for companies to get their information into WP because their competitors are there. This is especially the case for upstarts - I'm sure that Apple and Google are basically unconcerned about being included in WP because they ARE notable. I also assume that no one writes a WP article for a small company or a doctor's practice UNLESS they have a COI -- it's just not inherently interesting. I'd love to have a reason to reject or delete these articles. LaMona (talk) 16:49, 2 September 2015 (UTC)

• That applies to every form of press. Pages to fill. Look at the rubbish that gets into opinion columns, and Sunday supplements. All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 03:55, 7 September 2015 (UTC).
  

• Absolutely agree we need tighter notability requirements on business. It used to be that being in the Fortune 500 or traded on the NYSE was not sufficient notability. Now, according to The Independent "several wedding photography companies" were victims of the recent scam. Wedding photographers? Well perhaps if they are known for royal weddings and the like, but I don't see any need for "several wedding photography companies" in the entire encyclopedia. Three independent reliable sources that focus on the subject of the article should be a bare minimum. The single-store cafe on the corner might well come up with 3 reliable sources, especially if they advertise heavily in the local newspapers. Yes, I have seen an article on a 15 seat single-store cafe on Wikipedia. What we really need however is a bright-line rule. Perhaps sales of over $10,000,000 per year as reported in a reliable source or in a linked audited financial statement. That limit would likely let in a few hundred US restaurants - do we really need more than that? Smallbones_(smalltalk) 17:09, 2 September 2015 (UTC)
• Comment - agree in general, but it should be sufficient to enforce and clarify the general notability criteria for business topics. One re-occuring problem in particular: product announcements, feelgood interviews from branche-internal magazines and pre-reviews, before the product/artist/company are even really established, are often given too much weight. Such articles, often with little or no own neutrally researched content from the author, should not count towards our notability evaluation. They are often accepted with the argument "But it's a reliable source" - that argument is flawed: reliable sources are perfectly capable of writing promotional or other vanity fluff. GermanJoe (talk) 17:45, 2 September 2015 (UTC)
• Agree Notability requirements need to be tightened and specific notability criteria need to be re-examined. Many of the specific criteria are fine until that one criteria like two book reviews or one professional game etc. and WP:NCORP while detailed is pretty useless becuase of the volume of PR press. These loopholes pretty much gut GNG. The community could start by defining the term significant as its interpratation varies wildly amongst editors and it a great point to wikilawyer when trying to sway an AfD.

  Further, no matter the topic, all articles should have reliable sources and an expanded BLPPROD should be implemented in all topic areas, regardless to when the article was created and with the initial sourcing requirement the same as the removal requirement ie RS not 'any-source'.

  This will help deal with the paid editors trying to push low-notability material into Wikipedia and will allow it to be removed easier. Paid editors on high-notability subjects are a different matter and likely a different population in general. The best solution is ban all paid editing, rollback all edits made by paid editors and delete all articles made by paid editors. I find it objectionable that so much volunteer time is used a) tracking down bad edits by paid editors, or b) improving articles of marginal notability, than we can not delete, created by paid editors thereby allowing the subject that hired them to get free work from us. Jbh^Talk 18:20, 2 September 2015 (UTC)

• Agree with Risker. Andreas JN466 18:23, 2 September 2015 (UTC)
• I think tightening Notability is good, but it seems we need different proposals for Business/BLP's/products/services, although the higher standards - at this point - should probably have some kind of recentism/time restriction - I doubt that the problem is as severe with "historical" persons/entities. I also think it good, in terms of growth of knowledge and editor interest, to test all boundaries (like IAR) on some "obscure" but nonetheless "interesting" historical person/thing. Also, continued experimentation with what makes something "notable" enough for a corporation (or say, artist or scientist or businessperson or product) of 30 or 50 or 100 years ago, should help guide editors on "current" topics. Alanscottwalker (talk) 14:21, 3 September 2015 (UTC)
• With respect to Corp, I would also put-off expanding higher restrictions to cultural, non-profit, academic, and non-governmental, just to see how it works with the profit sector first. Alanscottwalker (talk) 14:42, 3 September 2015 (UTC)

• Not sure, if it makes sense to exclude non-profit organizations in that regard. After companies and minor artists, non-profits "for a good cause" are probably among the worst spammers on Wikipedia. I don't have anything against such good causes personally, but getting used for such campaigns not only violates notability guidelines but also Wikipedia's neutral stance as encyclopedia. GermanJoe (talk) 16:07, 6 September 2015 (UTC)

• Agree with Risker. The rate at which garbage is added to Wikipedia is proportional to the amount that is already there (per WP:OTHERSTUFFEXISTS as pointed out above) -- therefore the amount of garbage increases exponentially. Raise the bar. MER-C 02:45, 4 September 2015 (UTC)
• Agree Fundamentally we must ask ourselves what type of encyclopedia is worth building and then preserving. I find the advent of mass and elaborate, almost industrial scale, paid editing to be one of the most critical threats to the project. We have tens of thousands of articles on companies that are not worth keeping but very few tools to get rid of them. It would seem only a few articles written about them in large publications seem to sway deletion discussions towards GNG. While messy, the whole MMA controversy and subsequent standards that were put in place have netted a massive cleanup of those articles. Something similar needs to be put in place whereby corporations must demonstrate a level of notability at such a rate that GNG should be a given, not a marginal call by a handful of editors. Mkdw^talk 03:06, 4 September 2015 (UTC)
• Support. Long overdue. --Anthonyhcole (talk · contribs · email) 06:22, 4 September 2015 (UTC)
• Oppose in strongest possible fashion. WP:GNG is what it is. Making a 'special' WP:GNG that only applies to BLP-articles, or that only applies to corporation-articles, or that only applies to product-articles, is something that already exists. It is called Citizendium. There is good reason to have WP:MEDRS, real humans could literally die in real life, if wikipedia doesn't stick firmly to the statistically-safest-in-medical-outcome-terms sources. Using orangemoody as an excuse, to institute some kind of super-WP:42, and apply it to the 1.2 million BLP-articles we have nowadays, is the wet dream of all deletionists. But it would also likely be the biggest wheel-war of all time. And it would not help end paid-editing, because 99% of those BLP-articles will, within a couple years, be recreated BY UNDISCLOSED PAID EDITORS who suddenly find themselves with a vast demand for their covert "services". Blowback is the keyword here. Settle down people, and concentrate on solving the real problem: it took two months, so I hear, from the first detection of an orangemoody-type-operation, for the sting to actually happen. The problem is, how do we best adjust wikipedia's defenses, so that we can more easily detect (as far in advance as possible) any similar sort of FUTURE shakedown attempts, and nip them in the bud. Rewriting WP:42 has absolutely nothing to do with that goal, and everything to do with we-need-to-DO-something-and-deleting-half-a-million-lesser-known-BLP-articles-IS-doing-something. Doing something that will come back to bite us in the ass, to be specific. 75.108.94.227 (talk) 19:12, 4 September 2015 (UTC)
• Oppose any restriction beyond WP:GNG; support nuking the specialty guidelines and replacing them with a single general rule that members of a notable and well-defined set of topics, most of whose members are notable, can be supported by sources that describe them but are not primarily about them. Wnt (talk) 02:31, 5 September 2015 (UTC)

• The problem with GNG is that it is perhaps our most ambiguously open policy. What does significant mean when two equally notable topics receive vastly different amounts of coverage? Coverage scales depending on the topic. For example, pop culture topics receive considerably more coverage than academic subjects. Even inside a single topic like companies, certain companies will attract more attention than others but may not be anymore notable than its counterpart. It's for these reasons we weigh routine coverage that does not have enduring or lasting effects, in balance with "significant coverage" among other criteria and considerations. GNG is about finding notability. A singular metric to determine this when there are so many potential variables must be accounted for and adjusted against. Mkdw^talk 02:53, 5 September 2015 (UTC)

Notability guidelines are very frequently misinterpreted, and it sounds like you might have such a misinterpretation in mind. According to WP:GNG, "Significant coverage" addresses the topic directly and in detail, so that no original research is needed to extract the content. The rule is that the sources chosen must give significant attention to the topic of the article -- not that the sources must be 'significant' in the sense of some personal-bias evaluation of whether sports or professors are more worth writing about. The whole point of GNG is that it is a bare-minimum level of coverage where we can represent that we are able to cite more than one overall perspective on the topic from external, independent sources. We could go slightly less than this in cases of a topic that is well-defined within a broader set (i.e. if we want to write about an Olympic shotputter, we know what they do even though no one specifically explains what that person does; it may be sufficient to have just a few stats). But it's basically a question of whether we can source meaningful content, not a judgment of the importance of the subject. Wnt (talk) 03:12, 5 September 2015 (UTC)

I don't have a misinterpretation in mind and let's stick to the topic of the policy and not about me. It is after all what we're discussing. Mkdw^talk 03:45, 5 September 2015 (UTC)

• We should stop using the term notability, because it doesn't mean what it does in ordinary language, as proven by the continual misinterpretations of it here. What we mean is suitability for inclusion as a full article in an encyclopedia. This, in turn, depends on our own individual images of what sort of encyclopedia Wikipedia should be; but at least it has a meaning not at odds with the rest of the world. We include what we want to include, and adjust the wording and the interpretation of the guidelines to suit. We use the GNG when we care to, but modify it by tinkering with the meanings of the key terms "independent" and "significant coverage". For some topics we traditionally interpret this very loosely indeed (e.g. populated places, or songs) and for some very strictly (e.g. college sports, or politicians). Our statements of the alternate rules are designed to reduce some of the erraticness, and we use them when we want and not when we want. In some fields, the result is fairly consistent, but only because essentially all the active editors in the field more or less agree. The only real question I have to answer when someone asks me if a proposed topic is notable, is whether or not it will pass AfD. Though this sort of approach may not have a firm logical basis, its the only way we can operate in a system where the same people make the rules and make the exceptions. Since we define and run our own private universe, we can do with it whatever we want at the time, and cannot bind ourselves to do anything in the future. DGG ( talk ) 05:12, 5 September 2015 (UTC)
  • Notable turns I suppose on the word "noticed" which any reader of the DNB will know means "they were written about". GnG my seem obscure, but if you ask anyone to come up with broad inclusion criteria they will often come to a similar conclusion "things about which serious people write". All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 03:55, 7 September 2015 (UTC).
    
• Support, the extremely flexible interpretation of some specialised notability guidelines allow far too many thinly disguised advertisements to get through. There should be a stronger focus on every article needing to meet the WP:GNG, and a firm insistence on the use of high quality reliable sources, not the directory entries, press releases, and offhand mentions that get too many articles, particularly on businesses, through deletion discussions. Lankiveil ^{(speak to me)} 09:26, 5 September 2015 (UTC).
• A thousand times yes. Yes to Risker's full analysis and indictment of how low inclusion standards make these type of debacles a logical end. An even bigger yes to Risker's connection between low inclusion standards, pre-admin trepidation/pussyfooting, and the notability backlog. Yes to "nuking the specialty guidelines". Yes to putting the GNG over topic-specific guidelines and yes to excluding promotional press when determining notability. Yes to delayed deletion for articles its creators cannot bother to source. Yes to Jbhunley's placing editor support above fear of losing edge articles. Yes to easier removal of articles over letting them fester. Yes to Mkdw's not wasting time on GNG's liminality. Yes to dropping "notability" as a shortcut for "suitability for inclusion as a full article in an encyclopedia" or "things about which serious people write". Yes to three in-depth and reliable sources for every topic. Yes to ratcheting the definition of "significant coverage" to its high end. Yes to "super-WP:42". I'm a historian of education: I'm the last to believe that standards in themselves solve anything. They can, however, serve a moral end: our willingness to muck around in the GNG as a tipping point (rather than putting the bar above the GNG) is itself the ambiguity that enables Orangemoody's extortive play of AfD and the low bar of entry for "me too" articles of every flavor. Low inclusion standards enable our easily swayed AfDs, our notability backlogs and pre-admin general unwillingness to participate in difficult calls, our preference for unsourced and rotting content over no content at all, and our perpetuation of a Who's Who over an encyclopedia. Our permissiveness has enabled junk content. I hope we are reaching a consensus to clean house.  – czar 22:08, 7 September 2015 (UTC)

• Support The question now, is how to implement? Jytdog (talk) 23:55, 7 September 2015 (UTC)

How to implement?

Thoughts? Jytdog (talk) 23:55, 7 September 2015 (UTC)

3. Increase requirements for new articles

Increase how long someone must be editing before they can create a new article without going through AfC. Maybe 6 months and 500 edits?

Discuss

• Most articles in the Orangemoody case were actually taken from declined AfCs or Drafts. After that either a redirect was created that was then later populated by article text, or the article was recreated in sandbox and moved to article space. Technical measures around curating such pages would probably help better raising user requirements. Keegan (talk) 03:21, 1 September 2015 (UTC)

• Yes good point they could just put the text at a redirect. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 03:24, 1 September 2015 (UTC)

• I would accept implementing the consensus at Wikipedia:Autoconfirmed article creation trial to run a trial to require autoconfirmed status to create or move articles into article space. (Please Doc, use your super WMF powers to make it happen) Ideally I think a 1 month, 100 edit requirement (and perhaps getting one or two articles through AfC could be an alternative way to gain article creation rights). This would prevent most speedy deletions in article space from occurring as that is sufficient experience to understand the basics of article writing, thereby increasing editor retention as new editors don't have their articles speedy deleted. Winner 42 Talk to me! 05:11, 1 September 2015 (UTC)

• @Winner 42: I've dedicated the greatest portion of my wiki-career to helping new editors create articles, primarily in #wikipedia-en-help where I was a founder for several years, to my general CSD deletions. There is no amount of ACTRIAL or other confirmations that will deter this. Money is a far greater motive than meeting arbitrary software targets. Keegan (talk) 05:39, 1 September 2015 (UTC)
• As this sockfarm was sufficiently organised to get their new accounts autoconfirmed, any extra measures we now take can forget ACTRIAL or any other solution based on the idea that only goodfaith editors stay long enough to get autoconfirmed. ϢereSpielChequers 11:18, 1 September 2015 (UTC)

• The suggestion is to have different levels of "autoconfirmed" with a higher one for new articles. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 18:52, 1 September 2015 (UTC)

• Currently you don't need to be autoconfirmed to create new articles, and ACTRIAL, the proposal to limit new article creation to autoconfirmed users, was vetoed by the WMF. Since the OrangeMooody sockfarm was sufficiently organised to get accounts auto confirmed it is reasonable to assume that they would do what was necessary to get the new higher level of confirmation. Which raises the question about auto confirmation based proposals, what is the point of making things still more difficult for editors who don't use the services of organisations like OrangeMoody? ϢereSpielChequers 09:47, 2 September 2015 (UTC)

• Unfortunately, I agree that any rules on editing longevity or numbers of edits will be thwarted by clever COIs. I think the only way to manage this is on real world criteria like references and notability, which are less manipulable than WP accounts. LaMona (talk) 16:53, 2 September 2015 (UTC)

• Sure and CU can be gotten around by clever COIs. Are you suggesting we get rid of checkuser? These people are generally lazy and will try whatever to make money that is the easiest. If that is by scamming people via Wikipedia they will do it. This is why many people lock their cars and doors. Locks on your car or door will not stop a dedicated thief but no one would propose we outlay locks because it does not stop all thieves. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 20:44, 2 September 2015 (UTC)

• As per CU, I don't see the connection with what I said, which related to edit longevity, etc. Let's stay on topic. What we need is something that is directly related to the goals and the policies, and I don't think that numbers of edits or the time of an account get us very far, especially since there are no controls on who can create accounts. Since we don't want to start asking for an identifier (e.g. verified email address) for accounts, they are very squishy. I think trying to use those would not be a good use of everyone's time. LaMona (talk) 03:48, 3 September 2015 (UTC)

• People are forgetting that WP:ACTRIAL was born directly out of the need to address the abysmal quality of New Page Patrolling. As a consolation prize, the WMF built the new, new page patrolling software, but it is still only any good in the right hands. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 08:40, 3 September 2015 (UTC)

• Article creation should be restricted to users with more than 5,000 edits and 1 year activity. If a newbie wishes to create an article, he can ask an experencied user to do that. In this way, a lot of problematic creations could be prevented. If an experienced user creates too many problematic new articles, he can be approached about that. Ziko (talk) 16:16, 4 September 2015 (UTC)

• We used to require less than that to appoint admins! If the WMF wouldn't accept 10 edits and 2 days they won't accept this, also edit count is a flawed metric, an editor with 50,000 Huggle edits might never have cited a source and be less qualified to write new articles than an editor with 500 manual edits each of which took an hour of reading and research. ϢereSpielChequers 16:38, 4 September 2015 (UTC)

Agree with User:Kudpung. Also, this will backfire, and make the likelihood of future-undisclosed-paid-editor-shakedowns-of-the-much-larger-and-much-longer-AfC-queue vastly higher. The reason that the orangemoody socks had such success, is *because* the existing 'within ten days somebody will leave an obscure one-line comment declining your article' problem we have with the existing AfC queue. The pool of potential future-orangemoody-esque victims, when anybody with less than six months of editing must go through the AfC queue, will be Much Larger^TM. p.s. I support 100% the existing AfC volunteers... or well, 99% of them anyways... who do a good job. But more volunteers are needed, if we want to minimize the pool of orangemoody-victims-aka-recent-AfC-declines-that-are-frustrated-and-unsure-of-the-wiki-rules. 75.108.94.227 (talk) 19:17, 4 September 2015 (UTC)

I didn't know about Orangemoody at the time, in fact it was this post of mine of mine at DGG's talk page that put me on to it. After all these years I have an almost 6th sense when a new article is not quite kosher, but that particular article is typical of what less experienced patrollers will pass as patrolled without a second thought. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 23:32, 4 September 2015 (UTC)

• Oppose artificial restrictions on article creation. There are plenty of ways for paid editors to mess with articles by favoring deletion, changing content, and so forth. New editors are often motivated by desire to document something of their own, and restricting them hurts the growth of the encyclopedia. Clever spammers should have little trouble pumping their accounts up with an automated sequence of fake interactions with each other. Wnt (talk) 02:35, 5 September 2015 (UTC)
• We will accept what articles we please. What we must do, when working out how articles get submitted, is to give people as consistent advice and help as is possible. The only way to know what will stay in Wikipedia is to try, and the only people who can predict what will happen is the experienced Wikipedians with a knowledge of what tends to happen here. (I word it as tends to happen here, because nobody can ever be sure.) But the advice given by beginners to other beginners is relatively worthless, and often perverse, and we need to protect our good faith contributors from it. Wnt, think of it not as changing the requirements for new articles, but the way in which new articles are evaluated. What we basically need is a way that makes sure to expose all contributions to scrutiny, especially contributions from new editors. We are not discriminating against new editors, we are trying to assist them: for new good faith editors, we are trying to assist them to write acceptable articles; for new promotional editors, we are trying to assist them to leave WP without wasting their time and ours. DGG ( talk ) 05:23, 5 September 2015 (UTC)
• Strong oppose. I could accept a limitation on non-autoconfirmed users, but 500 edits/6 months? Seriously? In my opinion, we sometimes overreact disproportionately with proposals like these and give the sockmasters the attention they wanted all along. It should first be noted that AfC is already backlogged, so sending an enormous amount of new articles there would backlog it even further and consequently it would likely be many months before good articles were reviewed and approved, likely after being subjected to a few rejections due to individual reviewer's detailed criteria. ("Rejected–unsourced paragraph (on a non-BLP)." ... "Rejected–sources improperly formatted.") Do we really want this? Secondly, as a direct result of what I mentioned above, this stringent process would very likely discourage good-faith new users from participating here, due to the difficulty involved in simply publishing an article. I thought we were struggling to gain new editors and retain the editors we already have. Are all these potentially drastic consequences worth keeping a few paid editors away? Surely, there are better ways to go about this. Finally, the WMF rejected the ACTRIAL. I should note that I in fact disagreed with their unilateral rejection of community consensus, but no matter what we think, what would keep them from simply rejecting a much stricter requirement like this one? --Biblioworm 15:42, 5 September 2015 (UTC)

4. Create a new group of functionaries

Arbcom is clear that they do not see it as within their remit to enforce the TOU. We need a group of people who can receive concerns around paid editing that cannot be posted on wiki due to issues around privacy.

Discuss

• I disagree. To me this is about overall juggling of titular responsibility. In practice the communities have no trouble enforcing their remits; it's arguments over remits that pass things to the WMF - or actual out-of-hands things - when a stalemate is reached. We'd rather have an arbitrary judgement than a stalemate. I'd rather have a stalement than an arbitrary judgement most of the time. Keegan (talk) 06:07, 1 September 2015 (UTC)
• As has been repeatedly explained, the only group of people who can reliably make judgements about many TOU violators are the WMF as they are the only people with all of the time, tools, expertise and access to information to distinguish joe jobs from real humans. As an arbitrator who has been involved in trying to determine a connection between an off-site identity and a Wikipedia editor, it is not possible to do this with sufficient accuracy even with a group of people with arbitrator-level access. Thryduulf (talk) 08:53, 1 September 2015 (UTC)

• Yes creation of this group would be closely done with the legal team. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 18:48, 1 September 2015 (UTC)

• This needs to be a meta level proposal so the group has the remit to tackle spam that runs across several languages. We also have the problem that Arbcom has historically been so busy that it burns members out, so spinning this out as a separate role makes sense. As for whether it should be run by staff or volunteers, first lets establish if the community wants this to happen, second we need to establish if we have volunteers to make it happen. If the community wants it to happen but can't get volunteers then we need to see if the community wants it enough to add to the list of things that volunteers want to have happen, aren't finding sufficient volunteers for, and therefore are prepared to pay people to do. ϢereSpielChequers 13:16, 1 September 2015 (UTC)

• Yes agree will need to be a meta level proposal. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 00:07, 2 September 2015 (UTC)

• I hear arbcom members saying they can't do it, so obviously a new group of functionaries are needed. I don't see that this is much different from checkuser functions: private and incomplete data have to be analyzed and a decision has to be made if Wikipedia is going to keep on working. Somebody should take this to the WMF board if necessary. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 17:28, 2 September 2015 (UTC)
• Instead of volunteer functionaries the meta-discussion should propose the Foundation put together a small group of paid professionals to enforce the TOU. This is preferable from a legal standpoint as TOU enforcement is a legal question that has financial implications both for the subjects and the paid editors. If a volunteer team is used to suplement the professionals they need to be covered as agents of the Foundation. Anarchy is well and good but there must be dedicated and identified agents of the Foundation who can contact those entities who are violating the TOU and who can speak on behalf of the the Foundation - the entity with whom the TOU agreement is with. We, as editors, do not have the standing to enforce the TOU beyond the virtual space of Wikipedia itself and no real legal authority there. Jbh^Talk 18:32, 2 September 2015 (UTC)

I think it's fairly clear from this idea and others that technical solutions alone, volunteer community solutions alone, and legal solutions alone won't work. We need an integrated approach that uses the strengths of each set appropriately. The technical solutions could take some of the routine patrolling burden off of the volunteers. The volunteers can do what's appropriate for them and forward serious legal stuff to WMF Legal. Legal will have to do the black magic that only they can do. But this can form a virtuous circle where better machine- and volunteer-level stuff will give Legal more time to handle the things that really turn off the problem at its source. It's pretty clear to me at this point that the army of darkness that we're talking about fighting here is an organized, criminal-level enterprise and needs to be treated as such. In this regard I'd like to even go to "some next level shit" with US authorities, if WMF Legal hits a dead end. To me, the Orangemoody case looks like a RICO situation that they'd be interested in. — Brianhe (talk) 18:39, 2 September 2015 (UTC)

A number of those involved are in Indian and Pakistan and hired via Elance/Fiverr/Odesk. The US gov does not really have jurisdiction over were at least a part of the problem is coming from. Some of these paid accounts are working in 5 plus languages.

I agree this is going to need the community and foundation to work together. For the community to realize that we are here to write an encyclopedia not to try to create some utopian anonymous movement. That we need to adjust our perspective and rules to accomplish the new reality out their. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 20:49, 2 September 2015 (UTC)

Online behavior has consequences

We shouldn't give up that easily because of non-US actor involvement, and I don't even agree that the US authorities are powerless. The services they are using to recruit overseas WP actors (Elance/Upwork) are US based and subject to its jurisdiction. There's a lot that the feds can do, once they decide to do it. Even overseas servers like The Pirate Bay and enterprises with no local nexus like Silk Road (marketplace) aren't beyond the reach of the law. I'm pretty sure that Elance didn't agree to help WP turn off the flow of recruitment of undisclosed paid editors out of the goodness of their heart. Nobody running a business wants to see records subpoenas, servers seized for evidence, or even domain takedowns (see image). — Brianhe (talk) 21:59, 2 September 2015 (UTC)

BTW, Blackshades describes the kind of Federal response I'm talking about.

Yucel ran his organization like a business—hiring and firing employees, paying salaries, and updating the malicious software in response to customers’ requests. He employed several administrators to facilitate the operation of the organization, including a director of marketing, a website developer, a customer service manager, and a team of customer service representatives.

— FBI

There are some parallels with Orangemoody: organized, employed nature of the ring and the extortion/racketeering bit (they were holding malwarezinfected PCs for ransom). — Brianhe (talk) 23:31, 2 September 2015 (UTC)

This one I actually support in some fashion, though of course, the devil is in details. There was alleged evidence, that I personally stumbled across, of some kind of nasty AfC-related business going on, from a usertalk conversation. And, I was hesitant to say anything. Because what could I say, without WP:ABF? The good-apple victim, who had their AfC-declined-article hijacked by a bad-apple editor (who later turned out to be an orangemoody sock), was complaining on an admin-page about something unrelated, and then mentioned that they didn't want to work with the other editor, not because of WP:OWN, but because (allegedly at the time) they claimed the other editor had demanded money via off-wiki channels. I would have reported that, instantly... but whom to report it to?

    Not AN/I, there was no diff, it was an allegation about off-wiki stuff. Not to a checkuser, at the time there was no indication that the bad-apple was a sockfarm. I suppose WP:COIN would have been appropriate, kinda-sorta, but in that particular case, at that particular time, no money had actually changed hands, and even the allegation that one of the editors involved *might* have wanted to be paid-and-undisclosed, was pretty flimsy. So yeah, it would definitely have helped if there was something similar to #wikipedia-en-revdel ^connect , where I could have reported my suspicions about the bad-apple editor (who was NOT blocked as an orangemoody sock until about a week later), without worrying about WP:NICE.

    Now, that said, I'm a firm defender of WP:AGF on-wiki, since I believe it makes the wiki-culture bearable, and any pure-text-only enviroment is going to have communication failtures and misunderstandings aplenty, so it is essential that WP:NICE is one of our pillars, hereabouts. But when I heard the guy from the Turkish startup say, "she asks for money to make it live again! Isn't it clearly an abuse of use of Wikipedia?" ... well, fuck yeah it's an abuse of wikipedia, but without a diff, where can I report such alleged off-wiki abuse, without violating WP:NPA myself? WP:NOTBUREAUCRACY is one of my favorite wiki-policies, but in the particular case of suspicions-about-potential-off-wiki-demands-for-cash-or-else-it-would-be-a-shame-what-might-happen-to-your-nice-article, I definitely think there needs to be some IRC-based or email-a-functionary-based channel, where I can explain that although I have no actual diff, my spidey-wiki-senses are tingling. 75.108.94.227 (talk) 19:31, 4 September 2015 (UTC)

• There is an excellent way to solve the problem that "ArbCom is clear that they do not see it as within their remit to enforce the TOU." (And, as Keegan says, this is mainly a matter of relative priorities, not absolute refusal). ArbCom elections are coming up in a month or two. People who think ArbCom should make this a much higher priority, and are prepared to do the necessary work, should run for ArbCom, and should make it clear that this is part of the reason they are running. Half or a little more than half of the ArbCom positions will be open this year, and there are a few of us on ArbCom who do already see this as a priority. The very last thing we need at WP is another body of functionaries — we need more effective operation by the existing groups. Then, we need to complement this by the willingness of the WMF to support this with LEGAL and their other capabilities; the current effort is a good first start. DGG ( talk ) 00:11, 5 September 2015 (UTC)
• It's surprising to hear that ArbCom don't consider the ToU as part of their remit when I've seen plenty of blocks by other admins citing the lack of any disclosue per the ToU as the reason for a block. In regards to a new group of functionaries - one problem I foresee would be that editors who are very active in the COI area and not all admins and even if they are, do not necessarily have the experience or community trust to have the extra tools. If they are trusted then they should be CUs but I don't see a need for a separate group. I agree though that we need a group that handles off-wiki evidence though which would include non-admins. Could there be a mailing list to which WP:OTRS would forward information to the group to investigate? SmartSE (talk) 22:56, 8 September 2015 (UTC)

5. Allow some links on En WP

Allow the linking to Elance/Upwork accounts on Wikipedia. Currently it is not clear if this is allowed or not.

Discuss

• We should not loosen WP:OUTING because of bad actors. Keegan (talk) 06:04, 1 September 2015 (UTC)

People currently link to Elance accounts. Most do not consider it outing. Thus this would not be a change to outing just a confirmation of current practice. For example

We should not allow the misuse interpretation of our guidelines to protect bad actors. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 06:46, 1 September 2015 (UTC)

• Loosing WP:OUTING is the very last thing we should be doing. It's OK to link in cases of self-disclosure on Wikipedia, and in cases where it is conclusively proven, e.g. by CU, that user:X here is user:X or user:Y there. It is never acceptable to out someone on the basis of suspicion or fishing. Thryduulf (talk) 09:02, 1 September 2015 (UTC)

• I agree that loosening OUTING is not the way we want to go here. However, the community is currently between a rock and a hard place in cases of abusive paid editing: we can't discuss paid editing evidence onwiki, because outing, and we can't submit it to arbcom, because arbcom says paid editing is neither their job nor their problem (and that even if it were, they can't investigate things to their own satisfaction and thus couldn't do anything about it). The community is left with no real option for handling cases involving abusive paid editing. If we don't want exasperated people trying to handle it onwiki for lack of other options, then either Arbcom is going to have to start being willing to deal with these cases, or we are going to have to, as suggested above, consider creating a new group that is empowered to do it instead. A fluffernutter is a sandwich! (talk) 15:07, 1 September 2015 (UTC)

• Outing does not disallow the posting of these links to Elance if you look at the examples . Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 18:55, 1 September 2015 (UTC)

• I also don't see the point in this. If their editing is bad we will spot it (eventually) and if the fact that they are advertising on elance is crucial to an investigation it can be dealt with off-wiki. It would be a slippery slope to loosen OUTING. SmartSE (talk) 12:53, 2 September 2015 (UTC)

Posting links to other websites is NOT outing per se. Quoting WP:OUTING:

"Posting links to other accounts on other websites is allowable on a case-by-case basis."

....

"If ... personally identifying material is important to the COI discussion, then it should be emailed privately to an administrator or arbitrator – but not repeated on Wikipedia: it will be sufficient to say that the editor in question has a COI and the information has been emailed to the appropriate administrative authority. Issues involving private personal information (of anyone) could also be referred by email to a member of the functionaries team."

So it is not a question of whether we can report links to elance/upworks. The only question is how we can do this in the proper manner. I don't think it is completely clear who to report it to in order to have it acted upon. ArbCom has been very skittish on this - so where exactly should we report it? We can address that question. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 14:55, 2 September 2015 (UTC)

The "case by case" wording was inserted without real consensus. There was a massive discussion a few months ago about it, and there was consensus against allowing it in any of the cases suggested. Speaking as an arbitrator, we do not have the time, skills or resources to carry out investigations of this nature. Thryduulf (talk) 15:42, 2 September 2015 (UTC)

There has to be somewhere to report it - otherwise you appear to be saying "we don't have a policy on paid editing" which is just not the case. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 17:33, 2 September 2015 (UTC)

Then figure out which body of people does have the required time, skills and resources. Thryduulf (talk) 18:04, 2 September 2015 (UTC)

I've sent stuff in to functionaries and it seems like a black hole, sorry guys. What would really be better from my point of view is some kind of locked repository with a receipt that could be referred to. In other words, hypothetical example: I email my Elance link and evidence of real-world identity to a certain email address and get back a unique token in reply. Now I can refer to this token in a sockpuppet investigation or COIN case. Users with appropriate credentials can open the file by the token I supplied. Ideally there'd be transparency via audit trail as to who has shared what with whom. I don't see why the audit trail shouldn't be public, though maybe during an investigation it should not be. I think I'll develop the idea of a community investigation toolset a bit farther in a new subsection of this page. — Brianhe (talk) 18:23, 2 September 2015 (UTC)

As stated above User:Smartse our primary goal is not to create an anonymous group on the Internet it is to write a neutral encyclopedia. OUTING is not the be all and end all of everything. It is not a policy that we should try to interpret as widely as possible such that we can allow bad actors to do whatever they want and make encyclopedia writing impossible. OUTING does not cover linking to Elance and it never has. We do it all the time.

For example you want to disallow links like this [1]. What should we do about these sort of things? Yes arbcom wants nothing to do with paid editing. We get that. We need a new group of functionaries to do this work. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 21:26, 2 September 2015 (UTC)

I don't see any problem with that link but some editors use their real names on elance and linking to those constitutes outing which always taken precedence. The problem is with the content rather than the contributor and if elance accounts claim to have written articles then we should certainly investigate them and clean up as necessary. That doesn't require us to link to the account though and if we were to, it opens up people to harassment. As much as I dislike undisclosed paid editing I don't think it is worth compromising RL identities unnecessarily. I think that pursuing the sites where ads are posted and persuading them to not allow the ads is a better idea as this would stop the problem at the source. I'll deal with your functionaries suggestion above. SmartSE (talk) 22:12, 2 September 2015 (UTC)

There is a possibly a real name in this link [2] now that someone has sign up for the job. User:Smartse do you plan to oversight it and take me to arbcom to get me banned?

The problem you have is that their is no consensus that linking to this type of site is outing even if real names are present.

If this is outing 100s of dedicated non paid WPs would be banned. Would leave Wikipedia to the paid socks which they would probably like.

When you say "compromising RL identities unnecessarily" can you define when it is necessary? Does necessary include undisclosed paid editing? Or is necessary never in your opinion? Some of the Orangemoody accounts have real names attached to them. It is possible that use blocking all these accounts potentially affected some RL identities? Should we have not blocked these socks in your opinion? Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 22:25, 2 September 2015 (UTC)

Of course not - you haven't linked it to a user here for starters. I would say that it is never necessary to link when we can communicate off-wiki. If you or I (and many others) say that a group of articles are linked to elance ads people trust us and can look for themselves to see if the content is problematic. And yes of course those accounts should have been blocked, but what's that got to do with this? If they choose to use their real names here then obviously they do that at their own risk, but we shouldn't take any glee from identifying them. SmartSE (talk) 22:48, 2 September 2015 (UTC)

There is a real name attached to the Elance link. What if tomorrow that person now says I have added your link to page X. And low and behold tomorrow we find a new link was added to page X by a brand new user. Would we need to than oversight this link? Does outing an account before it exists count as outing? The question I have is just how crazy is our WP:OUTING policy anyway?

You still have not answered my other question though. Is their any case in which potentially compromising someones identify is necessary? (P.S. I doubt many of the accounts on Elance are real names anyway but that is another issue)

Per here "never necessary to link when we can communicate off-wiki" you are saying most follow up of paid editing needs to be done off-wiki using private communication. I guess we could have a closed wiki were paid editing discussions take place. But this appears to be a request that we try to deal with paid editing with one hand tied behind our backs.

As the Orangemody case exemplifies us NOT dealing with paid editing is hurting a lot of people. We need to at least admit that taking such a hard line on outing hurts other people. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 23:43, 2 September 2015 (UTC)

• I'm going to say something heretical for someone on ArbCom, and something which the other arbs would almost certainly disagree with: We do need to revise WP:OUTING, to permit easier on-wiki identification of people who want to destroy WP. This would perhaps require a change in the Foundation's privacy policies, so I suppose DocJames is the best point person here. We will never be able to stop abusive COI editing while we have the principle of anonymity. I doubt any of us, including myself, are at this point ready to give up that principle altogether, but we can stop some of the abuse if we modify it. (But I'm not yet quite sure of what we would want to change it to.) DGG ( talk ) 00:16, 5 September 2015 (UTC)

• Geez, I've been complaining about the tension between COI and OUTING for years, nice it have it recognized by someone in a position of authority. BMK (talk) 02:22, 5 September 2015 (UTC)
• "People who want to destroy WP"? In the current context, we're talking about people who want to make a quick buck and have settled on scheming and scamming, not malevolent cartoon villains. Opabinia regalis (talk) 06:32, 5 September 2015 (UTC)

• I think it's absurd to say that "WP:OUTING" prohibits linking to evidence of illegitimate paid editing. The TOU ban undisclosed paid editing; therefore, paid editing by someone who did not disclose it is not personal editor information, but TOU violation. Opposition research is wrong when you use it to present ad hominem arguments against an editor based on his offsite expressions of belief, etc; it's not wrong when you use it as direct evidence that he is violating Wikipedia policy. Wnt (talk) 02:40, 5 September 2015 (UTC)

  "If you violate the terms of use, even unknowingly or in a borderline way, we will dox you" is probably not a great PR move. Letting the community's most enthusiastic self-appointed Defenders of the Wiki do it would be a disaster. Opabinia regalis (talk) 06:32, 5 September 2015 (UTC)

  • An even worse PR move is stating "come and add you spam to WP anonymously with your armies of socks as we have decided that we are primarily an experiment in anonymity and only a little bit an encyclopedia. You can thus run your for profit WP editing business and we will ban anyone who exposes it". And unfortunately this is the message we are currently sending out loud and clear. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 07:06, 5 September 2015 (UTC)

    Being so cavalier and dismissive about online privacy concerns is a systemic bias issue. Remember all the kerfuffle after the Google launch about their real name policy? (Once upon a time people cared about Google .) There were a lot of women and people of color who used pseudonyms and felt strongly about it. Potentially exposing people to stalking and harassment as a response to their possibly violating a website's terms of use is inappropriate. Opabinia regalis (talk) 08:24, 5 September 2015 (UTC)

• Two points. If we get agreement to ban freelance paid editing, the need for some of this goes away. Second, this idea was discussed a lot and did not win consensus at arn RfC here. If this were going to re-proposed it would need to be in a way tailored to meet the objections raised there. As noted this may not be possible without a different Arbcom and without help from WMF in modifying the privacy policy at that level and with promise of support from WMF legal to tailor the proposal and offer suggestions for implementation. Jytdog (talk) 00:05, 8 September 2015 (UTC)

6. Allow corporate accounts

These accounts are verified and have a corporate name attached to them. They are not allowed to directly edit articles. Allowing corporations a way to engage may prevent many of them from going to paid editors.

Discuss

• I think this would have had more merit for en.wiki prior to the update ToU. Before that, following the German Model (flagging role accounts that represent people/companies is what the German Wikipedia does) could have been much more practical. Now it's far easier to register a PR account in your own name and list your employer, and just edit the talk page. The problem is with paid editors that do not choose to follow the ToU. This is the internet, there's no hard solution there. Keegan (talk) 06:03, 1 September 2015 (UTC)
• I would allow accounts operated by individuals to include corporate names in their username, e.g. user:Brian (Notable Corporation) or user:Alison (Llanelli PR Agents Ltd). I don't like the idea of role accounts so much, as one employee should not be punished for the actions of a colleague. Thryduulf (talk) 09:09, 1 September 2015 (UTC)

  These accounts are not speaking on behalf of individuals. They are speaking on behalf of companies. As companies are people to they deserve their own accounts no? Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 18:57, 1 September 2015 (UTC)

  Companies are not people though. Brian is an employee of Notable Corporation who can speak on behalf of his employer, and part of his role is to manage the online presence of Notable Corporation. Brian should have an account that is officially linked to Notable Corporation. Catherine works in the same team for the same company, she should also have an count that is officially linked to Notable Corporation. This way Catherine doesn't get punished if Brian is unable to follow the rules. Thryduulf (talk) 19:10, 1 September 2015 (UTC)

  Yes wouldn't have issues with separate accounts. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 00:09, 2 September 2015 (UTC)

• "Corporate account" names are already allowed per WP:ISU--see bullet 4. --Izno (talk) 11:31, 2 September 2015 (UTC)
• Allow "User:Brian (Notable Corporation)" but require an OTRS declaration to prevent joe jobs against Notable Corp., and prohibit them from editing article pages on their employer, competitors, and suppliers with a paid editing disclosure required. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 17:42, 2 September 2015 (UTC)

See ongoing RfC here: Wikipedia_talk:Username_policy#RfC_-_should_we_allow_company_account_names_with_verification Andreas JN466 18:15, 2 September 2015 (UTC)

• Oppose. Wikipedia should not place itself in the position of being a master of trademarks, because it will not stay in that position. What happens when someone gets a company account, then gets fired? The company wants the account taken away, obviously. So we keep track of who is and isn't employed for each company? What about when it's a small affair, a limited partnership where one partner had the account and now there's a falling out? How careful do we have to be that we don't let a prankster take out an account in the name of the company and then embarrass it? I don't want us in the position of a DNS service, getting a constant stream of legal orders to control who we 'control' as the owner of what name. Wnt (talk) 02:44, 5 September 2015 (UTC)

7. Delete articles by paid editors

Once an editor is confirmed to be a paid sockpuppet/undisclosed paid editor we should simply delete the articles they have created. We do not have the editor numbers to fix them all. And typically they are mostly of borderline notability.

Possibly, but only if they have not been adopted by genuine community editors. All their articles should certainly be examined to see if they meet any speedy criteria, and deleted if they do. Any criteria like this must apply only if the breach of the ToU was intentional. If someone was genuinely unaware of the ToU requirements, or tried and failed to meet them (e.g. because of misunderstanding) and complies when educated then their prior work should not be deleted unless it meets normal criteria - these are the people we want to avoid driving to undisclosed paid editing. Thryduulf (talk) 09:16, 1 September 2015 (UTC)

Yes exactly "only if they have not been adopted by genuine community editors". Most of them havn't as they are non notable topics. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 18:56, 1 September 2015 (UTC)

Actually, there are quite a few Orangemoody article subjects who are or might be notable enough for an article. Not all paid editing is about non-notable subjects. Thryduulf (talk) 19:11, 1 September 2015 (UTC)

I did not say NONE of the paid editing is about notable subjects. I said MOST of it isn't. We have a list of articles here [3]. We could calculate just how many are notable. However to my eye the answer is not many. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 00:52, 2 September 2015 (UTC)

Now you are conflating "articles created by Orangmoody socks" with "articles edited by paid editors", the first is only a subset of the latter. Thryduulf (talk) 10:22, 2 September 2015 (UTC)

This could be added to Criteria for Speedy Deletion, but the articles could be recreated without prejudice by other editors, or kept if other editors have made significant contributions. There is really no way to tell if somebody unintentionally violated ToU, so I'd just leave that out. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 15:20, 2 September 2015 (UTC)

You find out if someone unintentionally violated the TOU by asking them. If they respond that yes they are paid but didn't realise they were breaking the TOU (either through unawareness or misunderstanding) and correct their mistake(s) going forward then the breach was not intentional and their work should not be deleted. I think any speedy criterion for this would have to be related to G5, which normally applies only to pages created after the user was blocked, but could (if there is consensus at WT:CSD for it) be applied retroactively if the user was banned for breaching the TOU regarding paid editing. Thryduulf (talk) 15:40, 2 September 2015 (UTC)

Yes - Simply remove the work of those who violate the TOU. After the removal they can go through a process to have the work un-deleted if they are good faith editors or truely did not understand what they were doing. Making deletion the default makes it much harder for AGF to be gamed. It is very easy for an account to say 'ooppss I'll never do that again' have their material kept, have some actual good faith editor improve the marginal material and accomplish their contract. They can then create another account and do it again, and again, and again. Maintaining 5000000 articles is a non-trivial task we should take pains that paid editors do not increase that load by adding material that would never have been added but for the subject paying for it to be included here. Jbh^Talk 18:44, 2 September 2015 (UTC)

Yes - this has to be done. As of now the paid editors face insufficient cost. This would raise the cost of discovery quite a bit. Also it would disincentive them to play games at PROD or AfDs (like this, hello Orangemoody minions), which further raises costs on our side. It should be understood that a lot of the contracts stipulate that they only get paid if the article survives N days after placement. — Brianhe (talk) 18:53, 2 September 2015 (UTC)

• I think WP:BLOWITUP should be enforced in these cases. Professional editors will have no troubles purchasing and running systems to get around the technical blocks and therefore lose very little if their promotional article remains preserved. Mkdw^talk 03:11, 4 September 2015 (UTC)

We have essentially been enforcing BLOWUP, in our response to COI in general, and the Orangemoody group in particular. Consensus at AfD has also been increasingly accepting the argument that Lack of notability is not the only reason for deletion. Borderline notability combined with clear promotionalism is an equally good reason. Small variations to the notability standard either way do not fundamentally harm the encycopedia, but accepting articles that are part of a promotional campaign causes great damage. Once we become a vehicle for promotion, we're useless as an encycopedia. Individual action here can help, and what is needed is first, increasing scrutiny of article to detect the COI,and assistance at AfD and elsewhere in removing it.

But some of the Orangemoody articles have previously deleted versions that — while having COI — do not have the greater contamination of the extortion. It may be possible to use this material. And, for the minority of the subjects who are clearly notable, an independent article can be written. I do not think it is fair to refuse properly encyclopedic articles on appropriate subjects because the subjects have been victims of extortion. I don't propose restoring articles immediately — we want the effect of the removal. But, after a year or so, I think the list of deletions will merit re-examination. Similarly for other COI. Five and six years ago, I consistently argued against WP:BLOWITUP, and not in the interest of producing content for an encyclopedia. But now, with promotionalism so great a danger, priorities have changed. Blow it up, to be sure, but then build again properly. DGG ( talk ) 02:08, 5 September 2015 (UTC)

If the BLOWNUP articles were about truly notable subjects, the pressure to have an article on them would be such that regular editors would naturally, over a period of years, be creating them. Any subject which has escaped attention after some period of time, with no one missing them being missing, is probably not all that notable to begin with. BMK (talk) 02:17, 5 September 2015 (UTC)

DGG I certainly agree there could be valuable encyclopedic content. If these paid articles are written by skilled writers who are familiar with our policies, then it will be more and more difficult to spot COI, and the articles will blend in ever increasing amounts with regular content. Nonetheless it also means the content will meet our inclusion criteria. Lists like Wikipedia:Long-term abuse/Orangemoody/Articles would be useful for genuine editors to examine and perhaps WP:REFUND to a draft space could also be used for those editors wanting to work on these topics. Mkdw^talk 04:46, 5 September 2015 (UTC)

@DGG: Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Wyangala is an interesting example that only highlights my point that the AFD community isn't prepared to use WP:TNT as a valid deletion rationale without instructions put in place to do so. TNT was used for Orangemoody and a few other SPI/paid editing incidents, but perhaps has not been adopted as the standard practice. Mkdw^talk 04:23, 7 September 2015 (UTC)

• Support - "Blow it up" can be used in a number of cases, on a case-by-case basis. As Brianhe points out, this remedy puts a hurt on those gaming the system at Wikipedia, and those who would profit by said gaming. As DGG observes, articles can be rebuilt as deemed notable. Jusdafax 05:28, 5 September 2015 (UTC)
• Support, agree entirely with the notion of a speedy deletion criteria for articles created in violation of the TOU, although this should only apply if there's actual evidence of a breach and not merely a suspicion. Lankiveil ^{(speak to me)} 09:28, 5 September 2015 (UTC).

8. CorpProd for businesses

BLPprod has raised the bar for BLPs, we could do something similar for businesses. A sticky prod that required "from this date all new articles on commercial businesses must have at least one reference to an independent reliable source" would give an uncontentious source it or it gets deleted deletion route for those articles that are only sourced to the business's site. ϢereSpielChequers 09:10, 1 September 2015 (UTC)

This is the best idea I've seen so far. It would need to disallow news stories that are basically a rewording of the press release and mentions in business directories, but that's detail that should be easily worked out. Thryduulf (talk) 09:18, 1 September 2015 (UTC)

• I'd boost this to at least 3 references that consist of editorial content written by a reliable source, in which the article subject is the primary focus of the editorial content, and which is not mainly focused on "start-up" information. Lots of media that are generally considered "reliable sources" also allow articles that are not written by editorial staff on their sites (i.e., they allow "paid editing" by basically publishing press releases or similar 'reporting'), including just about every single business-related source. The vast majority of organizations that get start-up funding never actually get anywhere; perhaps include a requirement that the entity must have been formally registered as a business for a minimum of 2 years, and have significant reliable-source coverage of at least one successful profit-generating product/service before they are considered notable. Risker (talk) 14:06, 1 September 2015 (UTC)

• Yes would be a start. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 00:53, 2 September 2015 (UTC)

Strongly support Risker, i.e 3 reliable sources where the article subject is the primary focus. It may be difficult to clearly state her start-up criteria, but I support it in principle. There are the occasional start-ups (maybe 1 each year) that come out of nowhere with a groundbreaking product and are reported on internationally in dozens of sources, but probably those could be dealt with as the exception to the rule, e.g. via WP:IAR. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 15:43, 2 September 2015 (UTC)

• For corporate, there needs to be further qualification on what "substantial article" means and what "reliable source" means. Much of what comes out in the business press is just fandom - cooing over new products or lauding some company's success. I don't see those as being encyclopedic, just business as usual. What would we expect to see that would make a company worthy of an article? Personally, I'd go for some concept of social/historical impact, but I doubt if we can define that sufficiently. If we treated agriculture the way we treat business, we'd have an article for every farm and every year's new crop. LaMona (talk) 17:02, 2 September 2015 (UTC)

If we treated agriculture the way we treat business, we'd have an article for every farm and every year's new crop. that bears repeating. Thank you LaMona. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 17:47, 2 September 2015 (UTC)

Only if each farm's crop had different features than every other farm's crop, and new features every year, and new crops every couple of years. Ah... let's face it, the analogy ain't all that great. BMK (talk) 02:13, 5 September 2015 (UTC)

• Support proposal by Risker. I thought the "multiple independent, reliable sources" part of WP:GNG kind of implied Risker's minimum of three editorially independent sources for corp articles. However, if we have to spell it out, I support that. — Brianhe (talk) 17:59, 2 September 2015 (UTC)
• Agreed, per Risker. Andreas JN466 18:13, 2 September 2015 (UTC)
• 'Agree per much of what I have said earlier on this page. Significant needs to mean significant as in covered, in detail, over a non-trivial time frame, in multiple reliable sources. If those sources can not be documented in some way when the article hits main space there should be a definite time after which it will be deleted. Jbh^Talk 18:49, 2 September 2015 (UTC)
• Agree with Risker. Hard to write an article without three such sources anyway. -- Shudde ^talk 01:38, 4 September 2015 (UTC)
• Agree. Products and software should also be eligible for proposed deletion via this means. AFD is not coping with the quantity of deletion nominations concerning unremarkable companies. Once again, anything that reduces the amount of volunteer time required to deal with the crapflood is sorely needed. MER-C 02:54, 4 September 2015 (UTC)
• Agree - Risker's idea might be the best bet at handling the increased amount of business articles popping up. GamerPro64 19:42, 4 September 2015 (UTC)
• I firmly support WSC's excellent suggestion for a CorpPROD. It's really a no-brainer. It would get rid of a lot of drive-by SPA creations of the Yellow Pages variety. However, the criteria for links/sources need to be as high and as strict as possible. I played a significant part in getting BLPPROD up and running but still today years later I'm largely dissatisfied with its low and nebulous bar. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 00:09, 5 September 2015 (UTC)

• Very strong oppose as counterproductive and unnecessary. BLPPROD is a process I argued against as strongly as possible, because it would lose us potentially improvable articles. Its only justification was to eliminate the extremely rare case of writing an article on a nonexistent person, especially one with a name resembling a real person. I can easily source about one half of the items, though I no longer bother for sports and entertainers, which make up most of it. Companies and products are a worse choice yet, because it can take more than cursory effort to find sources. Even BLPPROD only requires a source sufficient to justify the existence of the person and a principal claim to significance, not in any sense a RS for notability. Anything more than that takes effort, and we have enough problems getting people to put in the effort at AfD. Nor will this solve any significant problem. The abusive articles typical of undeclared paid editors know enough to provide some kind of sources. We do not need additional procedures. We need, if anything, fewer, so we can pay proper attention to the ones we do have. We need to concentrate on commenting at AfD, to prevent articles escaping as nonconsensus through lack of participation. The more additional things we think of, the worse the basic process will work. DGG ( talk ) 02:17, 5 September 2015 (UTC)
• Don't get carried away. Demanding one independent source for an article about a company is just common sense. Two is the GNG as I interpret it. Three is in my opinion going too far. Remember, the main point of this case was that deletionists can make money shaking down companies by threatening to delete their articles - so WHY do we want to make policy that makes it easier for a deletionist to get an article deleted? Wnt (talk) 02:47, 5 September 2015 (UTC)
• Yes --Guerillero | Parlez Moi 03:08, 5 September 2015 (UTC)
• Agree - per Risker. Not much I can add to the reasoning. Long overdue. Jusdafax 05:32, 5 September 2015 (UTC)
• Agree I'm not 100% sure about the sticky-prod format, but dramatically raising the bar for inclusion of content about people, products, and organizations - through higher sourcing standards, stricter notability criteria, or something else - is the only reasonable way forward here. We can make whatever rules we like about what kind of content we're willing to host and how we're going to filter it. Almost every other proposed action on this page centers on judging people's real-life motivations and prying into their off-wiki business, or on increasing barriers to entry in the odd belief that those editing for pay will be deterred while those editing as a hobby will jump through the hoops. Opabinia regalis (talk) 06:19, 5 September 2015 (UTC)
• Oppose as counterproductive. Raising the bar for wiki-notability, increases the size of the available victim-pool, and specifically, increases the stuck-in-AfC-queue population dramatically. Wnt and DGG, per also. I'm not as strongly opposed to this one as I am to raising the BLP-article-definition-of-GNG, but this one is the same slippery slope. 75.108.94.227 (talk) 03:06, 11 September 2015 (UTC)

9. Lower the bar for sockpuppetry investigations of spammers

We have a difficult balance between maintaining the privacy of our editors and investigating potentially dodgy edits. If "writing a spammy article on a borderline notable commercial entity" became grounds for a checkuser to check for sockpuppetry then we would be much more likely to catch rings like this in future. The vast majority of our editors would be unaffected by such a targeted change. ϢereSpielChequers 09:55, 1 September 2015 (UTC)

I would support. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 00:10, 2 September 2015 (UTC)

Support Smallbones_(smalltalk) 15:46, 2 September 2015 (UTC)

I support this notionally, but the devil's in the details. Getting consensus on what constitutes "spamming" might be difficult. And the problem with socking isn't usually strictly about spamlinks, though that can be part of it. Would the lower bar attach just to the spammer account (s) or does it spread to the whole investigation to which they are a party? The one way you encourage throwaway SPAs for spamming. The other way you have kind of an all-purpose tool for widening SPIs just by naming the right party. So I'm having trouble seing how this would be reduced to practice. Brianhe (talk) 16:21, 2 September 2015 (UTC)

• Support I believe this to be one of the most important factors, along with making it harder to create multiple accounts and raising the bar for autoconfirmation. I think we take the "invasion of privacy" factor here much too seriously, since it is almost never the case that personal information becomes public through a CU investigation. The standard of required evidence should be loosened, long-term editors - especially those with a track record of sniffing out socks - should be given the benefit of the doubt, and SPI clerks should be more careful not to act as "agents of obstruction"; they should perceive their job as weeding out the wheat from the chaff, not -- as I think is the case now -- in denying endorsement unless the evidence is airtight. That kind of evidence doesn;t come along very often, but experienced editors do get a feel for socking, and that should be given weight which it is not given now. BMK (talk) 20:57, 2 September 2015 (UTC)

BMK has hit the nail on the head in his characterization of the SPI process. It's incredibly frustrating to bring a case there where I expect them to connect the dots, and have it fall flat on its face. Two cases in point to illustrate what I consider major process failures. (UPE=undisclosed paid editing):

• Worthywords (talk · contribs · deleted contribs · logs · filter log · block user · block log): Created 22 January 2009. WP Ed instructor as of 2011 [4] Announced retirement from teaching Feb 2014. Started UPE 4 March 2014 [5]. SPI shows involvement in PE ring 1 July 2014 [6]. Disclosed under protest in July 2014 [7]. Renamed acct 3 September 2014 [8]. COIN 7 May 2015. Blocked 15 July 2015.
• OnceaMetro (talk · contribs · deleted contribs · logs · filter log · block user · block log): Turned up on our radar from external investigation of Sony PR scandal and massive UPE/socking ~22 April 2015 (see Signpost special report). Blocked 24 April 2015. SPI filed 29 July 2015. Initially rejected with a snarky comment; spent hours adding evidence; some other accounts were confirmed, but as for what I think is the primary, "OnceaMetro is, unfortunately, Stale, so we can't run the CheckUser".

Not disparaging other volunteers, just saying the process needs work, yet frustrated. Look at the intervals between incindiary red flags and our responses in these two cases. Oh, other process problems above, if you didn't notice, the editor was granted a rename under a cloud, this is also true of Arr4 and someone else I can't recall right now. — Brianhe (talk) 22:22, 2 September 2015 (UTC)

Support - checkuser would be a powerful tool. -- GreenC 00:02, 4 September 2015 (UTC)

Support. Additionally, the combination of checkuser and the User:COIBot database of external link additions is extremely effective against link spammers. MER-C 03:00, 4 September 2015 (UTC)

• I would like to hear what the current active CU's think about this proposal. I think their insights would be invaluable in this particular situation. We may (or may not) find that SPI might be a bit like AIV in that they decline a large number of reports. AIV in particular requires almost no evidence to be submitted which is probably why there are such a high number of inappropriate reports. This was cited as a large hurdle for unbundling the block functions of the admin tool kit. That being said, I do think that users with a track record at SPI should be given either special flags or status at CU. Mkdw^talk 03:20, 4 September 2015 (UTC)
• Another good idea from WSC. I've always contended that a) the use of the CU tool is too restrictive, and b) we don't have enough CUs. We currently have a massive backlog at SPI and it sometimes takes several days to get a CU to run a check. The CU tool could be used far more liberally and still without infringing on any privacy policies.Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 00:28, 5 September 2015 (UTC)

• Bravo, I very strongly agree with all of that. We have a tool which (apparently) isn't the best it could be because we won't collect the extent of data that would make it more useful, and then we go and shackle it even further by restricting its use well beyond any reasonable standard. Makes no sense. BMK (talk) 02:10, 5 September 2015 (UTC)

• Support - Brilliant and overdue. We need this badly. Jusdafax 05:36, 5 September 2015 (UTC)
• Tentative Support, although I'd want to hear opinions from Checkusers, and also from WMF Legal to see if there would be any TOU implications of doing this. Lankiveil ^{(speak to me)} 09:30, 5 September 2015 (UTC).

10. Keep some IP data for longer

Currently we keep data about the IP's used by registered accounts for three months, this was a major limitation in this investigation. A general increase would be ill advised as it would risk exposing more of our editors to harassment via lawyers acting for spammers, but we could do a targeted extension, in particular for edits by badfaith accounts such as those blocked for sockpuppetry. That should make it easier to find returning bad faith editors. ϢereSpielChequers 10:03, 1 September 2015 (UTC)

I don't think this would be technically possible - either the data is available or it isn't. There is already a way for checkusers to record and store details of known sockmasters where this is desirable, however checkuser data has a high entropy - the older it is the less useful it is generally speaking (IP address get reassigned, people move, useragents change as people upgrade and switch to different versions of browsers, etc), so the benefits of having the data available for longer are not linnear. Thryduulf (talk) 10:45, 1 September 2015 (UTC)

It isn't technically possible to restore deleted data. But it is possible to keep existing data for longer, though this would require changes both to the software and in the legalese of the privacy policy. ϢereSpielChequers 11:13, 1 September 2015 (UTC)

I mean that it is not possible to do a "targeted extension", either there is a "general increase" or no increase. Thryduulf (talk) 12:39, 1 September 2015 (UTC)

I can appreciate that a general increase would be easier to implement, but the downside would be excessive in that all accounts would lose privacy and be more vulnerable to spurious court cases. A targeted extension would be more difficult to implement and would require careful thought as to who it targeted, but I don't see anything impossible in that. ϢereSpielChequers 12:45, 1 September 2015 (UTC)

How would it be targetted though? You don't know which accounts are sockpuppets/sockmasters until you check them so anything relevant would need to be discovered during the current timeframe or be lost, and there is already a way to record data before it expires where it is known this is needed. I don't see what benefits would be gained here? Thryduulf (talk) 13:09, 1 September 2015 (UTC)

Glad to hear we are retaining some data where there is due cause to be suspicious; I thought I remembered suggesting this during the review of the privacy policy. Perhaps the FAQ there could be changed to reflect what really happens. My suggestion still stands, though modified to "review the current exceptions with a view to broadening them" ϢereSpielChequers 13:41, 1 September 2015 (UTC)

• One might think checkusers would be the ones most likely to agree with this; however, I for one think that 3 months is sufficient. Cases such as the Orangemoody one are rare and exceptional, and I think the WMF's limitation of 3 months (it's a global setting) is reasonable. It's actually longer than many other organizations as it is. As to the 3-month period being a limitation, that cuts both ways. It also meant we had a hard limit on how much checking we'd have to do with the OM case. If we'd had more CU data to review, we may have found more accounts (although their editing pattern is clear enough that most admins should be able to do duck blocks) but the investigation consumed a vast amount of CU and other functionary time. Investigations like this need to be rare, or we'll need a LOT more CUs. Risker (talk) 14:26, 1 September 2015 (UTC)
• Support - This goes right along with the suggestion above. Once again, we are being much too sensitive to "privacy right" then we legally or morally need to be. BMK (talk) 20:58, 2 September 2015 (UTC)
• We need to balance our real goal of building an encyclopedia against the ideals of privacy agree. Having a discuss between legal and CU on where the cut off on this issue should be I think would be good. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 21:34, 2 September 2015 (UTC)
• I've already said in #9. Lower the bar for sockpuppetry investigations of spammers more or less why I would support this. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 00:37, 5 September 2015 (UTC)
• No, let's not follow the NSA down Big Brother's "but we might find a way to uuuuse it someday" slippery slope. Wnt (talk) 02:50, 5 September 2015 (UTC)

11. Automated sock identification

11a. Identify mutual patrolling

One feature of the OrangeMoody sockfarm was an interlinked group of accounts that marked each others articles as patrolled. A computer program that watched for similar patterns in future and notified functionaries of patterns it had detected would give us a chance of finding similar farms faster. ϢereSpielChequers 10:20, 1 September 2015 (UTC)

This sounds like it would be a good idea. It would not be 100% reliable of course and there would be false positives and false negatives, but as a flag for human investigation it could work. I will have to leave it to others to say whether this is technically possible or not though. Thryduulf (talk) 10:47, 1 September 2015 (UTC)

• We have to be cautious not to succumb to the "reds under the bed" syndrome. We've found a bunch of bad actors, who have leveraged our standard site procedures to their advantage and the disadvantage of article subjects/draft creators and the encyclopedia. Amongst the accounts were those that seemed to "specialize" in page curation, and were responsible for marking reviewed a pile of the articles, and most of those "article reviewers" didn't create articles. However, many of those articles were also reviewed by editors who do a lot of page curation who aren't socks here; they just do a lot of page curation, presumably because it's an activity they enjoy. It's certainly one that we need to keep doing. The interlinking of the page-curation socks and the article-creation socks comes from checkuser evidence to start with, which was then correlated with editing behavioural review; it would not necessarily be obvious without both types of data. Risker (talk) 15:08, 1 September 2015 (UTC)
  • But if a program was run and identified a group of editors who were patrolling each others articles or all patrolling the articles created by a second group of editors, wouldn't that be worth investigating by checkusers? ϢereSpielChequers 18:05, 1 September 2015 (UTC)
    • How would you identify the "article creation" group? Risker (talk) 18:13, 1 September 2015 (UTC)
      • By computer matching. If there is a ring of say 20 patrollers, half of whose patrols are random and half concentrate on the same thirty article creators, a large proportion of whose articles are patrolled by those twenty patrollers, then it should be easy for a computer to find that. ϢereSpielChequers 08:17, 2 September 2015 (UTC)
• Bad actors have different patterns than good ones. A group of accounts working together definitely will have a different pattern, one that really can't be hidden. If (and it is a big if) WMF can run software that looks for specific patterns without compromising server performance to any significant extent, and if the software can be tuned so that it produces minimal false positives, then such software could have a lot of value. I'd certainly support creating a small working group to specify the parameters/patterns that the software should look for, looking for a solution that isn't computationally intense. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 18:21, 3 September 2015 (UTC)

This is a potentially productive proposal, and merits further research. We can't solidly support the idea unless and until someone invents it, and can tell us what the frequency of false positives is. Encourage WMF to try coming up with a way to recognize corrupt user networking now; then we'll decide. Wnt (talk) 02:52, 5 September 2015 (UTC)

Concur with exploring this idea; as a start WMF tech should randomly select articles in the same relative genre not believed to be due to illegitimate paid editor to assess how well algorithms can discriminate between the two cases. It would be better if this problem could be open sourced to the wider tech community, but that may not be possible due to privacy concerns (or may require a change in terms of use). NE Ent 23:30, 7 September 2015 (UTC)

11b. Score articles on "sockiness"

Suggestion #11 is a good start, but should be part of a system that scores articles on "sockiness" or "COIfulness" based on a number of indicators. If the scores cross a threshold, the system would bring them to attention for human evaluation. You could even do it on a tool server hooked up to a Twitterbot a la CongressEdits and let the volunteer community self-organize around it. After spending some time at COIN, I have some ideas of what the scores should be based on, but this really deserves some serious thinking and testing of the scoring based on identified cases of undisclosed COI/undisclosed paid editing and socking. It should really be done as a machine learning system with partitioned learning/testing datasets, in essence datamining our own COIN and SPI datasets. As to elements of the scoring system, things I've noticed include:

• Creation of fully formed articles on first edit
• Creation of fully formed articles by new user
• Creation of long articles by new user
• Articles with certain types of content, e.g. business infobox, photo caption, logo
• Approval of AfD by approver who has interacted with the submitter in certain ways. Categories of interaction to look at: interaction on any talkpage, interaction the submitter's or approver's talkpage, interaction on XfD pages, interaction on noticeboards.
• Tweak interaction thresholds based on time between co-involvement on whatever page is analyzed.
• Tweak "new user" thresholds

The above is just off the top of my head, if this gets traction I'll think of some more. Maybe a knowledge engineer could help us conduct good interviews of COI and COIN patrollers, and experienced admins. The neat thing about machine learning is you don't have to be perfect: you can throw a bunch of stuff into the training, and see what works. Poor correlators/classifiers will be trained out. For consideration — Brianhe (talk) 04:12, 2 September 2015 (UTC)

Other possible factors to weigh in a scoring system include:

• External links quantity/quality metrics. Indicators include:
  • Multiple links to same domain
  • Social media links
  • Inline ELs in general
  • Inline ELs without a path
• Distance to deleted article titles
• Density of registered vs unregistered editors (sorry legit IP ed's)
• Editor trust metrics (longevity, blocks, noticeboards, corpname patterns, ...)
• There could also be a voluntary (opt-in) system for various actions that could modify the trust scoring for a particular editor:
  • having a WMF-verified identity on file
  • participation in a "ring of trust" system along the lines of WP:Personal acquaintances
  • community-bestowed reputation points

Another idea, if this scoring system worked sufficiently well, high scores could trigger automatic reversion of the article to the Pending changes protection model. — Brianhe (talk) 06:43, 2 September 2015 (UTC)

Thanks Brianhe, but I see that as a separate project targeted at auto assessing articles for spam much as we have bots and edit filters to deal with vandalism. This is a complex task for several reasons, but if we can come up with an algorithm that has few false positives it could be used for bot based spamfighting much as bots have brought vandalism under control. No-one nowadays would credibly predict that Wikipedia will eventually succumb to the rising tide of vandalism any more than they'd predict London would eventually overwhelmed in horse shit, but before the edit filters and vandalfighting bots that was as valid a prediction as the prediction in 1890 that London's traffic problems would bury the city in horseshit. Spam has been rising for years, I suspect it would eventually swamp the pedia if we don't find ways to automate dealing with it. ϢereSpielChequers 08:17, 2 September 2015 (UTC)

I'm exteremely supportive of this idea. As far as I understand, Cluebot works by giving edits a score based on how likely edits are to be vandalism and we could catch a great deal of promotional editing in a similar manner. We have plenty of SPIs listing confirmed COI accounts and we could presumably use these to train the bot to detect new edits. Special:AbuseFilter/354 Special:AbuseFilter/149 and Special:AbuseFilter/148 are the closest we have at the moment but they are comparatively crude and have barely changed in the last 5 years. I've not seen them catch any of the paid edits I've cleaned up over the last six months. How to get the ball rolling? SmartSE (talk) 12:46, 2 September 2015 (UTC)

You need to be careful here - what will be detected is promotional editing, not paid editing. Promotional editing is obviously harmful to the encyclopaedia, and improved detection of it is a good thing, but it will also catch unpaid promotional editing and will not catch paid editing that is not promotional. It is also incorrect to assume that all promotional editing by editors that have not disclosed they are being paid are breaking the terms of use - they may indeed not being paid and may just be a fan of whatever it is they are promoting. Thryduulf (talk) 12:56, 2 September 2015 (UTC)

That's the point though - content not contributor. If the content isn't promotional then there isn't so much of a problem (obviously this wouldn't deal with omissions etc. but it would catch a lot). Also, I should have said that unlike Cluebot I would prefer this to only tag edits for scrutiny rather than reverting them. SmartSE (talk) 13:13, 2 September 2015 (UTC)

@SmartSE:: Agree that none of this was intended to imply automated reversion, only tagging/reporting with human followup. At most, automatic reversion of the article to Pending changes protection based on certain tripwires. Actually I think we could start on this last one right away with fairly obvious parameters, like "new corp article by new editor". — Brianhe (talk) 18:34, 2 September 2015 (UTC)

You're pinging my doppelganger again ;) Does anyone have any clue who to ask about the feasibility of doing something like this? I noticed that neither of the original cluebot creators are really active anymore. SmartSE (talk) 20:50, 2 September 2015 (UTC)

Darn cut/paste. Brianhe (talk) 22:29, 2 September 2015 (UTC)

As an alternative to instituting a scoring system, consider using something like Amazon Web Services' Machine Learning to process the Wikimedia database, training it on known sock-posts, and letting it detect other candidates. Thanks to SmartSE for the heads-up, BTW. (Declaration of interests: I'm not paid by Amazon or AWS, nor did they ask me to comment on this, but I do - as an independent - run the Cambridge (UK) AWS User Group.) Jonsg (talk) 22:23, 2 September 2015 (UTC)

Have you done machine learning before? I have. You don't just throw a bunch of stuff at it and wait for an answer. AWS is part of the toolset but not all of it. To get a working classifier you need two things as input to the training. One is the dataset itself. The other is scoring algorithms (including a way to read/parse the data). Each individual criterion for the scoring, listed above, is implemented by a programmer as algorithms. You then run the machine learning system, which then crunches the data (frequently on a parallel system like AWS) and finds the best weights for in the overall score, that give you the best classification. Even for that, the definition of "best" is up to interpretation, because you have to decide what your acceptable false positive/false negative rate will be. — Brianhe (talk) 22:35, 2 September 2015 (UTC)

12. Write a Wikipedia article about paid editing

There's been plenty of reporting in the press, and this is definitely a notable topic. [9] A Wikipedia article that actually names abusive companies and explains their shady tactics could be a deterrent to the people who pay those companies. I like to imagine someone searching the internet either looking for somebody to write an article for them, or researching a company that has approached them, and finding our article near the top of their search results. ~Adjwilley (talk) 02:36, 2 September 2015 (UTC)

Conflict of interest editing on Wikipedia is pretty close. Ocaasi ^{t | c} 03:26, 2 September 2015 (UTC)

Indeed, it is. Even the major companies like Wiki-PR seem to have their own articles already. I do have another question: Are the checkusers able to link individual sockpuppets to the larger companies? That's actually two questions: do they have that ability, and would they be able to publicly disclose that, say, the orangemoody accounts are from such and such a company? ~Adjwilley (talk) 04:23, 2 September 2015 (UTC)

Regarding the Orangemoody socks, we do not know who is behind them. Speaking more generally, if there is sufficient evidence to be certain of a link between a sockfarm and/or paid editing ring and a corporation then I suspect that this will be publicly disclosed, although the advice of the WMF will be sought on each occasion. It is also possible that culprits will be identified through non-checkuser means, and I don't doubt there are people right now trying to do this based on the publicly available Orangemoody evidence. Thryduulf (talk) 10:34, 2 September 2015 (UTC)

I'm not even sure we know how many humans were behind the orangemoody socks. Yet, we have a section about the incident at conflict of interest editing on Wikipedia, and now a spinoff-article at orangemoody. 75.108.94.227 (talk) 03:14, 11 September 2015 (UTC)

13. Bonds for certain types of editing

Why not adopt a model from other areas and require the posting of a professional paid editor surety bond for good conduct? Bond would be forfeit fully or partially for various types of misconduct to be determined. This could be done in conjunction with one or more of the ideas above; for instance, I see it working well with #6 corporate accounts. A properly functioning market will price the bonds according to the editor's risk: a shady no-reputation actor would have to put up a lot of his own dough, but a reputable org or individual should be able to get a better rate. There would probably be some intrinsic tradeoff of privacy for accountability that the market would also see to. — Brianhe (talk) 06:54, 2 September 2015 (UTC)

We want to make legitimate interactions with use easy. And than we made to make poor paid promotional editing hard. Do not think this will accomplish either one of those. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 07:39, 2 September 2015 (UTC)

Our aim is for a global service, to achieve that we need to tackle systematic bias not encourage it. A bond system on a global site would inevitably be set at a level that some corporate PR types would consider trivial, but in other parts of the world would seem extortionate. It would be less onerous on the full time wikipedia spammer than on someone who only spams about one or two companies. It would lead to court cases by people claiming they shouldn't lose their bond because what they did wasn't excessively promotional. But worst of all, it would squeeze out the retired, neutral and disinterested as they hadn't paid for the privilege of editing Wikipedia. ϢereSpielChequers 09:57, 2 September 2015 (UTC)

I should clarify, the bond was only intended to apply to "certain types of editing" by which I mean primarily paid editing, though we could extend it at will, e.g. all articles with MEDRS implications could require a bond. There should be zero cost to individuals who are not paid editors.

Doc, I think it would actually accomplish both. 1) Making poor paid promotional editing hard: There has to be a cost associated with bad content. Right now the cost is all born by the volunteers like us. The bond would be set to a monetary point, and with terms such that it should scare away poor promotional editing by those with a commercial interest. This is simply a way to make the creator of content have something on the line to offset the incentive that got them to write the content in the first place. Right now it's all a one-way system where the upside is writing content, and the downside is virtually nonexistent: damage to reputation of a throwaway account. 2) Making good-faith editing easy. This should not affect that side of the equation at all, if the good-faith editor acts appropriately. If they violate the terms they agreed to when they created their account and started editing, and re-affirmed when committing to the bonded editing process, then too bad.

@WereSpielChequers: I agree, the litigious US system could be against us in this regard. However this might be a consideration better made by WMF legal staff; a lot of the other proposals on the table here would require enforcement that would be at least as onerous on them. If this solution is what we-the-community want, we should ask for it.

Tweaks to this proposal could include:

• Setting a very low bond value at first to demonstrate our resolve and to clarify process for good-faith people. Raise it over time to drive away the systematic exploiters.
• Setting a variable bond level based on locality. I don't like this because I can see bad content being "offshored", but we may have to live with it for the perception of equity, if the alternative is no system at all.
• Maybe membership in good standing in recognized professional organization (e.g. IEEE, AMA or even recognized PR associations) could be the equivalent of a bond for our purposes.
• The system could be applied across the board, or selectively for certain types of articles. For instance, only to business-related articles or only to startup-related articles. Enforcement would be easy: delete on sight if the editor was in a prohibited editor group/topic area, and was not bonded.

Submitted for (re)consideration — Brianhe (talk) 18:13, 2 September 2015 (UTC)

I can't support this idea unless you can make the undisclosed paid editors pay the surety bond. Otherwise you're just giving them an advantage! Wnt (talk) 02:55, 5 September 2015 (UTC)

• I've been pondering this, and I think Wnt has hit the nail on the head. However that doesn't mean there are no legs to this. What I think could work is a system where we work with the PR industries in countries where they do require people to post bonds before offering professional services in PR. If the trade bodies in those countries accepted breach of Wikipedia rules as a reason to sanction their members, whether by terminating membership or forfeiting bonds, then I think we would benefit. But that would involve their existing regulatory systems, not a specific bond where people pay to edit Wikipedia. ϢereSpielChequers 08:07, 5 September 2015 (UTC)

14. Require real-name registration for editing and/or creating certain types of articles: small and medium-sized companies and organisations, biographies of lesser-known people

Looking at articles on small and medium-sized businesses (law firms, management consultancies etc.), the majority of them seem to have been created by a Wikipedia editor who has done little or nothing else in Wikipedia, suggesting it was a principal, employee or agent of the company in question. Same with other types of organisations and biographies of living people. These are typically articles that get relatively little traffic and scrutiny from regular editors – and the number of highly active editors per 1,000 articles is continuously shrinking (about a fifth of what it was in 2007). The problem will get worse, not better, over time. Andreas JN466 11:15, 2 September 2015 (UTC)

• I strongly oppose requiring a real name on Wikipedia - even ignoring the swathes of privacy issues, we have no way of verifying what a person's real name is or is not. Read the Personal name article to see some of them problems with even defining what someone's "real name" is. Thryduulf (talk) 11:33, 2 September 2015 (UTC)
• I understand why the PR industry wants this, but why should we concede it, especially just after catching some PR outfit out in a massive breach of the TOU? There are two forms of real name registration, one is that used on certain wikis which require your username to be plausible as a real name in the Anglosphere. The other requires verification against an external site such as Facebook. Both systems have the disadvantage that they are a greater deterrent to goodfaith editors than bad, the more effective the system at outing our goodfaith editors the more vulnerable it makes them to litigious companies who don't want anyone changing their PR department's desired wording of the Wikipedia article on them. Of course real name editing is a very different burden depending on how common your name is, and we might well have a few editors with names like John Smith who would still be able to edit PR vulnerable areas. But if we introduce real name editing largely the spammers would have won. ϢereSpielChequers 11:52, 2 September 2015 (UTC)
  • I am not sure the PR industry wants this. Certainly, the Orangemoodies are unlikely to want it. As for how to identify, see below (I had neither of the methods you mention in mind). Note too that this would only affect certain types of articles: in particular, those for small and medium-sized businesses, which few unconflicted people want to edit in the first place. Andreas JN466 17:30, 2 September 2015 (UTC)
    • If you require real name disclosure to edit such articles then you muck up the work flow of gnomes like me who eradicate particular problems across the wiki. Nowadays I have for various reasons verified my name with the foundation, but before I had would it have been reasonable to expect me to disclose in order to fix a typo in an article? I've recently been de arting various medical collages, frankly it would have been a pain if I had had to worry whether they were articles I was authorised to edit. As for whether the PR industry wants to identify our editors, about three years ago I was one of the volunteers who tried to explain the wiki side of things when someone in Wikimedia UK invited the PR people in to try and agree a code of practice. Absolutely they wanted to know who our editors were and they were quite put out when we explained that identifying and cultivating relevant editors wasn't the way to go. ϢereSpielChequers 20:27, 2 September 2015 (UTC)
• I tend to agree with the above two opinions. Since we do require that paid editors disclose their employers, clients, and affiliations, you could say that we have real-name semi-registration for them. But if paid editors don't disclose the real names of their employers, etc. how could we force them to disclose (even in private) their own real names? There might be some use in brainstorming some ideas here - how can we force disclosure from paid editors? I'm not sure it would get far, but let m try 2.

• Have the businesses and other payers register an account in their own names (see above proposal) and have them disclose the user name of who they are paying, together with submitting an OTRS ticket identifying themselves to prevent Joe jobs.
• Require that paid editors enable the e-mail link, if serious issues have been raised, and confirm their identity to Arbcom or other people assigned this task.

Very likely those would be difficult to implement, e.g. just getting through an RfC would be difficult, but I think if we bounce around enough ideas we might come up with something. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 16:29, 2 September 2015 (UTC)

One possible method often mentioned in this context is a credit card payment to the Foundation of £0.01. Identification to the Foundation is all that is required here: the account could still have a fantasy name on-wiki. However, the additional user right would only be given in response to the nominal penny payment. Andreas JN466 17:30, 2 September 2015 (UTC)

Problem: anonymous prepaid credit cards. — Brianhe (talk) 17:54, 2 September 2015 (UTC)

Another problem is that credit card payments cost the recipient to process, many places in the UK don't accept credit card payments for transactions below £10 because it's not economical for them to do so. $0.01 transactions would be a significant drain on the WMF's budget (international payments maybe more so) for at most trivial benefits. Thryduulf (talk) 18:02, 2 September 2015 (UTC)

Lots of people do not accept prepaid credit cards, so I suspect it's possible to filter them out. And if it costs £0.50 to process the payment (the amount many people in the UK charge for transactions below £10), the payment amount could be adjusted accordingly. Processing could be fully automated: People enter a user name that they want to purchase the user right for, and the system automatically adds the relevant flag. Andreas JN466 19:00, 2 September 2015 (UTC)

• If this were implemented, everyone who creates stubs about, say, 7th-place Olympic gymnasts or Paralympic boccia medalists, or perhaps minor female scientists, would be required to out themselves or stop editing. I guarantee you that I would never have created what small number of articles I have if I had had to reveal my real name. BethNaught (talk) 17:58, 2 September 2015 (UTC)
• At one time I would have been a supporter of requiring real-name editing, if for no other reason than it looks silly to have a reference work edited by people with funny names. I, myself, edited under my real name, up until the time that a puppetmaster who was trying to control the content of an article used publicly-available information about me to harass me in real life and on other websites. Using a pseudonym hasn't completely stopped that, but it's helped. BMK (talk) 00:55, 4 September 2015 (UTC)
• Oppose - spammers have no trouble registering under a real name. Someone else's real name! Think about it. We have enough problem with the paid editing without also having them misrepresenting themselves as other, uninvolved ordinary people and getting them furious at us too. Even if you went a step further and, say, demanded a copy of a state identification document, it wouldn't work - they'd just cut-and-paste up a fake document, and then Wikipedia would have to access the state records if it wanted to check for faked documents, which means paying, and passing that on to users as a fee, and even then the spammers might get actual documents from some company megahack, and we'd certify them as genuine... we'd just keep losing and losing, worse and worse, the deeper we go there. Wnt (talk) 03:00, 5 September 2015 (UTC)
• Oppose. Also oppose cheek-swabs prior to editing, thumbprints or voiceprints or other biometric verification, and cryptologically-verified SecureBoot permissions before your operating system will permit you to browse to wikipedia. 75.108.94.227 (talk) 03:19, 11 September 2015 (UTC)

15. Community participation in investigation tools

It's apparent from the Orangemoody case that the checkuser team is using some sophisticated case management tools (Maltego at least). Why aren't these available to trusted members of the community on an as-needed basis? This could dovetail nicely with the "evidence lockbox" idea I proposed under idea #5. For instance, I believe that many COIN volunteers have private stashes of notes, but there's currently no sanctioned way to share these. Obviously there'd need to be some protection to keep investigations private, and to create policy allowing this. — Brianhe (talk) 18:27, 2 September 2015 (UTC)

Yes please. I suggested something similar a few months back on User:Bilby's talk page but nothing came of it. I'd certainly like WMF to help us share suspicions more privately and share tips on how to track UPE. SmartSE (talk) 20:21, 2 September 2015 (UTC)

The checkuser team do not have access to any software that normal volunteers do (unless they personally have access to something through a non-Wikipedia part of their life), and the investigating team used a combination of a private wiki and Google docs to collaborate. The visualisation was produced by the WMF Community Advocacy team using software they have for a different purpose. Thryduulf (talk) 01:24, 3 September 2015 (UTC)

Huh, well hats off to checkuser team then for doing what they did with what sounds like homespun technique. Maybe we could all benefit from standing up real workbench software for the various teams who do network analysis (I mean human networks). — Brianhe (talk) 05:19, 3 September 2015 (UTC)

16. Ban all Admins from paid editing

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

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A concrete proposal was made at Wikipedia talk:Administrators#Proposed change - 'No paid editing" for admins. Please comment there. MER-C 08:06, 5 September 2015 (UTC)

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My proposal is "Ban all administrators, arbitrators, checkusers, and other functionaries from acting as paid editors."

Consider the following paragraph in the Guardian:

"The Wikipedia Foundation said the accounts were blocked over “black hat” editing – charging money for the creation of promotional articles – amid allegations that hundreds of businesses and minor celebrities have been blackmailed by scammers posing as Wikipedia administrators."

It would be very good if we could tell everybody - everybody at WP:AFC, at any meetings with businesses, at the Guardian or any other newspaper - everybody, that admins are *not* allowed to accept payment for any services on Wikipedia. Do not believe those who claim to be admins and ask for money.

This would be a bright line rule that would protect everybody involved, admins, the WMF, and the scam targets.

BTW, I am not accusing any admins of being paid editors. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 18:43, 2 September 2015 (UTC)

• Agree. Seems eminently sensible, for the reasons stated. People would have a choice: take money, or be an admin. Andreas JN466 18:50, 2 September 2015 (UTC)
• Agree The potential for conflict of interest between a paid contract and administrative duties is not in line with an elevated position of trust in the community. Also, claiming to be an admin likely gives the paid editor a commercial advantage either in gaining clients or in what they can charge. This means that an admin gaining money from the community's trust and makes adminship a financial prize. Going forward this can be only be bad.

  A rule preventing admins from doing paid editing from their admin account or advertising as 'having access to an admin' etc is a great 'bright line' and by making it we can at the very least prevent such claims on Elance etc (Better to ban such freelance sites altogether but at lease prevent the monitization of the mop). I do not know if any admins are doing paid editing and trading on their status as admins but if they are they should stop. If they do not stop they should loose the mop. RfA is about who we trust to do the tricky stuff and the stuff requiring trust it is not about raising an editor's earning potential. Jbh^Talk 19:06, 2 September 2015 (UTC)

• Agree as well. There was a point in my Wikipedia editing history (I almost wrote "career") where I thought about pursuing adminship, but decided that since I was beginning to represent clients, this would create the potential appearance of impropriety, and would be entirely avoidable if I didn't try for RfA. It was the right call. I'd be very supportive of seeing this made policy. WWB Too (Talk · COI) 19:33, 2 September 2015 (UTC)

Update, clarification: A distinction must be made between paid editing for outside interests and GLAM work with like-minded institutions. The language "paid editor" is not quite right here; "paid advocate" is better, because I doubt the intent of this proposal would be to prohibit admins from becoming WiRs. This would be a necessary carve-out. WWB Too (Talk · COI) 21:52, 2 September 2015 (UTC)

• Agree. If we had to have a mechanism for temporarily suspending adminship—a leave of absence if you will—to accomodate and encourage compliance, I'd agree with that as well. Bottom line, active admins should not be paid editors and no admin should touch an article (or debate, etc.) that they have a conflict with, including one they previously worked on for pay. — Brianhe (talk) 19:43, 2 September 2015 (UTC)
  • Leave of absence might work for Wikipedians in Residence (unless they should be exempted). Andreas JN466 19:55, 2 September 2015 (UTC)
• Agree How could anyone disagree with this? SmartSE (talk) 20:22, 2 September 2015 (UTC)
• Disagree - The term "paid editor" is too blunt and imprecise to be meaningful in this context. It's COI that's a problem, not being "paid." -- Fuzheado | Talk 20:49, 2 September 2015 (UTC)
• Agree - excellent idea, one that never had occured to me. BMK (talk) 20:51, 2 September 2015 (UTC)
• Great idea Yes we have an account on Elance pretending to be this admin User_talk:Andrew_c#User:WayneAnde. It would help prevent impersonation. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 21:44, 2 September 2015 (UTC)
  • You do realize @Doc James: that by the strict interpretation of this proposal as written, it has the potential to wipe out all your activity as a paid academic/doctor, my contributions as a departmental faculty member, and the activities of WiR and GLAM professionals worldwide. -- Fuzheado | Talk 00:02, 3 September 2015 (UTC)
    • @Fuzheado: I was wondereing what you were thinking about. The ToU essentially eliminate Wikipedians-in-Residence and University profs from the paid editor category (check the FAQs) as does WP:COI. What I'd like to see is something that is very simple and easy for everyone to understand. I'm sure you know what I'm trying to get at here. Is there any chance you could write it in a way that you'd agree with? Smallbones_(smalltalk) 00:08, 3 September 2015 (UTC)
      • This does not eliminate any WP who is paid for anything from being an admin. This eliminates WPs who are paid to edit Wikipedia from being admins. I get paid to doctor and to teach medical students. I am not paid to edit Wikipedia. Never have been, never will be. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 00:55, 3 September 2015 (UTC)
• Oppose as written. I might agree to a ban on admins being paid to edit *using their admin account*, but not to ban admins from being paid to edit at all. When I was employed at Wikimedia UK, part of my role involved editing wikis, I used user:Chris McKenna (WMUK) for this (almost all edits are to Commons iirc), but even this would not have been permissible under this proposal. Thryduulf (talk) 01:34, 3 September 2015 (UTC)
  • • This is a proposal for EN WP not for Commons. If you were paid by Wikimedia UK to write articles about Wikimedia UK on EN WP yes that would have been an issue. Every edit by your account in fact was to a talk page [10]. You were not writing content on Wikipedia. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 02:07, 3 September 2015 (UTC)
    • Someone above mentioned leave of absence – temporary retirement from admin duties, with reinstatement once the paid position is over. The idea is that no one should be able to advertise their services as an admin in order to get a paid job. The benefits far outweigh the downsides here. Andreas JN466 07:12, 3 September 2015 (UTC)
      • May be we could decide on a case by case basis for WiR at WP:AN. It is not like we have that many admins who are WiR. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 07:44, 3 September 2015 (UTC)
• I spent two years as a part time staffer at Wikimedia UK, and while I wasn't paid to edit articles I certainly was paid to request geonotices and organise events - all of which involved wikipedia edits. If the ban was limited to mainspace that would still be problematic but be less bad. Wikipedians in Residence, and anyone involved in outreach, will find themselves sometimes making edits in mainspace, if only at the front of a class showing people how to edit. Having admin tools is really useful in outreach events, it means you can confirm users to get round the various IP throttles and Capcha problems, and it helps you explain what happened when someone turns up at the event in order to find out why their article was deleted. In my view we should be encouraging more of our WIRs and campus Ambassadors to become admins, not less - we have a really big problem with declining numbers of admins and this proposal would not help that. ϢereSpielChequers 08:32, 3 September 2015 (UTC)
• All this stuff about WMF and Wikipedia UK etc. is a red herring - we're not talking about official or semi-official Wikimedia-related paid editing, we're talking about people taking money from companies or private professionals or PR firms to promote their businesses. That's the focus here, and this other stuff is just gumming up the works: if it's necessary and desirable, exceptions can be written into the rule. Let's get back on track, please. BMK (talk) 00:48, 4 September 2015 (UTC)
• Agree for obvious reasons. The wording proposed below is approximately what the restriction should be. MER-C 03:06, 4 September 2015 (UTC)
• I wholeheartedly support a ban of paid editing/paid advocacy for editors entrusted with positions of administration of the project. It would fit in with our conflict of interest and involved policies. Mkdw^talk 03:25, 4 September 2015 (UTC)

I count 10 agrees and 2 or 3 disagrees (whose objections have likely been met). Would anybody mind if I propose this as a change to the policy WP:Administrators? I'd propose the text below starting "No administrator may accept payment ...", but I'm not sure where the best place in the policy to put this text would be. I'd explain where the text came from (this page) and then invite everybody here to participate. Does that work? Smallbones_(smalltalk) 04:20, 4 September 2015 (UTC)

Sounds good. How about under "expectations of adminship"? Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 04:51, 4 September 2015 (UTC)

Please see Wikipedia talk:Administrators#Proposed_change - "No paid editing" for_admins Smallbones_(smalltalk) 05:26, 4 September 2015 (UTC)

Agree - Since I oppose all paid editing period, this is an easy agreement. We need people to know that our admins are not paid mercenaries. Jusdafax 06:18, 4 September 2015 (UTC)

• Agree per nom, Javen466, and Jbhunley, with the wording below, plus the addition suggested by Brianhe. Whoop whoop pull up ^{Bitching Betty | Averted crashes} 17:37, 4 September 2015 (UTC)
• Agree - I'm all for this one. GamerPro64 19:39, 4 September 2015 (UTC)
• Agree - no-brainer.Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 00:45, 5 September 2015 (UTC)
• Agree. The notion that an admin might keep a separate non-admin account for paid editing is interesting, but do we need it? How much legitimate paid editing is there anyway? How do we get over the appearance of impropriety when the admin rules on an issue that touches a known client? Wnt (talk) 03:03, 5 September 2015 (UTC)

Proposed text

All of the above situations are pretty easy carve outs and I believe they have been addressed every time paid editing comes up. Here is an 'off the top of my head' stab at addressing the concerns I have heard here and at other discussions

No admin may be paid to edit for or on behalf of an article subject nor work as freelance paid editor or for any public relations, advertising or any other type of firm whose purpose is to create, edit, manage or promote material on Wikipedia for pay. This excepts Wikipedians who are participating in projects sponsored by the Wikimedia Foundation, its associated national chapters and mission aligned organizations (For example Wikipedians in Residence and WP:GLAM.) or who edit Wikipedia incidental to their regular work such as librarians, professors, teachers or other similar professionals. The purpose of this is to address promotional paid editing and conflict of interest not to interfere with the building of the encyclopedia. Cases which are unclear may be referred to COIN for clairification of what is allowed. Additionally no person or business may advertise 'being an admin', 'having access to an admin' or anything similar which implies admin status or tools may be used on the behalf of others for direct or indirect compensation.

Comments and further input would be welcome. Maybe if we have some actual text to work with it will be easier to move forward. Jbh^Talk 12:09, 3 September 2015 (UTC)

Nice job - I like that we're getting into specifics and not just "Ban all administrators..." as was written above, which would require careful reading of the TOU and COI policies to understand the subtleties and exceptions. I'll take some more time to digest, but it's going in the right direction, which also addresses #1 above about Elance and other sites, which I agree with @Doc James: that we should forbid with extreme prejudice. A concern with a policy like this would be a WP:BEANS effect, where someone would read this and say, "Oh, admins are not allowed to do these activities, but they didn't say anything about ordinary users. What a great idea to offer my services, as a plain user and get paid."

In the end, this all comes down to our very basic COI mantra: When advancing outside interests is more important to an editor than advancing the aims of Wikipedia, that editor stands in a conflict of interest. Unfortunately, this very succinct and useful guiding principle, which has been in the lede paragraph of WP:COI since 2007 in various forms, was erased without fanfare or discussion earlier this year. I'm hoping we can reintroduce this again as guidance on any COI issue. -- Fuzheado | Talk 14:07, 3 September 2015 (UTC)

I like the proposed wording, but think it is too long. What we need is one or two sentences that just hit the nail on the head and everybody who reads it will say "That's clear, I can't buy admin access." So I'll try cutting down the above text to see how close I'll come.

"No administrator may accept payment to edit articles or to perform any administrative function on Wikipedia. Admins who work for the the WMF or Wikimedia chapters are exempt when performing their duties for these organizations. Admins who work for other organizations which have missions that are aligned with the WMF mission, such as museums, libraries, universities and not-for-profit research centers, should declare a potential conflict of interest on their user pages and follow the Conflict of interest guideline closely, but are also exempt when performing their duties for these organizations."

Smallbones_(smalltalk) 15:58, 3 September 2015 (UTC)

On a more general level, I'd like to avoid this type of confusion on future discussions. The "what about GLAMs?" question comes up every time we talk about paid editing, even though the ToU deal with it (in the FAQs) similar to the above, and WP:COI deals with it as well. I'm hesitant to invent a new term for this distinction; we shouldn't do that unless we're pretty sure we're going to use it. I'll suggest "commercial editing" and "commercial editors" similar in definition to the above:

"Commercial editing is the practice of editing Wikipedia for payment, or soliciting payment for such editing. Any organization involved in these practices, as well as their officers, employees, and contractors are commercial editors if they write or edit text on Wikipedia, solicit payment, or help organize such activity. Employees and contractors of any organization are considered commercial editors if they write or edit text on Wikipedia as part of their employment, with the following exceptions:

• Editors who work for the the WMF or Wikimedia chapters when performing their duties for these organizations.
• Editors who work for other organizations which have missions that are aligned with the WMF mission, such as museums, libraries, universities and not-for-profit research centers,. These editors should declare a potential conflict of interest on their user pages and follow the Conflict of interest guideline closely, and are exempt when performing their duties for these organizations."

Of course having such a statement implies that we have a policy to put it in. Perhaps it should be titled "Commercial editing"

Smallbones_(smalltalk) 16:26, 3 September 2015 (UTC)

• @Smallbones: Thank you for the feedback. I have made modification to the text to make GLAMs explicit and to allow for Wikipedians in residence. I took a look at your alternate texts and I do think they address some important issues but not necessarily what I think this text is intended to target. I think the purpose here is not to define COI or its management but rather to bar specific paid activities done by admins to prevent monetization of the mop. That is also why the last part on advertizing is there, it also gives us a way to ask for any ads mentioning or implying use of admin status/tools to be removed from sites like Elance. Jbh^Talk 14:01, 4 September 2015 (UTC)

• @Smallbones: I think the proposal should be listed at WP:RFC. Mkdw^talk 15:33, 4 September 2015 (UTC)

• @Mkdw: Thanks for the suggestion. I put the template at the top of the section there. Could you check that I've done it right?
• @Jbhunley: I don't think there's any problem with continued discussion here, but the main place to discuss this now should be at Wikipedia_talk:Administrators#Proposed_change_-_.27No_paid_editing.22_for_admins WP:Admin. I have no objection to wordsmithing some more over there. I'd support your version, but - maybe due to pure ego reasons - like mine better! Smallbones_(smalltalk) 16:35, 4 September 2015 (UTC)

Thank you for the link to the new discussion. I will check it out. Jbh^Talk 17:27, 4 September 2015 (UTC)

Looks like it's been correctly listed. Cheers, Mkdw^talk 17:59, 4 September 2015 (UTC)

I've closed this to redirect discussion to the RFC. I'm going to notify all participants above of the new RFC. MER-C 08:06, 5 September 2015 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

17. Active promotion of Wiki ethics and integrity

I don't know what my concrete proposal is here, but I was shocked that #16 had to be said, I just assumed that ordinary ethics would have covered this already.

Perhaps a concrete part of this would be to have inclusion in an "ethical Wikipedians" society with strict guidelines and badge of membership. Kind of like the the statements and graphics below (see COIN convo on why this was necessary due to impersonation). If this was a thing, admins who didn't display it maybe would be shamed into either abandoning adminship, or signing up.

I do not edit or otherwise contribute to any WikiMedia article or project on behalf of any employer, client, or affiliated person, organization, or other entity; nor do I receive or solicit any compensation for any edits or other contributions.

This editor does not accept paid editing work. If somebody claims that he/she is me and is soliciting paid editing work, then they are impersonating me, and likely scamming you. Feel free to contact the proper authorities.

COI This user follows the COI agreements. Talk to me if you think I need help with my editing!

This editor is a volunteer, and is willing to write and maintain encyclopedia articles for free.

Another concrete thing would be to revive WP:WikiProject Integrity and include reports on its activities in Signpost.

Another concrete thing would be to separate the Conflict of Interest Noticeboard active cases from general questions about what's right and what's wrong. Right now it's pretty punitive (I admit I'm part of that problem) and there's no place I know of to go with genuine questions of ethical integrity. — Brianhe (talk) 19:23, 2 September 2015 (UTC)

I agree with a lot of this. Not every detail, but the basic point is a good one (and similar to what I've just posted below) that spotlighting and and improving the experience of being a disclosed COI editor on Wikipedia will make it more clearly a viable path to follow. WWB Too (Talk · COI) 19:30, 2 September 2015 (UTC)

Related, I would like to see COI policy information (and perhaps other policies - haven't thought that far) included in the initial AfC contact. Almost all AfC articles are by first-time editors, and most of what I review at AfC looks potentially like COI. I'm guessing that almost none of those folks have much knowledge of WP policies. When I've pointed out COI to them some have been quite embarrassed. Others out themselves by saying "I need help with this article about my grandfather/cousin/wife." This is an area where we could raise awareness - which doesn't stop the bad actors, but should reinforce the desired ethics. LaMona (talk) 04:08, 3 September 2015 (UTC)

18. Make it easier for company reps to receive community help

Streamline efforts to assist responsible, hands-off paid contributors to improve community responsiveness to requests.

Speaking as one of the handful of disclosed, guideline-compliant paid editors around here, I'd like to offer the following: a common point of trouble for those who would do the right thing is that it can be very difficult to find a volunteer to assist with a request. I frequently hear from companies who have tried posting a request but found it confusing, or failed to receive a reply. The biggest issue isn't usually opposition to the requested changes—it's that they're hearing crickets.

An interesting comparison would be AfC. For all its problems, the fact remains it is an actively managed queue where one can eventually find the necessary assistance. Not so with Category:Requested edits, where there are unanswered requests from March. Sometimes one can find help at WP:COI/N although that is not its stated purpose. Once upon a time there was WikiProject Cooperation, but after some early support the volunteers dwindled.

So how about a concentration of efforts to make it easier for companies and organizations to take a hands-off approach. For lack of a better proposal, let's call this AfI: a content-focused help desk to which all company representatives can be directed, and expect a timely answer, whatever it may be. WWB Too (Talk · COI) 19:26, 2 September 2015 (UTC)

I'd be a lot more likely to help if I didn't have doubts about who exactly I was helping. I think as long as Wikipedia has the degree of anonymity that it does, I'm unlikely to devote my volunteer time to enriching another person. The only way this would work for me is if the editor asking for an assist was verifiably backed by a cause (e.g. a nonprofit) that I believe in. Maybe having individual WikiProjects adopt and endorse paid editors would go towards this? — Brianhe (talk) 19:35, 2 September 2015 (UTC)

I agree that anonymity is a major hurdle to building a trust relationship, which is why I use my real name on-wiki, and encourage clients to do the same. However, I see the exchange differently: consider that you're donating your volunteer time to help someone follow the rules as they offer improvements to Wikipedia about, yes, themselves. If the suggestions improve Wikipedia and benefit the requestor, so be it. If the suggestions do not improve Wikipedia, don't implement them, and explain why.

Meanwhile, having paid editors endorsed by WikiProjects is an interesting idea, but few projects are strong enough for this to make any sense. WP:COMPANIES itself is mostly tumbleweeds. WWB Too (Talk · COI) 19:47, 2 September 2015 (UTC)

• Agree in principle, though a dedicated board might suffer the same fate as this one: Wikipedia:Miscellany_for_deletion/Wikipedia:Extant_Organizations/Noticeboard. It might be easier to write this as a second purpose into COIN, simply because you get a few people hanging out there. Andreas JN466 20:02, 2 September 2015 (UTC)
• Absolutely agree in principle, we need to accept that paid editing is here to stay and we need to make compliant paid editing as easy as possible for people who are not familiar with our rules or processes. Thryduulf (talk) 01:37, 3 September 2015 (UTC)
• The one way not to do this is an additional noticeboard: we already have too many. DGG ( talk ) 00:03, 5 September 2015 (UTC)
• In principle I agree, but the level of harassment and grief that declared paid editors who are doing the right thing receive at places like ANI makes me feel that people will be reluctant to participate. Lankiveil ^{(speak to me)} 09:35, 5 September 2015 (UTC).
• Here is an anecdotal experince that may shed some light. I was tempted even wanted to help a good faith editor with a COI at Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, see post at [11] In the end, it seemed to me I did not have the expertise or real desire to put in the time to really study it or to make those edits my own, so I don't know what to do about that. Alanscottwalker (talk) 14:09, 5 September 2015 (UTC)

• I don't like the idea of offering some sort of privileged or special service for businesses and certainly wouldn't volunteer for such myself. But if someone posts on an unwatched talkpage we already have a sort of solution, tell them that if no one answers in a week they should post {{helpme}} on it and it will get attention, albeit not from someone who follows that subject. It would also be worth having a page for "old unanswered queries on talkpages", with sublists at different WikiProjects ϢereSpielChequers 10:49, 7 September 2015 (UTC)

  Proposal now written up at Wikipedia:Bot_requests#Monitor_and_circulate_old_unanswered_questions ϢereSpielChequers 11:13, 7 September 2015 (UTC)

• Opposed on every level. I understand where this proposal is coming from. Anybody running a business wants a predictable context so they can make promises to customers and deliver on them. Freelancers/PR firms who comply with the COI guideline are in a bind b/c they need to wait for volunteer responses to edit-requests or for responses at AfC, so cannot make promises about timely delivery. I imagine that would be frustrating. But Wikipedia was not built to provide a context for anybody to efficiently get the content they want. There is WP:NODEADLINE. We set up OTRS to deal with emergency BLP/legal issues sure, but those are legal issues. The idea of turning volunteers, here out of desire and a commitment to the ideals of the place, into efficient content-generating machinery so that freelancers/PR reps can exploit them (and i use "exploit" in the sense of "use for selfish ends") is just wrong headed and will never work. There is nothing in that, that is coherent with the ideals of this place. And the double twist of spinning a rhetoric of "we have to do it or the integrity of WP will be even more harmed" is just confused and built on an impossible foundation. Freelancers/PR firms need to be educated about the nature of time and content creation in WP, and they need to educate their clients in turn. I am always happy to try to teach editors with a COI how this place works; only sometimes do I care enough about the content they want to get into WP, to actually work on that with them. I tell them that they need to wait for someone to be interested. Additional note - there are paid editors who have come to know lots of people in the community and are good at asking people who might be interested for their attention to the edits they want implemented, and I respect that they understand that they have to try and try to get attention. They cannot expect it to be served to them. Not here. Jytdog (talk) 03:51, 8 September 2015 (UTC)

19. Tighten up business-related content guidelines

Overhaul and tighten up the existing guidelines for business-related content.

Related to the point above about CorpProd (which, FWIW, I would be entirely in favor of a specific and strict notability standard for company articles), it would also be good to see a complete refresh and clarification of the guidelines for company articles. Anyone who works on a regular basis with company articles will know that the typical content of a company article, even those that have reached FA status, is hugely variable.

The WikiProject Companies guidelines are very basic and not terribly clear about what should be included, or excluded. Part of these very short guidelines also conflicts with the common sense feedback that often comes up at company articles about not wanting to include lists of executives; the guideline specifically says this is "desirable".

In short, having a clear guideline on appropriate content for company articles would give editors something to easily refer back to, as well as providing a resource to those seeking to update an article about their own company so that they understand what information can and should be included, as well as what should not. WWB Too (Talk · COI) 19:37, 2 September 2015 (UTC)

• Agree. Would work well in combination with 2. and 8. above. Andreas JN466 20:07, 2 September 2015 (UTC)
• Agree - see also my related policy suggestion at the Village Pump for a WP:NOTDIRECTORY clarification on business-related article lists. GermanJoe (talk) 20:18, 2 September 2015 (UTC)

Hallelujah on the WP:NOTDIR cleanup. My fingers are tired from deleting lists of products [12][13][14] and software features [15], corp officers [16], company social media [17][18] and social media campaigns (!) [19], and office locations [20]. That's just a sample of what I did in the month of August. — Brianhe (talk) 02:29, 3 September 2015 (UTC)

The simplest way to do this — at least partially — (which I am about to propose in an RfC as soon as I can get the wording right) — is what I am tentatively calling NOT STARTUP: An addition to WP:NOT that specifies that information on companies limited to the motivation of the founders and the initial funding is not encyclopedic. And a corresponding addition to the notability guideline: that sources limited to this do not show notability, and neither do sources establishing an award for "good companies to work at", and "fastest growing" — an excellent synonym for what we call "not yet notable". I'd add to this a clarification at RS that local "business journals" are not reliable. This won't deal with promotional editing from established firms: but, with established firms, there's at least a decent chance of finding encyclopedic information. DGG ( talk ) 00:01, 5 September 2015 (UTC)

20. Increase the bar for autoconfirmation

As the initial report indicated, the socks created for this enterprise made their 10 trivial edits and waited the 4 days to be autoconfirmed. This is a ridiculously easy requirement. I would suggest at least 50 edits and 30 days, making it more onerous to create large numbers of autoconfirmed socks - and that standard is still easily reached by normal accounts. (Right now, IP exempt accounts editing through a Tor network are required to make 100 edits in 90 days.) BMK (talk) 21:06, 2 September 2015 (UTC)

See #3 above, as this is largely the same issue -- Fuzheado | Talk 21:30, 2 September 2015 (UTC)

21. Log groups of accounts created by the same IP

• Could we automatically check the IPs used to create new accounts and flag those that create many new accounts in a short period? The only legit occassion this would happen would be in the educational program. I wouldn't suggest blocking the creation, but if we could at least see the groups of accounts we could check them to see what they're up to. SmartSE (talk) 12:49, 2 September 2015 (UTC)

See Wikipedia:Sockpuppet_investigations/Tzufun for a contemporary example of what this could detect. It's ridiculous that it is so easy to evade detection by creating accounts that make 1 or 2 edits. SmartSE (talk) 13:00, 2 September 2015 (UTC)

• (edit conflict)} This already happens - only 6 accounts can be created per IP per day (this can be overridden by administrators and account creators) - see Wikipedia:Account creator. I've been involved with several editathons where the limit has been hit, so the override is necessary for more than just the education programme. Thryduulf (talk) 13:02, 2 September 2015 (UTC)

• Thanks for the link. As with anti-vandal measures, I guess we have to concede that there will be some false positives. As with our discussion at 11b it would only be necessary to log groups of accounts from IPs creating many accounts e.g. >10 in a month. It would be possible to distinguish good faith editors from socks very easily. SmartSE (talk) 13:16, 2 September 2015 (UTC)

• An additional limit of X account creations per Y days could be very useful. It would need more discussion, e.g. does it need to be customisable (e.g. a university in September may see many legitimate creations)? Would spanning a range (to avoid IP hopping) cause more false positives than benefits? And it will almost certainly need a software update, but it's a good idea. Thryduulf (talk) 14:37, 2 September 2015 (UTC)

• Support - I've also never understood why we allow 5 account creations at a time -- to what purpose? We have account creators if there's a legitimate need for a large number of accounts to be created. I'd limit account creation to 2, at most 3, at a time, and then a waiting period before any accounts could be created from that IP - say 7 days. BMK (talk) 21:00, 2 September 2015 (UTC)
  • There are legitimate cases where multiple users are created from the same IP frequently (e.g. libraries, educational institutions) and we want to encourage the creation of accounts by legitimate folk so we need to be careful where we strike the balance - remembering that IPs are trivial to change (I've had three this evening without leaving my seat because I've had to restart the router twice (it's crap) and BT assigns a different IP each time. Thryduulf (talk) 01:16, 3 September 2015 (UTC)
    • It might be worth doing some testing of this concept with human validators to see what kind of ratio of true to false hits one would achieve. I would expect such a program to bring potential cases to light, not to make final decisions. Thus it becomes a question of whether it's right most of the time, or whether it's a waste of people's time most of the time. LaMona (talk) 03:54, 3 September 2015 (UTC)
• Oppose Account creator is a workaround, it really isn't ideal to have to say "thanks for attending this class, if you haven't created an account queue over there and we will create one for you" aside from the difficulties to the volunteers at the event, it really sends a bad message out if we are effectively saying that this system is so complex you can't even set up an account. I attended a twitter course recently and the course leader was able to say "if you don't yet have a twitter account set one up now, its easy!". How I wish our outreach was more like that. Then there's the issue of diversity. One account per IP per day probably sounds quite logical to people with home broadband in Europe and America, but elsewhere aside from internet cafes and campus WiFi, there is an entire country that channels the internet through one IP. ϢereSpielChequers 08:44, 3 September 2015 (UTC)
  • We just need a simple way to exempt a set of IPs in real time. So that when I start an editing session as an admin I can go to X spot and exempt the IP I am at for 12h or whatever. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 00:58, 4 September 2015 (UTC)
    • Funny you should mention that, care to endorse that at Phabricator? ϢereSpielChequers 05:47, 4 September 2015 (UTC)
      • I never meant this to be an automatic limit but rather a way for others to check groups of accounts created by the same IP to see if they are disruptive. Without access to any data it's impossible to know the balance of good-faith to bad-faith groups that this would pick up but it would at least make us more proactive in finding these massive sockrings. SmartSE (talk) 08:08, 4 September 2015 (UTC)
        • Yes having a way to determine a batch of accounts created from the same IP would be useful for following up editing events aswell. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 08:43, 4 September 2015 (UTC)
          • There are data protection/Privacy implications to that I'm afraid, and some of the most interesting attendees at outreach events are the ones who already had accounts but had hit a problem. So at outreach events where we want to monitor things afterwards we try to get consent from the attendees. ϢereSpielChequers 09:21, 4 September 2015 (UTC)

• oppose i suppose nominator has not been to an editathon and seen people walk away from editing. each barrier turns away a percentage of good faith newbies. i would suggest connecting ip throttle and auto confirm to algorithmic prediction, i.e. i can predict you are a vandal in 5 edits. Duckduckstop (talk) 16:18, 4 September 2015 (UTC)
  • This wouldn't prevent people from editing. SmartSE (talk) 23:05, 8 September 2015 (UTC)
• Oppose. This won't stop professional networks who are making money. They can figure out how to find a fresh IP, and will take that precaution. Then we have diverted enforcement resources completely away from the worst offenders. And where have we diverted those resources? To hounding and harassing users based on dubious claims of connection. If two people in a town in India write about a meteor that hit nearby that people in Britain think is non-notable because it only hit an Indian townhouse, well, if you know they are linked by an IP address, instant sockpuppet block. Not a thought will even be diverted to the notion that they might just be using one public computer nearby and they both care that a meteor came down and hit a building in town, no, you know they're one and the same because they registered with the same IP, end of story. But it's worse than that, because if you link accounts by creating IP, that can be used to out users. For example, the Egyptian government could spoof the IP addresses of 10,000 suspected dissidents, sign up each one for a new Wikipedia account, then check if those accounts are linked by IP to any existing accounts. If those accounts ever said anything bad, look out! There's a mass execution scheduled next week. No, we do not want to participate in spy games. Let the foreign spies grate their teeth on our HTTPS and at least have to do some hacking of their own, instead of using us to do their work. Wnt (talk) 21:46, 8 September 2015 (UTC)
  • By your reasoning we wouldn't hard block IPs either since there are ways to avoid them. Logging (not publicly which I guess I didn't make clear) doesn't mean blocking or preventing account creation - the idea of this is to have groups that might be suspicious and could be checked in a similar way to how the edit filter tags work. They're a sign something might be wrong not a reason for instant reversion. Currently we rely on fluke to find them and when there are technological solutions that would prevent abuse it seems stupid not to use them. SmartSE (talk) 23:05, 8 September 2015 (UTC)

Keeping the information non-public offers some protection, and yes, unfortunately there is considerable IP information available to checkusers for a period now - nonetheless, the more secret data Wikipedia accumulates, the more information can be hacked at once, and the more appealing it becomes for someone to take all that information. The thing that drew in the abusers in this case was power - the power to keep or throw away articles. The more power that we allow to accumulate, the more power there is for someone to take from us. Wnt (talk) 00:29, 9 September 2015 (UTC)

22. turn up algorithmic vandal prediction to 11

given the good work by Aaron Halfaker, we need to fund more automation of vandal detection and sock detection. he should go to school on this case, and the past history, to A/B test sock tells. the humans should stop trying to be programs, and rather be programmers and ambassadors. when the algorithm can tell good faith newbies apart from vandals better than new page patrol, it's time to tell the humans to stop. let the computer give patrolers a watchlist of problematic interactions to act on. Duckduckstop (talk) 16:24, 4 September 2015 (UTC)

Not to toot my own horn, but is this a rehash of § 11b. Score articles on "sockiness"? — Brianhe (talk) 16:33, 4 September 2015 (UTC)

ok, call it 11c. i agree with you, but suggest building on existing A/B testing on vandalism as was presented at Wikimania. m:Research:Editor Behaviour Analysis & Graphs; m:Research:Revision scoring as a service; m:Research:Onboarding new Wikipedians/Qualitative analysis need a grant, and funding, submit your ideas at m:Grants:IdeaLab. Duckduckstop (talk) 18:24, 4 September 2015 (UTC)

Orangemoody was not about vandalism, it was a combination of spam, socking, COI and a protection racket, but no-one has yet pointed to a single Orangemoody edit that you could call vandalism. We could of course tune our antivandal bots differently, but the price would be more false positives. Currently we are very intolerant of either edit filters or anti vandal bots that have a significant proportion of errors; The thinking being that if a bot misses some vandalism another bot, edit filter or editor will very probably catch it, but if you bite newbies you lose them. If we had no shortage of editors but vandalism was increasing, then I could see the logic for making the algorithmic prediction to 11 and accepting a bit more collateral damage. But our problems are the reverse of that, vandalism is much less of a problem than before cluebot and the edit filters, but our inflow of newbies is declining. ϢereSpielChequers 18:45, 9 September 2015 (UTC)

In violent agreement (I think!) with WereSpielChequers. We need a new class of creep detector, and we need it to assist in discovering and stopping the flow of crap on WP. Just today I've seen one new COIN case [21] and investigated one spinoff case [22] that involved editors whose names were obvious shills for orgs or individuals that they even inserted links to. This isn't an unsolvable AI problem, it's conventional pattern recognition. I'm tired of the argument that adding new detectors will just drive creeps to be more stealthy. We missed these, pure and simple, one of them for six years according to Smartse, and we need to do better. Urgently need a toolset that looks at the totality of what we've learned about those who aren't here to build a better encyclopedia, self-promotional names being just one factor, and enables/leverages our incredibly tenacious, committed talent that's committed to the cause. — Brianhe (talk) 19:27, 9 September 2015 (UTC)

23. teahousification of AfC

so an extortion ring uses the declined AfC, as a to do list. feel implicated? given that between 15%-25% of newbies are here to create a new article, we need a newbie friendly way and means of mentoring their work; either to coach into getting into shape, or explain why and how it is not ready. clearly a wall of template rejection to counter-productive. we currently advise newbies not to go anywhere near AfC. such is the fate of broken processes. any process requires a feedback loop for continuous quality improvement; when you do not have one this is the result. actual interaction with humans is required. this will require the recruitment of mentors, creation of safe space, and ongoing support and funding to implement. Duckduckstop (talk) 16:32, 4 September 2015 (UTC)

I formerly advised them not to go near AfC. With the partial improvement in the quality of reviews that Kudpung's initiative has accomplished, I no longer do; this needs to be considerably more stringent. And, with possibly-promotional editors, using draft space is a requirement. But certainly we need better human interaction with experienced editors. Fortunately, it does not require funding, nor will funding even help. The mentors who are needed are volunteers with experience here, who need to realize that helping new editors is the most critical function for not just the improvement but the survival of the encycopedia. Such people do not work at WP for money, and almost all the people who do work at WP for money are incapable of doing this right. The very few who are actually qualified WP editors are already fully occupied, often with related matters. What is needed is not coordination (though a organized schedule for checking NPP would help) — but intelligent work. Each of us, individually, can start doing this right now. DGG ( talk ) 23:56, 4 September 2015 (UTC)

Judging by the huge amount of talk that still goes on at AfC, my initiative apparently still did not restrict AfC reviewing to editors with enough intuition, experience, and knowledge to go about the task without constantly asking for help. AfC is a project, while NPP is an essential process. We don't get this phenomenon at all at the far more crucial process of of NPP. Perhaps, at the risk of turning NPP into a social gathering too, we should, but ideally we should carry over to NPPers the qualifcations that are required for AfC reviewers. Better still, perhaps merge AfC to the more important NPP completely; in fact I believe there is consensus for this already that hasn't been enacted yet. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 01:04, 5 September 2015 (UTC)

Perhaps this would be a good time to temporarily suspend operations at AfC, and review all the outstanding issues, and all the new issues that have arisen out of Orangemoody? Take two weeks if necessary, figure out what you could do differently to stop the next Orangemoody. Would it be as simple as posting a few bigger warning notices? Perhaps deleting rejected articles ASAP. Possibly, but I'd guess that a comprehensive program would be needed. Then you've obviously got some pre-Orangemoody issues. Get all the active reviewers together and give the project new direction and new life. Or if you can't, then take it to NPP. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 01:42, 5 September 2015 (UTC)

I think that any knee-jerk deletionism is far out of place here. Yes, the clients wanted their businesses or whatever to get articles, but -- it was the potential for deletion that made money for the Orangemoody cabal. If we'd just been inclusionist and let all the non-notable articles be, there would have been no need to pay anyone. Wnt (talk) 15:27, 6 September 2015 (UTC)

The only step on the "company" draft creation that could lead a reasonably diligent user astray is the one where it talks about the quality of sources - I wonder if a tick-box list would work better. All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 17:57, 7 September 2015 (UTC).

24. Loosen requirements for articles, especially in draft space

Companies did not pay to have people write articles, but to have people not delete their articles. If we did not delete their articles anyway, they could not be made to pay. There is no harm in having draft articles about non-notable companies, provided people understand they are drafts not checked for neutrality. There is also no harm in having articles about companies that pass a very basic test of GNG: two RSes with substantial coverage. It is highly counterproductive to have crooked or ought-to-be-crooked-but-apparently-just-power-tripping editors go through articles and say "no, this company might have some sources about it, but it's too small, too unimportant, I don't like it". Subjective, arbitrary decisions are the golden road to corruption. Therefore,

1) Any article with a source should be able to linger in draft space indefinitely. It should only be deleted if it is unsourced or misrepresents its source or is clearly non-neutral, and can't be readily fixed.

2) Editors searching for a company name (or anything else) should not get draft articles as hits on the main page. Nonetheless, the search should tell them if a draft exists and let them proceed, perhaps with a note behind the link that drafts are unreliable and may be biased or promotional.

3) The GNG should be universally applied. We must not tolerate editors who persistently and deliberately misunderstand the various specialty guidelines as being restrictions that disqualify articles that pass the GNG, when they are clearly written as alternative evidence of notability. Arbitrary, falsely-wikilawyering deletionism isn't just a vile nuisance, it's a career, and we need to end that career. Wnt (talk) 15:39, 6 September 2015 (UTC)

This sounds like an in situ project fork into a "good" encyclopedia and a "non-encyclopedic" encyclopedia. Why not just create a proper project fork with different notability requirements, if this is considered a good direction? Corpopedia, maybe (that's a joke). — Brianhe (talk) 21:25, 6 September 2015 (UTC)

We already have a Draft: namespace, so fortunately I don't have to reargue that. ;) Let's just encourage people to use it, and in the process, take the wind out of the sails of the people who were gaming the system for profit. Wnt (talk) 22:34, 6 September 2015 (UTC)

I think what Wnt is suggesting already exists. When I run into a BLP-article or a corp-article in AfC, which is WP:NotJustYet because they don't have enough sources, I recommend they concentrate on being the best actor / band / startup / athlete / whatever they can be, and return every three months to tweak their draftspace article (to avoid the deletion-after-six-months-of-inactivity-bot). These are the potential-article-drafts, as distinct from the no-hope-drafts that should be declined as unlikely to EVER satisfy the wiki-notability standards.

    I also think that mainspace *is* forked, already -- and has been for many years now -- into the crap-pedia with pokemon, television shows, barely-wiki-notable movie personnel, and so on... plus the stub-pedia of biological species, state-representative politicians, athletes active prior to 1970 A.D., high schools, and small populated places in Iran ... with then a huge jump to the DYK / FA / GA realm aka the good-encyclopedia-that-nobody-can-edit except for the stewardship-slash-page-protection folks. In between, we have start-class, C-class, and B-class articles, in various states of quality. So the idea that we could revoke WP:NOTDIR, and create a wikipedia-based yellowpages equivalent, where every corporation with a delaware registration would be listed, is not as outlandish as it first sounds.

    Still, the fundamental problem would still exist: if we vastly expand the eligibility for mainspace, but put a big red border around the not-yet-wiki-notable articles (or similar badge of shame), then we are just creating a market for PR and SEO specialists to try and 'improve' articles from H-class up to C-class ... using their sockfarms to manipulate the level-up mechanisms. Wikipedia was vulnerable to orangemoody-type incidents, not so much because our wiki-notability and wiki-reliability criteria are so high, but because our wiki-culture is so *harsh*. Even at AfC, which is *designed* to handle COI-encumbered beginners, the process mostly consists of getting a one-liner decline-template after waiting two weeks for a response. Only the most dedicated folks survive the AfC queue... and those people tend to be the most dedicated, because they are the most COI-encumbered! Catch-22. 75.108.94.227 (talk) 03:56, 11 September 2015 (UTC)

25. Develop procedures for identifying and imposing real-world consequences on bad actors

Currently, our sanctions against bad actors are quite limited. We can ban easily duplicated user accounts, and revert their edits. Beyond that, we are limited by a wall of anonymity. We don't actually identify puppetmasters, and so our consequences are effective only against puppets. Deterrence in this system is minimal. Proposals to require real-name participation have been repeatedly floated, and have always gotten shot down, for a number of very good reasons. However, given the scale, complexity, organization, and damage of bad actor(s) like orangemoody, it might be time to consider a formal procedure to pierce that anonymity in the most egregious cases. Once a real-world bad actor has been identified, we can seek some sort of real world sanction, from the fairly mild (publishing the name with our evidence and requesting a response) all the way to the most severe (seeking criminal prosecution by the appropriate authority).

Stage 1: Identification. There are obviously many hurdles to identifying the real identity to a contributor.

--The first is cultural: we strongly value anonymity on wikipedia. Anonymity allows free expression and participation. Many editors, including myself, value anonymity. But I don't think that value is absolute. We're here to build an encyclopedia, and in very limited cases anonymity may harm that effort. A decision to seek to identify a contributor should not be taken lightly. We can adopt a tough standard of evidence. Perhaps a body such as ArbCom should form a type of "judicial oversight" or "check and balance." A targeted user should be notified and have a chance to defend. These and other types of basic due process safeguards should obviously be discussed.

--Once a decision is made, the second hurdle is technical. I am certainly not an expert in this field. However, I am not completely sure that we are powerless. We have a tremendous reservoir of talent and time in terms of volunteers, a non-trivial amount of cash that we seem to be stacking up at the Foundation level, and lawyers on staff. Nearly by definition, a major bad actor leaves a huge amount of evidence on wikipedia. It seems with all that we should be able to make some headway. I know that we have not been able to get information from Elance and other sites when we come to them hat-in-hand. But court-ordered discovery pursuant to a lawsuit might pop those servers right open.

Stage 2: Consequences. The purpose of consequences is deterrence. In many cases, simple publication of evidence may be sufficient, and has the advantage of not depending on court action. Civil suits would be especially effective against anyone who makes a business out of violating our terms of use. At the most extreme, when crimes have been committed, we could apply to the appropriate authorities for prosecution. All of this will of course be complicated by the global nature of the project and the numerous jurisdictions involved.

I don't think this will be at all easy in practice. It is resource intensive. And that's good...we don't want to be doing this often; in fact, hopefully not ever. But even having the process "on the books" may serve as a deterrent. Erudy (talk) 15:10, 7 September 2015 (UTC)

Piercing anonymity from the Wikipedia end is dangerous and won't work on the worst cases. It really isn't that hard to write a little script and put it on a free website to arrange for your very own proxy access to Wikipedia. The "behind 7 proxies" approach might not work against topnotch prosecutors, but Wikipedia isn't them. Meanwhile, it is easy for some totalitarian regime to get a mole into the Wikipedia bureaucracy and go after the users they want, claiming it's part of some investigation like this, and probably no one will be the wiser. Why, you would be treated as outright racist if you even suggested that someone shouldn't be granted checkuser or whatever your new Grand Inquisitor power is called that would let them automatically call on WMF's lawyers to get you subpoenas or whatever would be called, just because they have Russian or Chinese nationality.

However, it ought to be much simpler to break anonymity from the far end. Pose as a company looking for services, send a check, get some work done, and then go after whoever took the money with some sort of tort or FTC action or even extortion. No one has to care who made the edit - only who collected the money given the representations that your business might suffer if you don't pay to keep its article active. It doesn't matter if it was a monkey doing the editing, only who owned the monkey. Wnt (talk) 18:19, 7 September 2015 (UTC)

I think the idea of a "sting" from the far side is a good one. Your Manchurian Candidate scenario seems extremely far fetched though. So the Chinese are going to set up a user, make this user into a respected member of the community, build up a case against some target user, submit this case to the scrutiny of the wikipedia community, all for the privilege of having a wikipedia lawyer go to a real court and air the whole case again in front of an independent judge to maybe get some data off of a company's server? Wouldn't they just do a black hat hack the company's (or wikipedia's) server? And we're assuming that this Manchurian Candidate has somehow convinced everyone that the user who regularly edits Falon Gong or Tibetan Independence or whatever is the next orangemoody? Or mount a sockpuppet campaign to change those articles by brute force...just the kind of bad actor where this process would be useful. I agree that piercing anonymity is a big step and even dangerous, but clearly I'm thinking of a system more robust and with more checks in it than you are.Erudy (talk) 23:04, 7 September 2015 (UTC)

I'm not suggesting they would build a case against the user. Instead they would have some nobody file a complaint that user X (some dissident) is a shill who is part of an existing PR network under investigation. An Inquisitor "carelessly" takes this at face value and runs the paperwork, gets someone to add the user to the list of people to be tracked down and records subpoenaed or whatever as part of that case. Sooner or later this is exposed, but in the meanwhile, the data would be in the hands of the careless Inquisitor, who fails to keep it as confidential as people might think, and presumably gets a little kickback for his willingness to help. Now you could say why don't they hack Wikipedia instead, but this is hacking Wikipedia. Social engineering is the basis of many hacks. Wnt (talk) 21:37, 8 September 2015 (UTC)

26. Make "paid editor" a preferences setting - set at registration time

Build the TOU requirements into the software. All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 17:00, 7 September 2015 (UTC).

• That would be good if we were trying to normalise and encourage it. But since we aren't...... ϢereSpielChequers 17:36, 7 September 2015 (UTC)

That's an interesting idea. We're trying to normalize and encourage disclosure, which is currently often done in a sloppy and haphazard way, is confusing even to those who want to be transparent, and is an expectation that's fairly easy to just ignore until someone asks. A separate user group that is easy to self-select into and technically incompatible with relevant rights (e.g. autopatrolled) might streamline the process and facilitate community review of edits from these accounts. Opabinia regalis (talk) 17:45, 7 September 2015 (UTC)

This is something that bothered me about that policy from the beginning, and I commented on it when it was still a draft. The current 'disclosure' requirement gives such a choice of options that there is no way to reduce it to a machine-readable quantity. Sort of an odd omission when half the stuff in our articles is written in standard templates as if they are merely a way station to some commercial dataset. AFAIR, checking for disclosure means reviewing every edit summary the person made to see if a freely written text indicates they were paid somehow, plus checking their user page, plus checking I think it was the talk page archives... it's designed as if intentionally to make it impossible to track the paid editors en masse. And ... some of the suggestions aren't much better; some are indeed directly counterproductive. I suspect they have a bigger lobby here than people give them credit for. Wnt (talk) 18:24, 7 September 2015 (UTC)

• Support this as sensible. Also, however, when the I-am-editing-my-company-article-on-the-clock checkbox is ticked, we should automagically create *two* usernames: one for their paid editing, and a second one for use off-the-clock. They're getting paid to memorize WP:COI and WP:RS and WP:NPOV and such, plus learn infobox-syntax and cite-web-syntax and all manner of other skills. We should offer them the opportunity to edit for fun, on movies or schools or sports or politics or whatever other interests they might have, outside of work. When you create User:PollyPaidEditor_XyzCorp, you should also get the User:PollyHobbyForFun persona, gratis. Auto-linkage of the uids, as well. 75.108.94.227 (talk) 04:03, 11 September 2015 (UTC)

27. Surface attempts to manipulate an article to the reader

It's clear that we're converging on solutions that encourage good editing and discourage bad, especially COI/advocacy editing and socking. However I think we are missing an element here --the reader. This is an essential factor, if the COI editors, PR agencies, corp marketers, budding artists, hedge fund promoters, etc. are to be dissuaded from abusing our creation, an encyclopedia.

The whole reason the bad actors are here is to become visible and to manipulate public perceptions. What if we could turn that on its head and hold their own bad behavior, now mostly hidden in internal process-oriented noticeboards and administrative remedies, up to public scrutiny? We already do this somewhat with {{COI}}, which is kind of random in its application, but could it be taken up a notch? Could there be a virtually automatic tag, say, for "this article is/has recently been subject to manipulation" with a link to more information, for lay readers?

We can define criteria as we please, but I'd suggest one or more of the following considerations. Editor criteria: recent confirmed or under-investigation COI editors, socks, blocked or banned editors. Article criteria : recreated deletions, formerly protected, mentioned on noticeboards. I had some other ideas about scoring, decay functions and stuff, but maybe starting simple is best. — Brianhe (talk) 05:44, 8 September 2015 (UTC)

We already have far too many templates on articles. ϢereSpielChequers 12:52, 8 September 2015 (UTC)

It doesn't have to be done with templates, which I agree are ugly. One idea, a Tomatometer integrity score somewhere on the page; opt-in or opt-out configuration. Another idea, an "issues" or "article integrity" tab where this stuff could be kept, including history of noticeboard incidents involving the article, which currently requires excessive levels of wizardry to locate and access. Maybe combine the two; score links to details on scoring. — Brianhe (talk) 14:50, 9 September 2015 (UTC)

User:Piotrus pointed out at Signpost that something like this exists as Wikipedia:Metadata gadget even including a color coded score. - Brianhe (talk) 17:21, 29 October 2015 (UTC)

I'd support bringing this to Village Pump for a community vote on enabling it for all editors and readers by default. Through probably it will get defeated by the crowd of people saying "why bother, I like Wikipedia as it is", sigh. --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 07:00, 30 October 2015 (UTC)

I would have proposed it already except for the ominous caveats in the installation section, including "...this practice can make the script load unreliably...". Maybe we need some technical reliability checks before we try to push anything foward. – Brianhe (talk) 19:52, 30 October 2015 (UTC)

28. Fork Wikipedia

It has been obvious for a while that there is tension between deletionists and inclusionists on this project. The result is a series of compromises like BLPprod that don't really suit either side, and have left room for organisations like Orangemoody to exploit the anomalies between them. A simple solution to that would be to fork the English language Wikipedia. Verifiedpedia and Openpedia could both operate within SUL and the Wikimedia family, anyone visiting Wikipedia would have the choice to only see Verifiedpedia or to see Openpedia. On Verifiedpedia the deletionists could be given carte blanche to delete anything unsourced, and unsourced or poorly sourced would become a speedy deletion class. Openpedia by contrast could go for a more inclusive approach, notability could be broadened, temporary notability could be introduced for people who the public want to know about but whose notability cannot yet be discerned. For example, anyone currently signed to a top flight team would be temporarily notable, and their articles only deleted if they left the squad without actually making a first team appearance.

Verifiedpedia would seek to avoid Orangemoody style problems by requiring multiple independent sources before anyone could create an article. Verifiedpedia could even treat Openpedia as its draft space. If you don't have Autopatrolled rights, start articles on Openpedia and when they are ready they will be copied to Verifiedpedia.

Openpedia would avoid Orangemoody style problems by enabling anyone to post a basic profile of their organisation by answering twenty questions such as name. sector, location, number of employees, website, CEO, founding date, awards won, products produced, other companies acquired etc etc and then use those answers to bot generate a stub that at least avoided some of the peacock phrasing.

Verifiedpedia would be able to mass delete all the articles in AFC, draft, or currently tagged for notability or sourcing problems, after all they could always be reimported from Openpedia if improved or if it turned out the tag was incorrect.

Openpedia would be able to move all AFC and draft articles into mainspace, redefine "draft" as unpatrolled articles, and have all unpatrolled articles set as NoIndex with a simple template at the top saying that this was a draft and not yet fully part of Openpedia.

Both pedias would be free to import articles and edits from the other. As long as an article or a section was in both then subsequent edits could be automatically ported across if editors opt in to that.

The two communities would inevitably diverge as they acquired different recruits, but they would both start with the same admins etc as anyone with user rights on Wikipedia would start with the same rights on both (though presumably many would resign or lapse from one or the other). ϢereSpielChequers 16:15, 9 September 2015 (UTC)

An intriguing proposal, thanks for your boldness in proposing. I wonder if a full fork is required, or could this be accomplished technically with approved page versions and a "verifiedpedia" reader mode? — Brianhe (talk) 16:27, 9 September 2015 (UTC)

Thanks, I don't know to what extent we could do the technical side of this without forking, remember few of our readers log in, so if we don't fork we achieve little by offering people a cookie based solution to set their Wikipedia preferences as most people will go to the default. On one website I can't see agreement on keeping a huge swathe of marginally notable articles provided they were marked as NoIndex. Two websites, separate brandnames, and yes you could offer a real choice. ϢereSpielChequers 18:33, 9 September 2015 (UTC)

It occurred to me that what we have today is very close to your description of Openpedia, with a few exceptions carved out by dogged determination, like the MEDRS suite of articles. Others have pointed out that whole swaths of WP—Indian cinema, I believe was the example given—are vast lawless tracts of self-promotion. — Brianhe (talk) 19:32, 9 September 2015 (UTC)

That I think gives me an indication as to which of the two projects you would be most inclined to go with. Others tire of continually having to deal with template bombing and deletionist mistakes such as classifying Australian State Coach as a BLP. ϢereSpielChequers 20:02, 9 September 2015 (UTC)

Yes and no, some articles I have created were deleted including Road Runners Motorcycle Club just last year, which I think was a mistake. I'm currently debating whether the Orangemoody case is worthy of a WP article, on the inclusionist side. In some sense, the labels inclusionist or deletionist are orthogonal to my goals. I do believe in predictably applied rules, otherwise we are creating a system of perverse incentives that will ultimately drive away good-faith editors. This, I think is the root of the evil; I don't really care if XYZ corp has a self-promoting article per se. Information quality from a crowdsourced project is a caveat emptor affair by its nature. But to build these self-serving things on the backs of volunteers, especially unwitting ones—i.e. when we find out after the fact that someone else has profited from creating/maintaining the thing—is evil, amounting to theft of labor. In a metaphorical sense, it increasingly seems that we (the developed world) are outsourcing to the developing/underdeveloped world the strip mining of a precious resource, the global intellectual commons of which WP is a part. Which is doubly evil, because the developing world has the most to gain from a free, quality information resource via efforts like Wikipedia Zero, but only if accessing it remains a thing of value. One has to wonder if this is one of the factors related to the project's declining content-creator participation. — Brianhe (talk) 20:57, 9 September 2015 (UTC)

• Same comment as on #24. We already have a forked wikipedia, with articles that run the spectrum from anything-goes all the way through the FA class ('fortress article' where none but the bravest wiki-warriors dare tread). Trying to split veri-pedia from anything-pedia is not going to make orangemoody-type problems go away: instead of trying to get money for getting the victim-article out of the AfC queue, the focus will simply shift to trying to get money for promoting an article from the anything-pedia over to the veri-pedia. The idea that veri-pedia will magically be more secure again incursions, because the deletionists will be given free rein, is also false methinks: deletionism is a philosophy, not a specific number of wiki-reliable references, so there will be a constant battle on veri-pedia between the 3-RS-is-enough deletionists, and the 5-RS-or-more deletionists, just as there are constant battles at AfD on the current wikipedia between the 3-RS-is-not-really-significant-coverage deletionists, and the GNG-has-been-met-case-closed inclusionists. Key distinction: on veri-pedia, the inclusionists will no longer be welcome, so the already extremely harsh wiki-culture will become unbelievably harsher. Forking in this fashion, is akin to dividing-and-conquering ourselves. The inclusionists need the deletionists, and the deletionists would only feud all the harder amongst themselves without the inclusionists around to act as a balance to their philosophy. Definitely agree that our current haphazard scheme, where roughly 2/3rds of wikipedia articles are now theoretically under arbcom discretionary sanctions, is *not* working well. Too much inconsistency and asymmetry, plus too many minefield-DMZ-articles where the various wiki-gangs are covertly waging attrition-warfare on each other. 75.108.94.227 (talk) 04:20, 11 September 2015 (UTC)

29. Give readers an assessment of likely article quality based on edit history statistics

There are various statistics in the database that are correlated with article quality. While they don't have predictive power, they're still potentially useful information for readers. So why not track them and share them?

For example, many promotionally tinged company articles are created and/or written by single-purpose accounts (or near SPAs) who haven't done much else in Wikipedia. This applies to paid editors' single-job socks as much as it does to company principals and employees, who usually don't bother to edit other content (unless it is to insert a link to the article on their company). Frequent edit wars deleting and adding substantial chunks of content are another indicator of potential problems. Articles that have very few editors and readers are more likely to have problems.

Checking for these indicators manually is very time-consuming. So why not automate the process, and flag the result for the reader in a highly visible way (e.g. coloured icons on the article page)? This would be a kind of potted history of the article telling the reader

• whether the creator and/or main content writers are single-purpose accounts or accounts with a substantial and well-rounded contributions history
• how many accounts have contributed to the article
• how stable the article is
• how many people have viewed the article

Readers would be able to absorb this information at a glance and keep it in mind. In time, this might also reduce the number of problematic articles being created in this way, as the incentive would be reduced. Andreas JN466 08:38, 10 September 2015 (UTC)

good idea, though experienced readers do this automatically i'd think. I agree that average or novel readers wont, as it involves some know-how and clicking around. together with Brianhe's tomatometer it would make sense, the more parameters the better, as neither viewership nor contributor#'s are per se sensitive indicators for paid editing, if you know what i mean.--Wuerzele (talk) 15:49, 10 September 2015 (UTC) ( BTW: Is there a special reason why this editing field on your page does not have a button for signature and time stamp, docjames?--Wuerzele (talk) 15:49, 10 September 2015 (UTC)

30. Patrol Job Websites

Wikipedia volunteers can patrol job websites and seek out Wikipedia related entries. We can either warn those offering money for an article or create fake job requests of our own to bait rogue editors. One does not need to go far to find paid editing offers Catlemur (talk) 22:02, 10 September 2015 (UTC)

31. Tighten WP:NCOMPANY, start a spam task force reviewing/mass prodding/deleting CORPSPAM entries

See discussion at Wikipedia_talk:Spam#Proposal:_a_new_task_force_to_ID_spammy_entries_on_companies for details. --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 02:44, 13 September 2015 (UTC)

32. Checkuser oracle

Further information: Turing oracle

Wikipedia must already collect IP address and device IDs on the backend, considering we have Checkusers. The community needs a feature from WMF that automatically scans pages for edits from the same device ID, on the same article, in the same discussion, from the same device, within a short time-frame. The device ID itself could be encoded into a random, but consistent, number before Wikipedians see it, sacrificing only the tiniest amount of privacy in a very remote number of false positives - but it would have caught Orangemoody years ago and probably thousands of socks nobody knows about (from both paid and unpaid POV pushers). (Proposed by CorporateM, copied here from talkpage elsewhere.) - Brianhe (talk) 14:28, 17 September 2015 (UTC)

Basically, a program could be run once-per-month or once-per-quarter that identifies devices that have made substantial edits to the same article, from the same device, under multiple usernames, within a short time-frame. This would detect almost ALL sockpuppeting on the site automatically. The legitimate reasons for editing the same article, from the same device, over a short time period, from different accounts are extremely few and far between and can be dealt with through exemptions, etc. and most socking should fall under this criteria. It would only require some rudimentary analytics programming and some additional server power. It could virtually eliminate the practice of socking from Wikipedia, or at least cut it in half or more. David King, Ethical Wiki (Talk) 15:04, 17 September 2015 (UTC)

Refinement/similar idea to get this up and running ASAP. An on-demand tool that could spit out a token to compare two users based on privacy-confidential information. E.g. a one-way hash based on the IP and the device ID strings (implementation details to be left to WMF dev's). As just described, a black hat knowing the algorithm and the inputs to it could extract information from the oracle with a brute-force search, repeatedly trying (on a private machine) a known device ID against an IP range until a collision is found, thus finding a known device's IP address. Or vice-versa with a known IP address, though the value of this information is questionable. To prevent this scenario, a secret salt value could be added for each IP.

This service could be offered as a labs based service immediately for volunteer investigators, then later incorporated into stuff like article history and CorporateM's suggestion of machine driven periodic or on-creation scanning. — Brianhe (talk) 17:20, 17 September 2015 (UTC)

33. Enforce "no promotion in userspace"

Wikipedia needs to be more restrictive on that guideline (WP:UPG#PROMO). Userspace pages should be periodically checked (maybe assisted by a bot) for certain keywords and external links to the most common paid-editing sites, especially for accounts whose only "contribution" is posting their resume. Those users should be politely warned once, and then the pages should be blanked as soon as possible if the users don't change them quickly. It's a bit ridiculous to condemn incidents like Orangemoody paid-editing on the one hand, but allow several dozens of paid editors a free of charge promotional platform on the other hand. It weakens the project's credibility, when tough speak and idealistic guidelines are not followed by consequent actions. GermanJoe (talk) 04:43, 10 November 2015 (UTC)

Agree. Example: every user page that includes the phrase "internet marketing" should be scrutinized. Like this one: Harendragusain –Brianhe (talk) 06:31, 10 November 2015 (UTC)

Paid editors fighting with each other

Using armies of socks.

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Might be time to ban all paid editing. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 10:55, 27 March 2019 (UTC)