Major Wikipedia Donors Caught Editing Their Own Articles 125
An anonymous reader writes "As reported before on Slashdot, one of the most terrible sins on Wikipedia is to edit articles for pay, or otherwise violate the 'neutral point of view' policy, per their co-founder Jimmy Wales. And yet, the Wikipedia-criticism website Wikipediocracy recently began a study showing that dozens of the Wikimedia Foundation's largest cash donors have violated that policy. Repeatedly, and wantonly. In short, they wrote articles about themselves or their companies, then gave the WMF big donations — and were not confronted about violating the NPOV policy."
Do the proposed TOS changes address this? Note that they also found that many of the donors adequately documented their conflict of interest.
Spin Baby Spin (Score:1)
All that money has to buy something. The donations are likely part of the advertising budget.
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Shocked! (Score:4, Funny)
one of the most terrible sins on Wikipedia is to edit articles for pay, or otherwise violate the 'neutral point of view' policy,
I'm shocked, shocked to find that illicit editing is going on in here!
Where is the big problem? (Score:4, Informative)
Editing your own article on Wikipedia is not prohibited as long as you disclose your conflict of interest and follow the rules, so I have trouble seeing how this submission is anything other than yet more manufactured controversy and/or anti-Wikipedia astroturfing.
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I personally have no problem with someone editing an article on themselves as long as they're accurate, fair, and open about it. Should a company or individual be obligated to allow inaccurate information about them to remain in an article even when they KNOW it's inaccurate?
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It's not the inaccuracy that matters, it's the completeness. I may write an article about my company and omit the fact that the FTC has fined me seventeen times for cheating customers. When a company PR hack writes a Wikipedia article, you can bet it will present the company in a move favorable light.
This is not limited to companies. Political parties hire people to write Wikipedia articles on even their most minor elected and appointed officials. While naturally unbiased and accurate, they consistently por
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it's not just what is added, but also subtracted from previous users. Some times you can look at the history of an article and find out it had a lot more information previously, but someone decided to subtract content even though it was relevant and factual.
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And sometimes you can find out it had a lot more information previously, but someone removed it because it was untrue, false, libelous, or, cardinal of all sins, lacked citations.
The reality is that you can't really know why that information is gone without more information. It may have been removed legitimately. Or it may have been removed as part of a whitewash to clean up an image. So now, which is the better article? The one before or after the subtractions? We don't necessarily know.
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One of the downsides of having a free-to-edit encyclopedia is the difficulty in policing against bad actions like this, especially on articles visited infrequently. However the state of the articles on most of the major political players and products would seem to suggest that the editors have a low tolerance for the removal of bad news.
The False Promise of Neutrality (Score:2)
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To me, the problem is that it breaks promise of neutrality, and deceives anyone who believes it's a neutral piece.
NPOV is a lofty goal, but not a firm promise. For niche fields it can be difficult or impossible to find enough sources to present a neutral view.
This is why Wikipedia policy prefers secondary sources but will still accept primary sources when few or none exist. The policy allows for the encyclopedia to have accurate information with proper references (yet written with a bias) rather than for the encyclopedia to have no information on the topic at all. The policy clearly allows articles written by the clos
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Wikipedia has some really bad rules about editing and information - no "original research" for example, so basically nothing can be added to the sum total of human knowledge as Wikipedia considers it, until its been posted on some blog somewhere first...
I've seen Games Workshop fictional universe articles pop up with the "needs third party citations" label, as apparently the original source material isn't good enough for Wikipedia...
Re:Where is the big problem? (Score:4, Insightful)
until its been posted on some blog somewhere first...
No, that would be ridiculous. It has to be posted on one blog and linked to from another blog.
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until its been posted on some blog somewhere first...
No, that would be ridiculous. It has to be posted on one blog and linked to from another blog.
Right!. That's how scientific research works too. Write a paper for a journal run my you and your friends then right a new paper sighting the published one and submit to a more prestigious journal, who's reviewers are also colleagues. Now it's all fine
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Right!. That's how scientific research works too. Write a paper for a journal run my you and your friends then right a new paper sighting the published one and submit to a more prestigious journal, who's reviewers are also colleagues. Now it's all fine
I see what you did there.
(It's "citing". I'd tell you to look up that word in wikipedia, but I'm guessing it's been illicitly edited by some research journals trying to skew the definition their way.)
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You missed "right a new paper".
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You missed "right a new paper".
Yeah, and two other egregious errors in that sentence, too.
Or maybe we just need to understand the true meaning of the sentence: "then right a new paper sighting the published one and submit to a more prestigious journal"
In other words, I take a new paper in the works and make it "right" by including research literally gleaned from the previous paper while staring at it ("sighting") and copying it.
Perhaps the GGP was actually talking about plagiarism and falsifying research to fit an agenda.
Re:Where is the big problem? (Score:4, Insightful)
Makes perfect sense for their intended purpose. Wiki pages are supposed to be accepted knowledge not ground-breaking and controversial theories. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia not a science journal.
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The side effect of the rule is perpetuating no longer correct information. For example: a wikipedia entry states that a building is slated to be demolished, but the demolition hasn't begun, since that is what the last cited source has. However, looking out my window, I can see they have finally started demolishing it. Even if I provide a picture of the demolition, I cannot update the article and be within the rules, until the local paper is bored enough to run a story about it (which may never happen).
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Yes, that's how documentary evidence works. The assumption on the part of the reader is that there may be undocumented events that are not included in the formal record.
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The kooky part is rejecting documentation of same.
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On the first point, the whole point of an encyclopedia is that it's not the author's own feelings on the subject, but a disinterested report of the general consensus on the material. On the second point, a regurgitation of the contents of Codex Chaos (or whatever) is not only of less scholarly value than the source (the most accurate and complete it can ever be is a copy-and-paste), it's the kind of thing Games Workshop has a long and storied history of suing people into the dirt over. So it has no business
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"Editing your own article on Wikipedia is not prohibited as long as you disclose your conflict of interest and follow the rules[...]"
That's just the point though, they are not following the rules. FTA; "While the research behind the 144 named donors who gave more than $5,000 to the WMF is not yet complete, it is already clear that several dozen of them are not widely notable enough to have a Wikipedia article associated with them", "While a few have adequately disclosed their conflict of interest, most have
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Editing your own article on Wikipedia is not prohibited as long as you disclose your conflict of interest and follow the rules, so I have trouble seeing how this submission is anything other than yet more manufactured controversy and/or anti-Wikipedia astroturfing.
In slashdot's defense, they did use the *link to the wikipedia page* of wikipediocracy in describing their role. A golf clap is in order.
Not being confronted about NPOV is the problem (Score:2)
Did you read the summary past the first sentence or so?
"In short, they wrote articles about themselves or their companies, then gave the WMF big donations and were not confronted about violating the NPOV policy."
That said, I've routinely come across articles on Wikipedia that were not tagged NPOV yet were clearly cut+pasted from marketing material or written in that unmistakable tone. It's especially common on articles that aren't very popular.
Example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y... [wikipedia.org]
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You only get confronted for breaking the policy if you break the policy. NPOV isn't a set of rules on who can edit what, it's a style guide.
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FALSE: Any other editor who sees you editing your own article will slap you with a ban for COI. It's a standard part of wikilawyering.
Conflict (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Conflict (Score:5, Informative)
Ideally they should document a conflict of interest, but that's not very clear how it should be done.
Like this [wikipedia.org]
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Didn't his choice of username already disclose his interest? You don't have to be Dirk Hatchett, Internet PI to figure out that that the JsDillon writing the article about Josh Dillon might, in fact, be Josh Dillon.
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You should be able to edit it, but WP requires that change to have a 3rd party source, which frankly is a bit ridiculous, but I can totally understand why the rule is there.
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That is simply not true. This is the article as Josh Dillon wrote it before deletion:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/inde... [wikipedia.org]
This is the totality of his second batch of edits, after the article was revived:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/inde... [wikipedia.org]
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No, I dare say that the revival was because Kickstarter backers were about to receive the game.
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...by someone who is not JsDillon.
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The OP talks of violation of the NPOV policy, but that is not what is happening. They are violating to COI (conflict of interest) policy. Violation of NPOV is easy to determine by reading the article, because a NPOV violation applies no matter who wrote it.
COI violations are less easy to determine if you do not know who the editor is.
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This. In fact, I think it is accepted that people with potential bias do and should edit/create articles when they are needed. They should not take a good article and edit it to be more positive for them or their employers, but if something is missing they should add it.
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Unfortunately, such editing is extremely common, especially around times of great discussion. Usually what happens are things like "Controversies" get edited down or completely deleted. Then someone puts it back, and then a PR editor removes it again and the edit war continues.
It's been shown a lot of those edits have been done by people associated with the page - b
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If they are a donor or not should not matter. People who edit Wikipedia a lot are likely far more likely donate. And simply being an expert in Quantum Mechanics makes you biased in any opinion you have relating to this field, but at the same time Wikipedia needs QM experts to write in the QM sections. Most editing in Wikipedia is done by people who are highly biased, but the theory is that you get enough biased people together and include everything they do agree on, and it will work out as a decent article
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Who else would provide the info? (Score:2)
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The FCC could have, or a radio advertising network could have same info. Someone with access to that info could make the page. Whether that WOULD happen is another matter.
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these are also the people most knowledgeable on the subject and have the most to contribute.
How true. Most people don't realize that I am a demi-god with an IQ of 324; only I can add those unique facts to my Wikipedia page.
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Yes and Wikipedia is very heavy handed about this. Several years ago, I created my former companies Wikipedia page. Being a manufacturer for over 110 years, pioneering some different kinds of processes (and winning engineering and design awards), we wanted to get our page started. But being green it wasn't long before someone came along
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I think Wikipedia falls along the path that many potential buyers take. Wiki articles are usually very highly ranked by search engines, and tend to float near the top of results. When people start researching an upcoming purchase, many look at Wikipedia as a less-biased source of information. (Like you, I tend to think that people who read Wikipedia articles for such information are also somewhat more adept at spotting marketing materials, and are slightly less likely to be duped by them.)
These articles
Kind of assumed this already (Score:3)
I'm sure others will tell me why I'm mistaken, but this doesn't bother me so much, mainly because it doesn't surprise me.
Basically, you're telling me that a document that can be edited by anyone is being edited by people to show themselves in a more positive light, ToS be damned.
Well, yeah.
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What we really want is for Wikipedia to enforce every one of its own rules with an iron fist, of course, whether the result makes any sense or has a positive effect upon the project at all. Right?
I'm shocked! (Score:2, Funny)
I'm shocked, shocked to find non-neutral points of view in Wikipedia!
"...were not confronted..." ? (Score:2)
Wait, this is Wikipedia. How could they not be confronted, when anyone can do the confronting, even the writers at Wikipediocracy.
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Wait, this is Wikipedia. How could they not be confronted, when anyone can do the confronting, even the writers at Wikipediocracy.
Perhaps they were well sourced neutral contributions, and no confrontation was needed. You are right, its a non story. Hell the people writing TFA could have gone and confronted the people themselves!
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Because there was nothing to confront them about. NPOV was not violated and the OP is talking bunk.
I've read the article that is mentioned in particular. A minor page about a card game. A few things might be better worded, but I see no flagrant violations of NPOV. Yes, one or two contributing editors may have had a conflict of interests, and probably shouldn't have been editing it. But the article as it stands is broadly neutral and reasonably cited.
If this is the best example that Wikipediocracy can p
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Note who the author of Wikipediocracy TFA is: Greg Kohs [wikipedia.org]. Seems someone is butthurt.
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Note that the author made clear that the Cards Against Humanity editing was merely "a 'mid-grade' violator of conflict-of-interest norms". And note that he said that more reports would emerge in this series, which would suggest that there are worse offenders waiting in store. Yet, we see the typical low-grade reading comprehension folks who jump to words like "butthurt" and "doubt... anything to worry about". It is no wonder Wikipedia is trusted by so many people, considering how many people can't read a
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There are worse offenders than someone who edited an article about himself while using his own real-life name as a handle? What's next, a guy who corrected a spelling mistake on his high school's page without bothering to log in first?
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No, how about an organization that dropped Bell Pottinger as their PR agency, after Jimbo Wales blasted Bell Pottinger for "ethical blindness"; then the organization hired a new PR firm, which quickly went about puffing up the organization's Wikipedia article without disclosing who they were or that they were hired to promote the organization? Let me know if that's an acceptable situation as far as you're concerned.
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Except we did read it, and most likely reached the same conclusion. He's got next to nothing, but hopes that darkly hinting at future revelations of much worse will fool us into taking him more seriously than he deserves.
If you're going to have a series of revelations about anything, best start with one that doesn't have people saying "meh".
Also, "An anonymous reader writes" (Score:2)
Did the anonymous submitter disclose their ties to Wikipediocracy?
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Does Slashdot have a policy against conflict-of-interest contributions? (Full disclosure: I wrote the blog piece in question. I did not issue the notice here on Slashdot.
edit articles for pay is not a sin (Score:1)
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Please discuss this with Jimmy Wales and Geoff Brigham at the Wikimedia Foundation. They disagree with you, and the recently terminated employee Sarah Stierch is concrete evidence of this.
Non sequitur (Score:5, Insightful)
Companies and individuals edit articles about themselves, if they ARE or ARE NOT donors.
Please explain the logic that says you should not donate to Wikipedia, if you have edited an article about yourself?
OK, just because you edited your own article doesn't mean it's not NPOV. But let's say it was biased in your favor...
So what if the article is not NPOV? Other editors will participate in its development.
Also, if you can't prove your notability beyond a shadow of a doubt, there turn out to be an army of deletionists visiting all the articles who will be more than happy to nominate you for deletion in a few heartbeats.
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I think the angle they are trying for here is suggesting that they were not confronted about editing articles about themselves because they were donors. That is implying that others who are not donors were confronted about editing articles about themselves. In other words, the donation is buying them out of the policy against editing articles about yourself.
I don't think the article actually presents any evidence to support that insinuation, but I think that's what they're aiming for.
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I believe you'll see over time (in the forthcoming series) that the real insinuation is whether the Wikimedia Foundation is correct to keep the gifts from donors who especially brazenly violate Wikipedia's community norms (and potentially, Terms of Use).
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The real insinuation is whether the Wikimedia Foundation is correct to keep the gifts from donors who especially brazenly violate Wikipedia's community norms
The Wikimedia foundation would be best off not scrutinizing or reviewing the identity of who makes donations to them...instead, preferring to keep all donations anonymous, and the foundation and community blind to the identities of any donors.
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Typically, big charitable donors get a sense of enjoyment from the publicity related to their large donation. Most would be turned off if they were told that their donation would be kept anonymous.
I suggest that the donor would still be free to announce their donation and enjoy the publicity, but the foundation would be unwilling and unable to confirm or deny that they made the donation, is all.
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Oh, that will work! In that case, I would like to announce my donation to the Wikimedia Foundation, in the amount of $666.
On behalf of the internet community... Thank you! Your contribution to the betterment of human knowledge is appreciated.
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Instead of restricting edits, why not follow the existing guidelines about open disclosure? There are guidelines about declaring and displaying conflicts of interest. However, there don't seem to be any guidelines that explicitly address the implicit conflict of interest in being both a financial donor and an editor (at least I don't see it). I think donors should be able to edit, but they should not be able to edit without disclosure.
In a way, the donor-editor conflict of interest is nastier than the ed
Caught??? (Score:2)
If they "adequately documented their conflict of interest" then they were not "caught."
Physician, heal thyself? (Score:2)
Wikipediocracy, the Internet’s foremost Wikipedia criticism community, has embarked on....
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Misunderstanding of Neutral POV (Score:5, Informative)
The summary seems to have the wrong idea about what the NPOV policy actually means. Straight from the link it provided to Wikipedia's definition:
Editing from a neutral point of view (NPOV) means representing fairly, proportionately, and, as far as possible, without bias, all of the significant views that have been published by reliable sources on a topic. All Wikipedia articles and other encyclopedic content must be written from a neutral point of view.
Note that it does NOT indicate who can or cannot participate in editing an article. So long as their interests are disclosed, it's quite possible that people with vested interests in a subject will be able to contribute more meaningfully to a page than those without firsthand experience on the subject. Their contributions may in some cases need to be revised by others to better conform to NPOV, but they may bring to light facts and sources that would have otherwise gone unnoticed.
It's one thing to edit articles for pay--where your obligation to your employer exceeds your obligation to the policies of the site--but if you're just someone with an opinion or a vested interest, you should be perfectly capable of setting those aside in order to help construct pages that are balanced, fair, and neutral in their approach to the subject at hand, and that's exactly what I've seen people do. Though, I'll certainly grant that the cases where someone hasn't done so are much more memorable. ;)
And is it really any surprise that the people donating to Wikipedia are the ones editing it? It's a self-selecting sample: people donate to Wikipedia because they're the ones getting the most out of the site, rather than the other way around, which seems to be the perspective that the criticism is coming from.
Drama Queen Slashdot (Score:3, Insightful)
So some people made donations, then followed all the rules for editing their own stuff ... and you're getting your panties in a twist because?
No one is even bitching that what they wrote was misleading. The entire complaint is simply that it happened at all.
Thats fucking retarded, shut up and crawl back in your scumbag, drag others down to your level hole. Slashdot should go with it for posting this kind of crap.
What the fuck is wrong with you people, most of the big donators are fucking editors, these people are 'in to' wikipedia, of course they edit stuff THEY KNOW ABOUT ... which is THEIR STUFF.
Unless they are lying, misleading or misrepresenting, then whats the problem? Come up with an actual problem with what they did before you blow it out of proportion.
They followed the rules and aren't a problem, STFU FFS.
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Can you show where Dillon followed Wikipedia's "WP:COI" guidelines, especially the part that encourages self-disclosure by conflicted editors? I doubt it.
Who cares? (Score:2)
Does it matter as long as they provide sources for the information they add to wikipedia?
Conspiracy nutters (Score:2)
For people who hate "deletionists [google.com]", they are remarkably concerned over an article [wikipedia.org]'s resurrection.
Reviewed by volonteers, donated to Foundation (Score:2)
Disclaimer - I work for the Wikimedia foundation, but expressing my own opinion.
Donations go to the Wikimedia Foundation, covering various technology/organizational costs, but the foundation is not involved in the actual editing or reviewing process - that has always been done exclusivelly by the community. Donations would never affect the content of an article simply because its a different group of people - those who receive the money spend it on internet/development/building/conferences, while volonteers
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According the Wikimedia Foundation's most recent Form 990 (which I am sure Yurik hasn't read), less than 51% of donation dollars are actually applied toward the program services that any 501(c)(3) is obliged to support, to fulfill the charitable mission of the organization. That is an abysmal program efficiency ratio (most good charities strive for ratios of 80% or 90% or higher), so please don't lie to us about the money being spent on internet/development/building/conferences. Only half of the money is
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Thekohser, thanks for the reply, could you point me to the correct info? I only found http://upload.wikimedia.org/wi... [wikimedia.org] and that doc is not trivial, so any help explaining your position would greatly help. Where do 49+% go? Is it the same for all non-profits or non-profits in the same sector (if there is such a division). Thank you!
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Also, if you think that the Wikimedia Foundation doesn't pay close attention to the articles about their donors, I have a bridge that I'd like to sell you, here: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/inde... [wikipedia.org]
This just in! Money talks! (Score:2)
Of course they did it (Score:1)
Inaccurate description of NPOV (Score:2)
From summary (and presumably TFA):
"one of the most terrible sins on Wikipedia is to edit articles for pay, or otherwise violate the 'neutral point of view' policy"
but...that's not what NPOV is about. NPOV isn't a conflict-of-interest policy. It doesn't say anything about editing articles for pay.
Josh Dillon's actual edits (Score:2)
His first version of the article, which was promptly deleted:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/inde... [wikipedia.org]
His second and last batch of edits, after the article was resurrected by a third party:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/inde... [wikipedia.org]
They need a better example (Score:2)
The article lists only one Wikipedia article, and it's for a silly game. The article isn't particularly bad, although it could be trimmed a bit. It looks more like fancruft than promotion. A better (worse) example is needed.
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Both the original article and this /. story are both not-so-subtle ads for CAH.
Well played.
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A better (worse) example is needed.
Stay tuned, Animats. Stay tuned. One donor hired a new PR firm to puff up their Wikipedia article with thousands of bytes of content, because their previous PR firm was Bell Pottinger, and they felt compelled to get rid of them. (You may recall the highly-publicized interaction between Jimmy Wales and Bell Pottinger -- http://www.independent.co.uk/n... [independent.co.uk] )
What about the no-ad policy then? (Score:1)
No Problem (Score:2)
I fail to see any problem provided that the information is accurate and that is ensured by the very nature of Wikipedia's open editing. If someone puts up false information someone else quickly corrects it.
Wiki is beautiful.
Antimatter (Score:2)
I did not donate, yet I edited "deadbeat". Is that a conflict-of-interest?
Nice link (Score:2)
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I sincerely doubt that Greg Kohs is bearing any grudge whatsoever about being banned from Wikipedia for paid editing.
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Strange as it may seem, I wasn't banned from Wikipedia for paid editing. That is a well-worn myth... but it's still a myth.
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Clearly there is some reading comprehension problem afoot. The blog post clearly says that Cards Against Humanity is "an example of a 'mid-grade' violator of conflict-of-interest norms on Wikipedia". The high-test violators will be trotted out in future installments. You'll see how paid PR managers have carefully manipulated the content of some donors' articles. So, please save your "big fucking deal" for a time in the future where you're a better reader. (And, you mean "Appropriate", not "Ironic". If
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Compare and contrast with the other AC whining about evolution below.
When you're being accused by nutters from both sides of being biased towards the other side, I'd say you're doing a reasonable job of being neutral. See also: the BBC.