Thank you for this provocation, I share your concern. As a reader, it's disappointing to find material that looks like a press release, and intimidating to flag or edit without doing research into the editing history and editors involved. A quick, "back of the envelope" calculation I did recently shows an alarming level of paid editing, with 1,017 "Paid" status disclosures among en.wikipedia editors' user pages [1], which would amount to 1.4% of active editors if these numbers were directly comparable. This doesn't begin to account for any of the undisclosed paid editing that must be happening.
As a technical contributor, I can offer two concrete initiatives which might be helpful. Neither is a quick fix, but they offer spaces of resistance that we can build upon. * The JADE project [2] will create a structured namespace for patrolling, and a talk namespace for coordinating work. You can think of it as an enhancement to the patrolled edit flag, where patrollers can provide their judgment in a format roughly equivalent to ORES predictions. We'll eventually use these judgments to improve our training for the ORES AIs, and our hope is that JADE will be integrated into tools like Huggle, to make communication between patrollers more explicit. JADE is available for experimentation on the Beta cluster [3], and we can move to the production wikis after we get some feedback from experienced editors, maybe after the upcoming Wikimania. * We've also started work on an AI model to detect paid promotional editing, based on the overly optimistic puffery that's commonly deployed.[4] I'm excited about this approach, and once it's active we'll be able to make good estimates of the scale of the problem, the number of editors and sockpuppets failing to disclose their conflicts of interest, and the financial resources pouring in. I imagine this would give us a better idea of what next steps to take. Cheers, Adam Wikimedia Scoring Platform Team [[mw:User:Adamw]] [1] https://tools.wmflabs.org/templatecount/index.php?lang=en&namespace=10&name=Paid [2] https://mediawiki.org/wiki/JADE [3] For example, https://en.wikipedia.beta.wmflabs.org/wiki/JADE:Diff/376901 [4] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T120170 On Fri, May 25, 2018 at 12:00 PM Anders Wennersten <m...@anderswennersten.se> wrote: > My main worry, during my daily patrolling, is if we manage to neutralize > the bad editing (vandalism, POV pushing) or if the destructive editing > is slowly successfully degenerating the great content we have created in > our projects. > > In todays Sign-post it indicates an accelerating rate of decrease of > admins on enwp, and some likewise tendency on dewp. Is this a sign that > the "good" powers are losing out to the "bad" ones? > > I also seen a very passive response to two massPOV editing . One, on 35 > versions, is related to Hans Asperger, to state he was a nazi doctor > (false, even if he was somewhat passive in some cases). Here dewp > reacted quickly and after a while enwp, so these articles are OK, but in > most of the other 35 this false info lies unchanged. Also I react to the > effort from GazProm promoting their propaganda article /Football for > Friendship / in up to 80 version, and where almost noone has neutralized > it. > > Are we slowly losing the battle against the "evil" forces? And if so, > is then our new strategy (being good in itself) and the plan to > implement it all too naive? For example I like very much the ambition > to help out on areas in the world where Wikipedia etc is not > established, but would it be more correct to put effort in regaining > control of the very many Wikipedia versions, that is definitely > degenerating and we are loosing what has been done on these. (as a test > look at "latest changes" on some of the versions with low editing, it is > depressing to see that there often are more vandal editing, not being > undone, then proper new material) > > Would it be most appropriate if we all in a 2-3 years effort > concentrated on getting (back) control on our material in our projects, > before we start efforts in implementing the strategy we have agreed > upon. Perhaps a number of paid admins, vandal/pov fighters, about as > many as there are stewards today, would be necessary not to lose out. > > Anders > > > > // > > _______________________________________________ > Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: > https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and > https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l > New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org > Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, > <mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe> _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, <mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>
