So for every article we have 960 active editors? I assume you wrote that wrong.
On Thu, Nov 18, 2010 at 6:50 PM, Risker <risker...@gmail.com> wrote: > On 18 November 2010 18:33, David Gerard <dger...@gmail.com> wrote: > > > On 18 November 2010 23:09, John Vandenberg <jay...@gmail.com> wrote: > > > > > Am I 'paid editing' when I write articles during 9-5 ? Is that bad? > > > > > > The problem with paid editing is when it violates content guidelines, > > such as NPOV. > > > > Someone paid to improve the area of linguistics in general? (This has > > happened.) Fine by me. > > > > Someone paid by (say) a museum to write articles on the contents of > > their collection? Could risk NPOV, but the idea is probably a net win. > > And the photos! > > > > Someone paid by a company to monitor their article for negative > > information and edit it accordingly? Could violate NPOV. The very > > proper way to do this is to openly introduce yourself as a PR person > > on the talk page, supply information as appropriate and never touch > > the article text itself; this can be problematic for you if there's > > little actual interest in the article, though, and so little > > third-party editor traffic. > > > > Someone paid by a person to keep rubbish out of their BLP? Trickier. > > In a perfect spherical Wikipedia of uniform density in a vacuum, they > > shouldn't go near the article on them. In practice, BLPs are our > > biggest problems, for reasons I needn't elaborate on. Usually if they > > contact i...@wikimedia.org with a BLP issue it gets an experienced > > volunteer on the case, and the BLP Noticeboard is an excellent and > > effective way to get experienced attention to an article. > > > > "Paid editing" is, of course, not one thing. > > > > > I'll repeat what I said on enwp's Administrator's noticeboard here for a > different audience: > > "We are extraordinarily ineffective at providing neutral, well-written, > relatively complete and well-referenced articles about businesses and > individuals - even as of this writing we have tens of thousands of > unreferenced and poorly referenced BLPs - and equally bad at maintaining > and > updating them. Given this remarkable inefficiency, and the fact that a > Wikipedia article is usually a top-5 google hit for most businesses and > people, there's plenty of good reason for our subjects to say "enough is > enough" and insist on having a decent article. We've all seen the badly > written BLPs and the articles about companies where the "controversies" > section contains every complaint made in the last 10 years. We aren't > doing > the job ourselves, and it's unrealistic to think that we can: the > article-to-active editor ratio is 1:960 right now[1], and getting higher > all > the time. I'm hard pressed to tell someone that they can't bring in a > skilled Wikipedia editor, following our own policies and guidelines, to > bring an article they're interested in up to our own stated standards. As > to > COI, one wonders why financial benefit seems to raise all these red flags, > when undisclosed membership in various organizations, personal beliefs, and > life experiences may well lead to an even greater COI. "Put it on the talk > page" only works if (a) someone is watching the article, (b) that someone > doesn't have their own perspective that they feel is more valid, (c) and > someone is willing to actually edit the article. Those three conditions > aren't being met nearly enough (see editor-to-article ratio above). We've > created the very situation where organizations and people are no longer > willing to accept that they have to put up with a bad article about > themselves. And precisely why should they be prevented from improving our > project?" > > As to the Volunteer Response Team, they are a very small group of > volunteers > who are usually swamped with requests, and they often wind up having to > negotiate with the existing "interested" editors to clear out BLP > violations > and clean up the articles to meet our own standards, sometimes having to > fight tooth and nail to do so. (I should clarify that there is a large > group of volunteers, but only a few who are actually responding to tickets > on a regular basis, not unlike most wiki-projects.) It is challenging for > subjects of articles to find their way to submit a request to have their > article fixed, too. And remember that 1:960 ratio - even if every active > editor on enwp made it their business to do nothing but maintenance and > improvement of existing articles, we couldn't keep up with the workload. > > Risker/Anne > > [1] <http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediaEN.htm> > _______________________________________________ > foundation-l mailing list > foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org > Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l > _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
