Wikipedia Forcing Editors To Disclose If They Are Paid?

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DexterMorgan

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Jul 18, 2012
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Here is some recent coverage on this evolving issue if you haven't been following:

Wikipedia creates new rules, forcing editors to disclose if they

Wikipedia wants paid editors to disclose their conflict of interest.

What do you guys think about this stuff now that some different reports are coming out and people are discussing it? I read a comment by someone on reddit about the reasons Wikipedia is doing this (QUOTED BELOW):

"In practice what this does is gives the Wikimedia Foundation a way to go after people who are doing shady stuff at large scale, like offering article-whitewashing services for a fee, and evading community attempts to stop them (e.g. by continuing to register new accounts when Wikipedians ban the old ones). Now there's a means by which the community can "escalate" it to legal action by the Foundation, if they can't gt a company to either 1) behave; or 2) go away; using the normal on-wiki means. But I suspect that would be quite rare. The vast majority of cases will continue to be handled on-wiki, by warning people, banning accounts, etc., not bringing it to court.

edit: Forgot to mention, the other thing it can help with is that just the existence of a ToS provision will cause some PR firms to follow it. A lot of the bigger PR firms and trade groups have internal codes of ethics, and "thou shalt not promote on a 3rd-party website in violation of its ToS" is a common one. Whereas "thou shalt not promote on a 3rd-party website in violation of its unofficial community consensus" isn't, so PR firms have be pretty willing to just pretend Wikipedia's conflict-of-interest rules didn't exist until now, since they weren't in the ToS. "
Click to expand...

Wikipedia has been dealing with this issue for awhile, so it interesting to see how this all unfolds. Do you agree with that above comment's interpretation of Wikipedia's motivations here?
 


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I'm honestly surprised it took this long for this to happen. This is some pretty basic J-School / Editorial ethics type shit.

There's some truth in what you quoted, but I don't think this is about punishing people at all. That's a byproduct of achieving their goal, not the goal itself.

The part of the quote about PR is more in line with what the actual goal probably is, but still not quite there.

I have to believe that these changes are about opening up new avenues of funding. As it is now, Wikipedia has just about the biggest collection of freely available information on the web. But if you walk into just about any classroom or business in the country they will tell you in no uncertain terms that Wikipedia is not to be used as a cited resource for anything. You can follow the links in the bottom and cite those sources, but citing wiki is a huge no-no for most places.

Setting up and enforcing this kind of of editorial ethics code makes Wikipedia and the information it contains more legitimate. Being viewed as a legitimate and reliable source of information means they'll be able to reach donors they couldn't reach before, they'll be eligible for more grants than they are now, and it puts them on the path to scholastic and professional legitimacy when it comes to people using the site as an information source. Once businesses and schools view Wikipedia as a legitimate and reliable source of information, the site will be exposed to even more people in both a leisure and professional capacity. All of which means more potential donors, and likely larger donations.
 
Sock puppet accounts, users who use multiple accounts and don't link them, have been a big no-no on Wikipedia for ages. Basically, anyone who is doing paid edits on Wikipedia use sock puppet accounts because it is retarded not to. Admins have a "revert all edits from this user" tool and it sucks if it happens to you.

Is anyone really going to follow through with this new guideline? lol no. I agree with Statelizard that it has more to do with funding and Wikipedia's image then really curbing PR edits. Its so frick'n easy to go around this rule that it is basically for show.

The only use I see for this guideline is when I'm identifying myself as an employee of my competitor and editing their Wikipedia page. Besides that, its useless.
 
OMG YOU MEAN EVERYTHING ON WIKIPEE ISN'T THE ABSOLUTE END-ALL TRUTH???

OH NOOOOOES.

Oh, and @ SirKon- STFU, Wiki Boy, I so totally hope you choke on the very next cock you suck. Begone, douchebag.
 
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