I believe in Wikipedia's Five Pillars. I try to find the best sources I can (per WP:RS and WP:MEDRS) for articles I work on, I read them, and strive to write WP:NPOV content based on them.
I work a lot here on articles related to health; I work some on religious topics, and on a smattering of other things. I've been around since 2008 and had made about 150,000 edits as of January 2018 (overall contribs)
I had a Twitter impersonator -- this was not my account.
If you would like to email me, you can reach me at jytdogwiki at gmail. Accept no substitutes!
Wikipedia is a laboratory of human behavior:
Remember to keep first sentences simple. That stemmed from this AN thread, which led to this which led to this, where we got rid of only some of it. For the remainder, there was all of the following crap (there is more than this, actually):
This is being sort of resolved with a "short description" template, Template:Short description being manually populated by en-WP editors, per this RfC. How the WMF will use that, is of course another question.
Some outside-of-en-WP stuff
I drafted an essay about why WP:MEDRS exists that was moved to mainspace in August 2015 and improved some by others. I hope you find it useful; please feel free to improve it! (it is too long!) It is here: WP:Why MEDRS?
I also wrote User:Jytdog/How to try to provide a narrative, very practical map to how this place is set up and how it works.
New York City. Imagine if there were no locks on any door, and no guards either. Walk right on in; do what you want.
Welcome to Wikipedia, one of the hottest properties on the internet, where we assume good faith, and anyone can edit.
But somehow it works. Kind of.
On the other hand, have you ever stepped in dog shit on the side walk?
Advocacy editing in Wikipedia is dogshit on the sidewalk. People can do that... we are wide open. Aren't we. We really do assume good faith in being so open. That good faith gets abused all the time. But people do walk their dogs and clean up after themselves. Surprisingly often. The good faith is often justified.
Myvery first edit back in 2008 was the result of such an unpleasant dogshit surprise. I had been reading intently, trying to understand exactly what a "turnkey system" is, when, splat -- Turn-Key is also known as a Real Estate service delivered by Colliers Corporate Solutions that allows companies to focus on their core compentencies while the complex opening of thier "retail" locations is managed by a single point of contact. Visit Colliers to see more details.
Yes that is a spam link, and yes those are typos. Wretched. It pulled me totally out of reading and made me wonder "How do I get rid of this so nobody else has to be exposed to this?". So I created an account, and I fixed it.
I haven't found anyplace where this is stated in one place, so wanted to pull together my perspective on this. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia. It is not a newspaper (we are in no hurry, we don't have to report the latest and best). It is not a journal or a book, pulling together all the primary sources into a coherent picture—that is what scientists and other scholars do in review articles in journals and what historians do in their books.
Our mission is to summarize accepted knowledge. Summarize.... accepted knowledge. (See WP:NOTEVERYTHING, which is policy) We are all editors. Our role is to read and understand the reliable secondary and tertiary sources, in which experts have pulled the basic research together into a coherent picture, and summarize and compile what those sources say, in clear English that any reader with a decent education can understand.
This is really fundamental to how this place actually works - we don't have competing "experts" here arguing about their interpretation of primary sources, or arguing over which primary source is most important or relevant. We avoid all that -- and this community of anonymous volunteers can actually function -- because we rely on published secondary sources that gather up and define "accepted knowledge" for us. The epistemology of Wikipedia is that we find accepted knowledge in the places where our knowledge-generating institutions put it. The higher you go up the institutional ladder, the more reliable the source. We want to use the most reliable sources we can, in order to achieve the mission as best we can.
So please always look for secondary sources, and don't reach for primary sources. And for secondary sources, think "New York Times" not "Daily Mail" for general content. Think "literature review in the BMJ or "statement by NICE" for content about health.
So whatever you are writing about, please don't start with primary sources and other self-published sources. Start with independent, secondary sources. If you need to turn to press releases, regulatory filings, or a company or personal website in order to fill in some gaps that are pointed to by the secondary sources (like.. exactly what date something happened, which might only be available in a press release), that's fine. But building whole articles, or whole sections, from an organization's website or press releases, is a recipe for content that will fail to meet WP:NPOV (but will be great PR).
In topics I work in (especially articles related to health) I find that editors who want to cite primary sources and create extensive content based on them fall in one of three buckets.
Who knows why people make edits like this, based on a primary source, hyping the people who did the work, and simply wrong? (The first actual test for humans published three years earlier)
Wikipedia is not about what you think is important, right now, nor even what the media is hyping today. It is about what we know, as expressed in reliable sources. It is so hard for people to differentiate what they see and what they "know" from what humanity — as expressed by experts in a given field — knows.
It is hard for people to think like scholars, with discipline, and actually listen to and be taught by reliable secondary sources instead of being driven by their own passions, or acting like barroom philosophers who shoot from the hip, or letting media hype drive them.
NPOV depends mightily upon editors' grasp of secondary sources. We have to find good ones - recent ones - and absorb them, and see what the mainstream positions are in the field, what are "significant minority opinions", and what views are just plain WP:FRINGE. We have to let the best sources teach us. And yes, it takes commitment - both in time, and to the values of Wikipedia - to really try to find the best secondary sources, access them, absorb them, and learn from them how to distribute WEIGHT in a Wikipedia article. yep.
What makes this even more challenging is that because this is a volunteer project, Wikipedia editors often come here and stay here due to some passion. This passion is a double-edged sword. It drives engagement and the creation of content but too often brings with it advocacy for one position or another. This is a quandary. The discipline of studying secondary sources and editing content based on those sources, in putting egos aside and letting the secondary sources speak, is the key that saves Wikipedia from our personal, limited perspectives.
If you have inserted content into an article based on a primary source and I have deleted it, it is not because I disagree with the content. The content has nothing to do with it. The issue is that we as editors cannot perform the original research to select a given primary source over other primary sources (that say different things) and assign any weight to it at all.
The call to use secondary sources is deep in the guts of Wikipedia. This is a meta-issue — a question of what it means to be an editor on Wikipedia.
Along with my editing, I work on clearing advocacy out of articles, and at the Conflict of interest Noticeboard ("COIN"), trying to help deal with Conflict-of-interest editing on Wikipedia.
Strictly speaking there is only one force that drives editors to violate the WP:NPOV and WP:NOTADVOCACY policies, and that is advocacy - namely using (really abusing) Wikipedia as a vehicle to promote or denigrate something (a person, a product, a company or institution, an idea...whatever).
It is pretty easy to tell by reading an article with WP's mission in mind (and with with awareness of the policies and guidelines through which the editing community realizes the mission), if an advocate has had a big influence on it. There will be colorful language (puffery or denigrating), and an overall positive or negative tone. One or more aspects may have way too much or too little weight in line with the tone. There will generally be unsourced content, and sources that are present will be poor (press releases, blogs, etc), or even fake. When you look at the editing history of an article like that, you often find that one or more single purpose accounts have been working on it. (Our articles about universities and their faculty are generally terrible and rife with advocacy editing, much of it undisclosed paid editing by university employees but some from students or alumni. We even have an essay just for those folks at WP:BOOSTER.)
The question here is why. Is the person "just" a fan or hater, or are they maybe the subject of the article, or a friend (or enemy), or are they an employee of a relevant company or institution, or of a PR agency? These are appropriate questions when one encounters POV editing. But they need to be real questions. (more on below, in the "How I try to help manage COI in WP subsection below)
But generally we make a distinction within WP, between fans/haters (whom we just call "advocates"), and people with what we define as as a COI. (Please note that I said "generally" because if an editor is a hater of a person, the policy WP:BLPCOI applies (you cannot use WP to carry on a real world dispute with someone in Wikipedia), and the WP:COISELF part of the COI guideline apples to any external personal relationship, including writing about yourself.)
In Wikipedia, you are editing under a COI if you write about yourself, your friends (or enemies) or family, or your employer or school, or your employer's products, or your real-world whatever, or you are a freelancer or work for a PR agency and are working on behalf of a client. All of those kinds of external relationships create a COI in Wikipedia, when a person works on the topics where they have a COI. Can a person with a COI, edit in a neutral way, with great sourcing, etc? Of course they can - many things are possible. However, humans being human, most often editors working under a COI edit as advocates. This is especially true for editors who work for PR agencies or who are freelancers working on articles for clients. We call editors like that, as well as company or university employees who are instructed to "buff up" some article, -- "paid advocates", or "paid editors".
There are editors in Wikipedia who are gravely concerned about the corrupting influence of paid editing in WP. There is reason be concerned - it happens. No one knows how much, as there is no data on this, and no one knows what corrupts Wikipedia more, paid advocacy or unpaid advocacy.
It is really hard for the community to manage people who are just fans or haters - and topics where there are big controversies in the real world tend to end up at WP:Arbcom.
But it is clear, that conflict of interest is an issue for any knowledge-producing and knowledge-presenting organization, and WP is definitely one of them. We have a responsibility to manage the COI of editors who are part of the community.
As I said above, COI is created by associations and activities that people have outside of Wikipedia, such that editors have some actual interest - some connection with a person or organization outside of WP - that conflicts with Wikipedia's mission to present reliable, neutral information to the public. Really managing COI, would require the community to delve into those associations and activities.
However, there is a stark tension between that, and a whole nexus of stuff deep in the guts of WP. Namely:
The nexus of all that, is what makes WP the radical experiment that it is - it makes this "the encyclopedia that anyone can edit".
This tension between a strong desire to manage COI editing, and the "content not contributor" nexus, is why the community has failed to reach consensus to make our guidance document on COI into a policy and not just a guideline, as it is now. It is why, even after the Banc de Binary scandal and the Wiki-PR scandal, the community had no less than five proposals to ban paid editing and every one of them failed to reach consensus. (If you want to read the failed proposals, you can find them in the "Further reading" section of the COI editing in WP article. If you do, really try to listen to what both sides are saying. The tension I am describing is very easy to see.)
Additionally, there are RW concerns with making claims about editors' outside associations - and especially taking action based on those claims. In some parts of the world, libel and slander cases are not difficult to bring and responsible parties like members of Arbcom ~could~ be financially responsible for defending themselves in court, and ~could~ be held personally/financially responsible for decisions they make.
As a result of the community's failure to act (at least that is how I explain what follows), the Wikimedia Foundation, which owns Wikipedia and other Wiki-projects, updated the Terms of Use to make it a requirement that paid editors disclose their "employer, client, and affiliation", and that they follow community policies and guidelines (which would mean our COI guideline). This community has struggled with how to implement that.
Arbcom's stance on these issue has generally been rooted in the "content not contributor" nexus; this makes sense as Arbcom should judge things based on the community's core values, and this is very core. However, along with te rest of the community Arbcom has been evolving to also express the value of protecting our content's integrity and the problems caused by unmanaged COI.
In the February 2015 decision, Wifione (about an admin who was found to be socking and long-term POV pushing, and who was ~probably~ editing for pay), the committee stated as a principle:
The Committee has no mandate to sanction editors for paid editing as it is not prohibited by site policies. The arbitration policy prevents the Committee from creating new policy by fiat. The Committee does have, however, a longstanding mandate to deal with activities often associated with paid editing—POV-pushing, misrepresentation of sources, and sometimes sockpuppetry—through the application of existing policy.
In January 2017, in response to a WMF Legal Department statement about paid editing and OUTING posted earlier that month, which suggested a loosening of OUTING protections for paid editors or people who are apparently paid editors, Arbcom posted a statement in which it fiercely upheld the values of privacy and protection from harassment as described in the harassment policy, and opposed any loosening of the OUTING policy.
In the January 2018 decision, Conduct of Mister Wiki editors (about the conduct of an admin who was editing for pay, and disclosed it but was found to have done things to evade review of their paid edits) the committee stated as a principle:
Because Wikipedia is intended to be written from a neutral point of view, it is necessary that conflicts of interest are properly disclosed, and articles or edits by conflicted editors are reasonably available for review by others. Editors are expected to comply with both the purpose and intent of the applicable policies, as well as their literal wording.
So you see, the tension remains between maintaining our comittment to "content not contributor" and managing COI. So what to do? I don't see the community coming to any Big Solutions any time soon. So we just need to work on the ground, editor by editor and edit by edit, as always. See my approach below.
But first, it useful to walk through some of the issues involved in paid editing, that everybody should be clear about:
Everybody in WP wants content that is NPOV and well sourced. Everybody agrees that editors with a COI tend to be biased. Views diverge strongly from that point, about what to do.
There are two main approaches to dealing with COI - eliminating it, and managing it.
With regard to my own external interests, I have disclosed my COI and have said that I will not edit content where I have a COI, and I don't - I don't put myself in a situation where I am in conflict between the mission of WP and my outside interests. I have eliminated the conflict. My sense (and my hope) is that this is what most WP editors do. Each of us has interests in the real world and WP is so big that there is probably no one who edits here, who wouldn't be in conflict on some article.
There are people in the community who have wanted to somehow eliminate conflicted editing by policy or by some other "top down" method. But per the section above, about the tension between privacy and integrity, that is impossible to do in WP. To eliminate COI from the top down, editors would have to disclose their real world identity to someone, and their external interests, and we would need to have some software process that would block editors from editing content where they have a COI. I don't see that happening anytime soon.
Other efforts to reduce COI editing (an approach to eliminating it) have been to try to work with sites like Elance to get them to disallow posting freelancing jobs for editing Wikipedia. We have gotten some traction there, but it is spotty.
The other approach is to "manage" COI. This is widely done in the real world, and the two steps for managing COI in the RW are disclosure and peer review. More on this below.
The approach I have arrived at after a bunch of trial and error, is in a framework of "management", which is something that I think everybody in WP could get behind. The concept of "managing COI" is widely used in academia and elsewhere. In any kind of management situation, you get the best results by educating people about what you want, and giving them the tools to do what you want.
I just want to underline that. Putting a COI notification on an editor's talk page, or tagging an article, is not really educating anyone. Many conflicted editors I work with have no idea about COI but as I talk with them, the lights go on, and they get it. (Many of them - not all). Most everybody comes to WP due to some passion or some conflict. If we want to grow the community (and we do), educating folks is really important. It is labor intensive, but important.
When I encounter edits that make a COI seem likely (it always starts and ends with content -- it is the person's edits that raise a flag of what we call "apparent COI"), I first look to see if the editor has disclosed any COI formally (which is rare) or if they have written something on a talk page or in an edit note, where they disclose some relationship. I also look at their pattern of editing, to see if the pattern tells some clear story (like they are a WP:SPA for X and write promotionally about it, or if their editing is about a random set of people and companies, and generally promotional and badly sourced, which are hallmarks of a freelancer).
Then I approach the editor who made the edits, and explain the importance of preserving the integrity of WP content, and if I have found some disclosure, I explain that they have a COI in WP and what that means. If I have found no disclosure, I ask the editor to disclose any connection they have with the subject of the article (and I note that they don't have to disclose personal information per OUTING, just the relationship). When I ask, the question is authentic. I do not know, and I cannot know, what external relationships an editor might have, unless he or she discloses it. In conversation, I draw out a disclosure. Once that is done, I ask them to follow our "peer review" process. In other words, if they want to create an article, they should submit it through AfC, and if they want to change content to an existing article, they should submit a suggestion on the article Talk page using the {{request edit}} template/tool.
Sometimes people's responses in dialogue make it clear (believably) that they have no COI, but really are just fans (or haters) - that they are editing here as advocates. If that happens, I ask them to read WP:SPA, the WP:ADVOCACY essay (which is really good), and the WP:PROMO policy, and ask them to try to be more neutral. If someone is an expert and doesn't quite get how WP works (and especially if they were adding a bunch of citations to their own work to articles) I point them to WP:EXPERT which is also very helpful. And in all this, I ask them for responses, and to ask me if they have questions. I try to generate an actual dialogue. That is how education happens.
I'll add here that sometimes these discussions go well, and sometimes they go badly. When they go badly, it could be that I was having an off day and was too harsh, or that the editor reacts defensively and can't get past that, or some combination. Humans are messy, and dealing with COI issues in WP is especially messy. But generally discussions go well.
This is a management approach to the issue. Most COI editors are happy to understand the process and say they will comply, and I generally find them complying. (I keep semi-template language here that I use when I approach people. Please feel free to use it - it is just my sandbox so is messy, sorry)
I take the same approach with anybody who has an apparent COI at the beginning of the process, and it flows the same way regardless of the kind of COI they turn out to have, if they have one.
In my experience, contract editors are more difficult. They tend to hide and when approached, tend to lie more. Thinking about where they are coming from, this makes sense, as their income is dependent on their editing here (unlike a company employee who probably has lots of other things they do at the company) and following the COI management process puts their income at risk; the disclosure leads to scrutiny and possibly deletion of their contributions, and the peer review process makes things less efficient and less predictable (both of which, from their perspective, mess up their business model).
Many paid editors come with a sense of entitlement, thinking they have a "right" to edit and feeling unhappy and aggrieved with scrutiny and suspicion. Sometimes, more education - explaining the context more - helps. When I explain what Wikipedia actually is (per WP:NOT), that editing WP is not a right, but a privilege (freely offered to all, but that can be restricted or lost), and the history of paid editing scandals, and really emphasize the importance of not shitting in your own backyard (in the sense that biased content harms the credibility of Wikipedia, and if the public loses trust in WP, the very reason that the paid editor wants to get content into WP will vanish, as fewer and fewer people will consult it), sometimes they "get it", and stop complaining and start complying. Sometimes. When they do, offering them the {{paid}} template is a simple tool to help them disclose per the ToU.
But even so, many paid editors have short term vision and goals, and want to get their edits done and get paid. These are the situations that require a pivot from a management approach to an enforcement approach. For these editors, the COI cannot be managed, but needs to eliminated. We do this by removing editing privileges, completely or in part.
In the Wikipedia that actually exists, the enforcement approach is difficult, due to OUTING and the support for paid editing in some quarters, which makes it unwise to be too aggressive in taking admin actions without a very solid basis (admin actions should of course always have a solid basis, but admin actions around paid editing will likely be scrutinized in light of the controversy and strong feelings) The advantage of having gone through everything I describe above, is that sometimes when a paid editor is finally resistant - sometimes - he or she actually discloses that he or she has edited for pay, without making a full disclosure per the ToU. In those cases, the enforcement of the ToU is simple, and there are growing number of admins who will block for clear violations of the ToU. In cases where they haven't disclosed editing for pay, enforcement requires time and work, gathering diffs and presenting a case.
Either way, in my experience, managing COI editors, contract or otherwise, takes a bunch of work, and the "enforcement approach" is generally only something that is useful to deploy at the end of the process, when the COI cannot be managed, but must be eliminated. Sometimes the work that has already been done makes that easy; other times it requires a bunch more work gathering diffs.
With regard to editors who really appear to have a COI, but deny it when asked (like Wifione) - or who are advocates (aka POV-pushers) - at the end of the day, if they are indeed warping Wikipedia, that is going to be evident in their editing. (Right? If they actually warped WP, it will be there to see, with diffs to be had) You will be able to see them deleting well-sourced content that is opposed to their interests, and adding only content and sources that favor their interests. You can see this in the evidence page of the Wifione case, here. So the case to bring, is an NPOV-violation case. Most of the evidence in the Wifione case was prior to February 2013. The case could have been settled two years before it was, based on that evidence. I don't know why (and I really don't) it wasn't brought sooner. Politics? Someone just didn't think of it? Don't know. But we have the model now. I have tried to bring a case or two like this, and will continue to try. This is the only viable way to deal with concerns about editors like this.
This is based on the letter and in some places just the spirit of the WP:COI guideline and WP:PAID policy. The specific section of the COI guideline is here, btw, which I urge folks to review if they haven't, including the link to Meta from there.
I initiated a COI investigation of myself with regard to ag biotech, articles concerning which are often contentious, and in discussion of which COI charges can fly too easily: results are here. (diff)
Here is what happened there. Via email with an oversighter, I disclosed my real life identity and what i do for a living, my life story, and my work history, and we had some discussion about that. The oversighter with whom I emailed evaluated all that (and based on what he wrote, did some research on his own based on what i told him) and found no COI for anything related to ag biotech. I did not mention editing for pay, as I have never done that. I was not asked if I edit for pay and we did not discuss that. In case I have never said it before (it is hard to believe I haven't with all the hammering I have gotten): i have never been paid, or received any consideration of any kind, for anything I do in Wikipedia, nor have I expected to, nor do I expect to, nor have I ever agreed to. I edit here purely as a volunteer; it has never been, and is not, part of my day job nor any paid work nor any volunteer work i do outside of my day job. I have tried to make that as broad and clear as possible - I am not a paid editor. I have no COI for ag biotech.
If you care, i explained how i got interested in ag biotech on an older version of this page, which you can see here.
I ask myself the questions in WP:Tendentious editing all the time. I cringe sometimes, but overall, I think I am clean. We are all human, and I have made mistakes. When I have, and have seen them, I have acknowledged them and done what I could to apologize and correct them. The goal of my work here is to create a great encyclopedia per the five pillars.
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