Misplaced Pages

Revision as of 16:22, 20 April 2023

Article display preview: TKTK – TKTKOpinionWhat Jimbo did, and why it mattersThe problem we solved and the problem we haven't.

This is a draft of a potential Signpost article, and should not be interpreted as a finished piece. Its content is subject to review by the editorial team and ultimately by JPxG, the editor in chief. Please do not link to this draft as it is unfinished and the URL will change upon publication. If you would like to contribute and are familiar with the requirements of a Signpost article, feel free to be bold in making improvements! This draft article ... Y ... has a title defined. What Jimbo did, and why it matters Y ... has a blurb defined. The problem we solved and the problem we haven't. Y ... has been copyedited. N ... does not have an image. N ... is not yet approved for publication. Writer resources ... The Newsroom (talk) Content guidance Cheatsheet Formatting Resources Style Submissions Suggestions Previous "Opinion"s deadlines Writing: 12 January 00:00 (1 day left; 5%) Publishing: 13 January 00:00 (2 days left; 10%)There are 6 hours, 4 minutes and 53 seconds until deadline. (refresh) Last revised 16:22, 20 April 2023 (UTC) (20 months ago) by Jayen466 (refresh)

What Jimbo did, and why it matters

•  PDF download
•  E-mail
•  Mastodon
•  LinkedIn
•  Facebook
•  X (Twitter)
•  Reddit

This last week might have felt like the end of an era on Misplaced Pages. Jimmy Wales's seat on the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees was never under threat and he retains his symbolic "founder's flag". But following a request for arbitration filed against him, he resigned all his administrative and technical functions on Misplaced Pages. The only real power he will retain other than his Board seat is the influence or "soft power" that results from the trust that most Wikipedians almost always have placed in him. No administrator or Arbitration committee can take that power away from him. It's developed over more than 22 years largely as the result of his practice of responding to almost any question – albeit sometimes with a long delay – on his talk page User talk:Jimbo Wales. But even that power has waned over the years as he has spent less time on Misplaced Pages. For example, the monthly pageviews for his talkpage, since 2015 when these numbers were first recorded, illustrate some of this decline in his interest and influence.

But something else happened this week. Seemingly unnoticed by the parties in this dispute, they agreed on a much bigger problem.

The controversy

The immediate cause of the controversy this week around Wales was a message he left on the talk page of a former ArbCom member, Bradv, about an undeclared paid-editing company named WikiExperts.

Wales wrote:

I have what seems to me a credible report that you have been recommending to people that they use WikiExperts. Is this true? … If it is a lie, then fine. But please tell me the truth.
— Jimbo Wales

As we'll see, the report Wales based his inquiry on turned out to be a lot less credible than he stated. But speaking in general terms, it's common practice, indeed a recommended procedure, to ask a suspected undeclared paid editor (UPE) about your suspicions in order to clear up any possible misunderstandings.

Many editors will ask via the standard (if overly long) Uw-coi template that follows.

Hello,

We welcome your contributions, but if you have an external relationship with the people, places or things you have written about on Misplaced Pages, you may have a conflict of interest (COI). Editors with a conflict of interest may be unduly influenced by their connection to the topic. See the conflict of interest guideline and FAQ for organizations for more information. We ask that you:

• avoid editing or creating articles about yourself, your family, friends, colleagues, company, organization, clients, or competitors;
• propose changes on the talk pages of affected articles (you can use the {{request edit}} template);
• disclose your conflict of interest when discussing affected articles (see Misplaced Pages:Conflict of interest#How to disclose a COI);
• avoid linking to your organization's website in other articles (see Misplaced Pages:Spam#External link spamming);
• do your best to comply with Misplaced Pages's content policies.

In addition, you are required by the Wikimedia Foundation's terms of use to disclose your employer, client, and affiliation with respect to any contribution which forms all or part of work for which you receive, or expect to receive, compensation. See Misplaced Pages:Paid-contribution disclosure.

Also, editing for the purpose of advertising, publicising, or promoting anyone or anything is not permitted. Thank you.

But this case was different.

Wales was very direct in his question. Soon his message was labeled "casting aspersions" and was severely criticized. What made matters worse is that Wales's actions are closely watched by other editors, with his words carrying a lot of weight. Bradv shouldn't have been expected to answer the question; he had been missing from Misplaced Pages for more than eight months since leaving his post at ArbCom.

I have investigated the "credible accusation", as has ArbCom. I did uncover an indication that somebody using Bradv’s name was repeatedly pushing their company’s paid editing service on an article subject whose article was possibly in danger of deletion. It seems to me the use of Bradv’s username was most likely a scam - something like the extortion documented in the 8-year-old Orangemoody case. ArbCom just concluded that it was an "obvious joe job".

Wales apologized for the tone of his question, but still maintained that the question about a former arb working for a UPE firm was important to address. "I don't think keeping these matters hushed benefits anyone other than the ultimate scammers," he wrote, ending with "I would like us to think about how we might better get the word out to potential victims of these scams, so that the business model of the scammers dries up as much as possible."

Several leaders in the fight against UPE responded rapidly to Wales. Bradv, a former ArbCom member, had been part of the group of leaders, and they couldn't imagine him working for a UPE firm. According to one current arb, the editors standing up against Wales included "2 stewards (1 of whom is also an enwiki checkuser and former ombud), 5 enwiki checkusers (not counting the steward), and an editor who is among the foremost in combating UPE on enwiki (and who has worked collaboratively with the Foundation on fighting paid editing firms like this)."

They also thought that a UPE firm was scamming new Misplaced Pages editors and its other customers, that Bradv was a victim of a joe job. Somebody must be impersonating him. Indeed, UPE firms commonly lie to Misplaced Pages editors and their other customers and impersonate Misplaced Pages admins and others on a weekly basis, so that Wales and his "credible" source had made the rookie mistake of believing UPE lies.

It might have been all downhill from there. Related discussions began on User talk:Jimbo Wales, and on the Village Pump, and a request for arbitration was filed with ArbCom. The next morning Wales requested that his remaining administrative and technical tools be removed.

Assume good faith

Though he was only giving up tools that he hadn’t used for years, the situation must have been difficult for Wales. He founded Misplaced Pages more than 22 years ago and was the ultimate arbiter of Wikipedians' conduct for several years. To the outside world, it might have still seemed that he was the embodiment of Misplaced Pages. He was the inspiration for many editors and one of the most level-headed editors around. A lot of cheap shots were aimed at him during this time, but for the most part he's kept going, preaching the gospel of "assume good faith" and "imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge in their own language." I, for one, encourage Jimmy to keep the faith and stay with us. We will still sometimes need his guidance.

But my opinion doesn’t matter a lick of spit on this question. Only the Misplaced Pages community at large can decide how much influence he will still have.

In an interview for this column, Wales told The Signpost "We need to remember such old fashioned essentials as 'Assume Good Faith'. I include myself in that, of course." He believes his recent mistake was making an intemperate remark and he hopes it might be forgiven. He also assumes that those who called him out on the mistake were acting in good faith.

"When I realized my mistake I did what I think was the honorable thing to do: a mea culpa."

What really makes Misplaced Pages work well is kindness, compassion, forgiveness, and behaving honorably. It is my belief that people will make mistakes - we're human after all - and that there's a right way to deal with mistakes - not through defensiveness or combativeness, but humility and thoughtfulness.
— Jimbo Wales

Bradv responded to the situation on his user talk page today. After thanking his defenders and denying working with paid editors, he got right to the point:

Sadly, the practice of conning potential article subjects for outrageous sums of money is all too common. Jimbo makes the point that we need to do a better job of communicating the risks involved in hiring paid editors, and on this point I wholeheartedly agree. In my time as an arbitrator I encountered several instances of people paying for articles and then emailing ArbCom when they ultimately got ripped off. The point I always want to make to these people, and the one we should be shouting from the rooftops, is that you do not need to pay to have an article written about you. If you or the things you've done really are worthy of an article, we will write it for free.
— Bradv

He also stated that we need to better communicate with our readers and with our editors about these scams. He doesn’t think that Wales first question "was made out of malice". He did say that Wales's resignation of his tools should be considered "under a cloud".

What next?

The mystery of this situation is why so many of the participants didn't seem to understand that almost all the participants agreed on one thing. There is a scam where paid editing services extort their marks out of thousands or tens of thousands of dollars, on a weekly basis. Their marks include both customers that they attract by false advertising, plus those they get by extorting new Misplaced Pages editors by preying on those who have had their drafts deleted, and those whose drafts the scammers have deleted themselves. Our temple of knowledge is being polluted by the worst type of money-chaser, by people who will do anything for a buck. This has been going on since before the Orangemoody scandal of 2015, which was widely documented at the time. We need to understand that eight years of extortion on Misplaced Pages is much too long. We need to understand that nobody deserves to be scammed. The UPE firms carry the most blame for the scam, but we have created the environment where the scam thrives. The whole Misplaced Pages community will bear some of the responsibility for the scam until we eradicate the scammers. We need to warn the targeted victims. There has been a scam warning posted since 2017, but we need to put it in the right places where new editors will see it. The Wikimedia Foundation could do much more to get the word out to the mainstream press. The Signpost too can do its part, as can individual editors. Keeping this paid editing scam hidden from our editors and readers only perpetuates the scam.

We should also understand how much we usually agree on despite all the mistakes we all make in the heat of editing. We should all understand the power of assuming good faith and the powers of an apology and of forgiveness.

Discuss this story

• What's a UPE page please? Ashwin Baindur (User:AshLin) (talk) 13:52, 26 April 2023 (UTC)
  • It's short for "undisclosed paid editor." Many on this site are loath to use full words.~TPW 14:11, 26 April 2023 (UTC)
    • UPE was defined in the article, perhaps he's wondering about where it's defined in policy. Try WP:PAID, but also WP:COI (for Conflict of Interest) can be useful as well. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 14:40, 26 April 2023 (UTC)

• I think the user is asking for a sample article written by a UPE. Schwede66 18:34, 26 April 2023 (UTC)

Most known UPE articles have been deleted, but 888casino is one that was retained for whatever reason. I pulled it from a list I compiled of one prolific UPE editor. It looked like this after they created it; note especially the long "accolades and awards" section, which is typical and listed at WP:Identifying PR.

I have a bunch of lists like that. I used to do a bunch of work identifying conflict-of-interest editing before joining The Signpost. If you want to see more recent examples, go over to the conflict-of-interest noticeboard and search for "UPE", there's plenty. ☆ Bri (talk) 19:33, 26 April 2023 (UTC)

• The user page "I don't do paid editing" flag is cool, but ultimately meangingless. There have been a number of paid editors with similar comments on their user page that also had no trouble finding work, as paid editors have found ways to explain the need for secrecy and denial to their clients. Accordingly, while it is probably better than not having that flag, it neither means that the person concerned doesn't do paid editing, nor does it prevent them from getting jobs if they are looking. It is a difficult mess. - Bilby (talk) 11:10, 27 April 2023 (UTC)
  • I have mixed feelings on the user page flags. On one hand, it's a way to raise awareness on the scams—though far less visible than the warning that your bank may put on their website telling you to be vigilant about scammers pretending to be them (and with time, they become background noise and are no longer noticed). On the other, it's almost shifting the burden onto editors who are being joe jobbed to have to defend themselves. This is a volunteer project, and volunteers shouldn't be kept up at night wondering if their username and hard work is being misused to scam people out of their money, tarnishing their reputation in the process. Frankly, if even Jimbo fell for the scammers, we have a much bigger problem that user page flags won't fix. —k6ka 🍁 (Talk · Contributions) 19:22, 27 April 2023 (UTC)
    • I agree that some flags on user pages is not the ultimate answer to this very serious problem, but it is not entirely useless. As @Bilby: wrote "it is probably better than not having that flag". So why not do it?
    • I consider doing something about the extortion problem to be a moral imperative. We have to try to stop it, or just admit that Misplaced Pages is never going to be anything approaching a credible source. Scammers are putting in bad articles, deleting (better) articles, and if you come to edit Misplaced Pages somebody is going to try to rip you off. There are little things that I can suggest, but ultimately the things that get done will be done either by the WMF or by our elected/appointed representatives. I do think that a lot of flags on a lot of active user pages could have a good effect on them.
    • There's one similar case that I'll point out. The U.S Congressional Cemetery in SE Washington, D.C. is something of a national treasure. A couple of decades ago. It was becoming a center of crime - drug dealing and prostitution - with violent crime seemingly just around the corner. The local neighborhood started coming up with some simple answers, maybe just to protect the investment in their homes. They formed a "Friends of" group and ended up managing the cemetery that the true owners (an inner city church) had essentially abandoned. They organized some clean up events, did some minor lawn mowing. And started a dog walking group. The dogs, surprisingly enough, were a major victory. Fido fights crime! They got a short appearance on C-SPAN. The cavalry (Air Force personal on their time off, actually) showed up with lawn mowers unexpectedly. Then they got a $1 million grant (from Congress of course). At that point, it looks like now, the ultimate victory was inevitable. So don't write off doing little things. We've got to start somewhere. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 23:55, 27 April 2023 (UTC)
• Something editors who haven't been here for 15+ years may not know, but it used to be that Jimmy Wales would habitually raise an issue like this thru email, often with the subject line "Personal & Confidential". If he had communicated to Bradv like that in this case, there would not have been any controversy & he might have kept his privileges. Sometimes old, established ways are best. -- llywrch (talk) 19:39, 3 May 2023 (UTC)

lists of paid editing articles

There's a lot of different types of articles written by UPE. Here's one with the bunch of awards (like Bri focused on) right after a Percepto editor completely rewrote it (page down to the top of the actual article). But I've written many Signpost articles on these guys, there are pages or blocked editors linked there. I'll fill in the links as I find them:

• Jeffrey Epstein (Misplaced Pages:Misplaced Pages Signpost/2020-03-29/In focus)
• 7 Russian oligarchs
• Peter Nygard (don't miss this one!)
• Gautam Adani e.g. a focus on philanthropy
• Wirecard
• 3 billionaires
• Banc de Binary

Smallbones_(smalltalk) 21:25, 26 April 2023 (UTC)

The Nygard was a great before/after! Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 08:31, 27 April 2023 (UTC)

• Excellent piece. Minor point, "To the outside world, it might have still seemed that he was the embodiment of Misplaced Pages." Oh, I am entirely confident almost all the outside world knows nothing of this business. Those who have heard of Jimbo Wales continue to assume that he is Misplaced Pages's owner, president, chairman, whatever. We have had a bit of a storm, and we are nervous for the future, but thus far it's all in our own little teacup. Jim.henderson (talk) 20:46, 27 April 2023 (UTC)

Convenience break

• I see this was toned down a bit from the draft version, but I still feel it misses the point. While I agree that we should work to raise awareness of these scams, to make it clear to one and all that Misplaced Pages articles are not for sale, what happened here is that a wealthy person was perfectly ok with working with people who claimed to have corrupt admins on their payroll. So, they knew they were dealing with trashy people, but they figured their money would buy them what they wanted, so they did not care. They only became upset when the scam that they willingly participated in turned out to be targeting them as well as Misplaced Pages. So (this goes to the point in the above comments) they reached out to the person they thought was the boss of the whole operation to complain that their attempt to buy their way in had not succeeded. And Mr. Wales fell for it and made a ridicualous accusation. I've seen the evidence, and it is so bad, so obviously, completely, laughably fake. The screengrabs I saw were most likely created on a private wiki used for faking things, to an experienced eye it obviously was not en.wp at all, and obviously not Bradv at all. I get how it could've fooled an out-of-touch businessman for whom money is all that matters, but I don't get how it could possibly have fooled any experienced Wikipedian, let alone literally the first person to ever edit Misplaced Pages. Wales was the one who critically failed to assume good faith here, not just in the tone of his remarks, but in his apparent lack of any skepticism about these claims, assuming the absolute worst from the get go, and having to be pressured over a period of several days to please share the supposed evidence with the Arbitration Committee, the body the community elected to deal with, among other things, admin misconduct. One would think the first assumption one would make was that this couldn't be real, and a few moments of actually looking into it would have easily confirmed that. To be clear: if this had any substance to it at all, I would be at the front of the line calling for Brad's head. This was on the level of people who cold call phone numbers claiming to be from the Internal Revenue Service and demanding a back tax bill be paid by Apple gift card in the next 30 minutes or the cops are coming to arrest you, it was that stupid. Beeblebrox (talk) 17:46, 30 April 2023 (UTC)

• @Beeblebrox: thanks for bringing your views here. I don't think that my article misses the point, just that you and I have different points to make. You believe that Bradv is an honest respectable person, and shouldn't have his honesty questioned. Please note that I never questioned his honesty, and I was quite surprised when people (not you) started accusing me of this. My point is that (almost?) everybody in the discussion agreed that there was a scam, including extortion, but nobody had any suggestions on how we could deal with that huge problem.
• I do disagree with you about "what happened here is that a wealthy person was perfectly ok with working with people who claimed to have corrupt admins on their payroll. So, they knew they were dealing with trashy people, but they figured their money would buy them what they wanted, so they did not care. They only became upset when the scam that they willingly participated in turned out to be targeting them as well as Misplaced Pages." That way of dealing with extortion is exactly the opposite of the approach we need to take. Let's say there was a situation where the police were collecting protection money for the mafia from a business owner. The business owner gets angry that neither the mafia nor the police are actually protecting him from anything, so he reports the arrangement to a higher level of the police.
• So what should the higher level say to the extortion victim? Definitely *not* the following "you've been bribing the police to pay the mafia. You are guilty of bribery, you've been breaking the law!" Technically, that may be true, but it won't stop the crime by dealing with the ultimate victim that way. A better way to stop the crime would be to get the police officers' names and properly investigate that part of the case. (In the analogous Misplaced Pages case it looks like somebody was impersonating the police). Only then could you begin to get information on who in the mafia was responsible.
• The part of the article where I mentioned that nobody is 100% honest is very important. In classic con games this is very important. As the grifters say "You can't cheat an honest man." They will put an ordinary person into an unusual situation where the rules aren't very clear and push, tempt, or trick them into being dishonest. Then when they take the money and run, the mark finds it very difficult to report the crime. In other words, the grifters are counting on the victim or the police to say "I (or you) can't report this; I was (or you were) being dishonest." So 90%(?) of the crimes go unreported. To get the crimes reported you have to sympathize with the victim, knowing that anybody can be scammed like this.
  • The very first thing we have to do is to make clear rules about paid editing and let the world know about them. I hope the WMF is listening! *Get the word out* covering it up doesn't help!
  • Next we have to gather information about the scammers (rather than just about the victims). You get the info about the scammers from the victims.
  • To gather that information, we need a clear reporting mechanism with somebody on the receiving end to ask the right questions. Maybe those folks should be specially trained for this, which might suggest that the T&S folks do it. But in any case, if you don't ask the right questions you won't find the right answers, so why bother going through the charade?
  • Then something has to be done. Perhaps this might just be a year-end report on how many victims have come forward. Hopefully it can be more than that, but something has to be done at this point.
• Otherwise, the only option I see is to tell the victims to call the authorities. There's a list at the end of the article Confidence trick, so I don't see a problem giving them those contacts. We might even prepare a packet of information on what we know about the scam in general. I know that some editors will object to this advise, based perhaps on "No legal threats", but I'm not making any legal threat here. I'm just saying if we see a victim of a crime that involves our website, we just say "it's a shame that we can't help you more, but maybe you should contact the authorities." If there isn't anybody on-Wiki or at the WMF that can handle the situation better than that, I'll suggest that the WMF contact the California State Attorney General and just ask them. "We've got an extortion racket going on on our website. Can you help us in deciding how best to handle the overall situation?" I'll bet that the AG has a special office that handles con games and they have seen organizations in a similar position and will have some suggestions. Hope this helps. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 22:37, 30 April 2023 (UTC)

  I think the key difference in how we formed our opinions on this matter is that I actually saw this person's conversations with the scammers. Unless Jimbo shared that with you as well, I assume you have not.

  This business only seems suddenly urgent to people who aren't involved in combating UPE. This is going on all day, every day, although this particular case does appear to involve larger sums than most. The committee has been contacted by numerous people targeted by such scammers, and we advise them that it is an attempted scam and not how Misplaced Pages works.

  I don't see how the state of California can help these people. I do like the idea that Google, which has a fairly cozy relationship with the WMF, might be able to help with SEO-type options. Perhaps give the WMF free "sponsored" placement at the top of certain search results.

  Where I think we have a fundamental difference of opinion is that you seem to somehow blame the volunteer community for not doing enough. The volunteer community is doing what it can. Those in the know, know, that this sort of thing is being actively combated every day by dedicated volunteers, but by the same token it is the community's responsibility to detect UPE, remove the paid editors, and review and possibly delete material generated by them. It is not and never has been the community's responsibility to police the entire web for people making dishonest claims about Misplaced Pages. Beeblebrox (talk) 15:53, 1 May 2023 (UTC)

• Pages transcluding The Signpost's deadline
• Signpost drafts
• Signpost drafts, by date
• Signpost drafts, ready for final check
• Misplaced Pages Signpost archives 2023-04