Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2023-04-26/Opinion
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What Jimbo did, and why it matters
This last week might have felt like the end of an era on Wikipedia. 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 Wikipedia. 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 Wikipedia. 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.
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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
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 Wikipedia, 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 Wikipedia:Conflict of interest#How to disclose a COI);
- avoid linking to your organization's website in other articles (see Wikipedia:Spam#External link spamming);
- do your best to comply with Wikipedia'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 Wikipedia: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. It was only made worse 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 Wikipedia for over a year 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 Wikipedia 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 Wikipedia editors and their other customers and impersonate Wikipedia 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 Wikipedia 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 Wikipedia. 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 Wikipedia 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 Wikipedia 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 Wikipedia 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 Wikipedia 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 Wikipedia 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
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:
Smallbones(smalltalk) 21:25, 26 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Convenience break