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Advert injection and user tracking

[edit]

An edit describing the current practice of advert injection was reverted without further comment (either here or in the edit summary). Presumably this was due to policy violation or other problems with the text? 180.251.44.247 (talk) 08:39, 21 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Here are the 3 relevant (and now reverted) edits:

I'd prefer to restore this text or some variant thereof, reasoning follows:

  • Injecting content into HTTP responses should be considered unusual or bad practice, and therefore noteworthy (not all ISPs do this - I'm hoping that very few do)
  • Modifying responses to include adverts can cause support overhead for webmasters, who may spend time and effort attempting to track down the source of what appears to be a hacking attempt
  • Further to the above, it took me some time to identify that the ISP was responsible for the injection (rather than malicious code on the original page or malware on the local system),
  • The injected adverts affect this site - wikipedia shows an overlay advert for me when visiting without any advert blocking activated
  • Multiple sources across the internet have reported this, so I don't believe this counts as original research
  • If the reason for reverting the original text was due to NPOV then tagging the page rather than a revert would seem to be more appropriate?
  • Other ISPs have similar text in their pages which has not been reverted, as an example see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BT_Group#Behavioural_targeting
  • "When you find a passage in an article that is biased or inaccurate, improve it if you can; don't delete salvageable text."

I'm not too familiar with wikipedia policies so my apologies if I'm missing steps somewhere, but based on the above I intend to restore the original edit (on this page only, to simplify matters). 180.251.44.247 (talk) 08:59, 21 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]

This is an encyclopaedia, and a practice of a moment in time like this is trivial, and not particularly worthy of noting in an article. — billinghurst sDrewth 09:46, 21 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Addendum, please look at Wikipedia:Citing sources and you will find that a web forum is not what we would utilise as an authoritative source. — billinghurst sDrewth 09:48, 21 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the reply.

  • This has been in place for at least a year - see Talk:Telkom_Indonesia#Javascript_and_ads_injection - so it's somewhat more than "a moment in time"
  • The "Phorm" tracking mentioned in the BT page was shortlived and is no longer in place, yet that article preserves the text
  • There is other shortlived and inaccurate information on this page ("384 kb/s to 10 Mb/s", current top rate is >100Mb/s).
  • The web forum citation can be removed if that doesn't meet the citation requirements, but there is also a link to the official terms and conditions and two separate and independent blog posts containing detailed information on the issue.
  • There are other ISP pages - Rogers_Hi-Speed_Internet#Injection_of_content for example - in this encyclopaedia which present similar information without being reverted

As such, I believe that the text (or some version thereof) should be restored - or at least those two other pages should be similarly trimmed for consistency? 180.251.44.247 (talk) 10:08, 21 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Addendum - if the main issue here is the citations, would a tag such as "citation needed" (or "better citations needed") not be more appropriate?

180.251.44.247 (talk) 10:11, 21 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Response to third opinion request:
I am responding to a third opinion request for this page. I have made no previous edits on Speedy (Telkom) and have no known association with the editors involved in this discussion. The third opinion process is informal and I have no special powers or authority apart from being a fresh pair of eyes.
Material like this, which criticizes a company, needs care for proper sourcing. Blogs and forums are not WP:RS reliable sources. The material as presented in the IP's version of the article (see URL below) cannot be used, as the sources are blogs/forums and not sufficiently reliable to source this kind of statment. The most you can do is to cite the Speedy Product Description page (FN5 in your version), which states Seluruh paket dapat disisipi advertising, which Google translate renders as "All packages can be inserted advertising". You cannot say more than this unless you have better sources.

@Billinghurst: while I agree with you about the inadequacy of the sources, I am surprised at your comment about the ephemeral nature of this. What I've quoted above is in the company's own product description, with no evidence that this is a short-term policy. Moreover, you haven't touched the blatantly promotional statement that "Speedy using ADSL technology, which delivers digital signal via the telephony network is optimal for Internet content consumption purposes" in the previous paragraph, sourced to the home page of the product's own web site, which doesn't verify it anyway, and would be even more ephemeral even if true. What we're left with is merely a promotional article with no secondary sources at all. Any thoughts?

Regards, Stfg (talk) 12:38, 21 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Some external links break the {{3O}} template, but the version I'm referring to is this one. --Stfg (talk) 12:38, 21 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]
That's a very helpful response, thank you. I can provide additional citations from news outlets - all in Indonesian unfortunately. The first one is an editorial from kompas.com Kompas Gramedia Group which is the main news conglomerate in this country:
There's also an article from Obeng+, which is a local equivalent of Ars Technica (as cited in Rogers_Hi-Speed_Internet#Injection_of_content), albeit smaller scale:
And a weaker source from a (much) smaller news site here, consisting of an interview with a single person:
There are a number of other links but these are specifically about how to prevent/remove the advertising, for example:
I'll leave the article as-is (without my additions), but if the main issue is with the quality of the citations then hopefully the above links are sufficient to resolve this. If not, I'd still push for a single sentence reference to the line in the official description page. Alternatively, if the issue is truly that the article should not mention specifics about the service provided then I submit that the entire article should be classed as being insufficiently noteworthy for inclusion, and would nominate it for deletion... anyway, thanks for your time! (and for clarity, I'm the same user as 180.251.44.247 / 86.6.231.149, enjoying the delights of a dynamic IP address) 36.76.109.100 (talk) 14:41, 21 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]
I'd like other opinions on those four. Three of them have space for people to comment, so forums in a sense, but what are the qualifications for posting articles there and what verification they do, I can't tell. That's really what it boils down to. I share your concern about notability. In fact I tried a quick WP:BEFORE, Googling Speedy (Telkom), but as I can't read Indonesian, I couldn't convince myself one way or another, and wouldn't be able to contribute to an AFD discussion. I sympathise with the thought, though. --Stfg (talk) 16:27, 21 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]
If there is other crap in the article then clean it up. If there is crap in other articles, then clean them up. This is meant to be an encyclopaedic article about the organisation. The article is not meant to be a debate about the pros/cons/goodness/evilness of advert tracking, other means of injection, they are all PoV. In an article about advert tracking on ISPs, this would be an example if required, as that is topical to the subject. The ISP will clearly have a range of services and practices and only focusing on one, and with the connotation of it as a negative practice is not NPOV.

Web forums are not authoritative sources as described at Wikipedia:Citing sources and should be avoided wherever possible. — billinghurst sDrewth 23:32, 24 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Not quite accurate, billinghurst. Wikipedia:Citing sources does not mention forums. Wikipedia:Verifiability does mention "Internet forum postings" (my italics) but here we are looking at newspaper articles, not at the forum postings underneath them. The question, as I pointed out before, is whether the newspaper itself is RS. And of course, what can be covered in factual tone; I never suggested that we should include "debate about the pros/cons/goodness/evilness" of anything. Please reconsider my comment in the light of these points. For now I've just used the company's own product description to make an NPOV version. It's all cited to that. That's all I'll do with this article. And I will say that it's rather facile just to revert the latest edit while leaving the unbalanced promotional stuff that was there before, with a snarky SOFIXIT type of response. Are we in the business of improving articles, or just reverting imperfect edits regardless of whatever was there before? To see a steward, no less, doing this is one small straw on this camel's back. --Stfg (talk) 23:14, 30 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]
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