User:Bri/Paid editing Chinese wall

This is a proposal to create a Chinese wall between paid and volunteer editing on the English Wikipedia.

Solution and proposal up front

Paid editors should have their own, non-indexed, sandbox-like environment that volunteers can then choose to dip into. From our own definition such a construct is "an information barrier within an organization that was erected to prevent exchanges or communication that could lead to conflicts of interest". It's a solved problem in some respects, and the rest is implementation and enforcement details. But we have to start with this as the basis for allowing paid editors to contribute. We currently do this weakly and non-mandatory fashion with the WP:COIEDIT guideline, which is a fail because it is only a guideline.

Strategic rollout

The simplest path from A to B may be to strengthen and upgrade this portion of WP:COIEDIT to a policy: you are strongly discouraged prohibited from editing affected articles directly. If and when it appears to be failing in practice, then upgrade to the technical solution identified below.

Problems in current regime

It is my firm and growing belief that the commercial quest for Google search visibility is driving the majority of our conflicted and non-disclosed commercial editing. Many independent studies and PR industry sources confirm this, and even so do the marketing materials prepared by some of the known bad actors inside English Wikipedia (see WP:List of paid editing companies for documentation). Wikiwashing, a form of reputation management, is a problem probably smaller in extent but attracting the same actors and the same negative consequences. Oftentimes the same firms offer a package for article construction with article monitoring, reputation management and crisis management – even in one case termed "Wikipedia Crisis Management" (again: see WP:List of paid editing companies).

Paid editing on ENWP has an instant payoff: the subject is indexed and searchable in Google virtually instantaneously. But the instant payoff, while desirable in many ways for volunteer contributions, leads to these direct consequences:

• Rewards a quick-and-dirty, low quality article, unchecked work approach
• Dis-incentivizes the use of AfC which, though our best practice for disclosed paid editing because of its built in quality checks by independent editors, is slow and non-indexed

These factors have effectively created a feedback cycle at odds with our own policies and best practices, creating frustrated volunteers and good-faith paid editors alike, while undermining content quality.

Undisclosed paid editing is a huge and growing problem:

• Downsides across entire project, particularly its volunteer aspects documented at WP:BOGO and User:Bri/What's wrong with undisclosed paid editing
• Size of the problem is unknown; being explored at WP:MEASURECOI

Successful uses of Chinese walls

"Chinese wall" is a common US business practice. Anytime one group needs to be insulated from another to prevent cross-contamination for the following reasons:

• Intellectual property ownership e.g. in reverse engineering existing work, then building a software- or hardware-compatible component
• Litigation teams
• Journalism, in perhaps the closest parallel to our dilemma, where advertising must be separated from news reporting

Promulgation, enforcement and other implementation details

First of all, there needs to be a strict separation between accounts used for live-article editing (or creation) and paid editing. Having a clear and sanctionable violation of policy when paid editors directly edit in mainspace is one of the greatest attractions of this proposal as it allows existing systems to kick in to apply corrective action. Policies like WP:PAID can be amended to include the new Chinese wall convention. Corrective action may take the form of simple reversion and cleanup of POV content, or more extensive and intrusive processes already in place such as sockpuppet investigations, blocking editors, etc. There is no clearly necessary new enforcement mechanism required.

Creating the separation

This could be through behavioral conventions backed by policy – or better, through system rules with MediaWiki technical implementations. Whether enforced by convention or technically, paid contributions can be separated into a "COI pool" with indexing restrictions.

The behavioral convention may be that disclosed paid contribs are restricted to draft, userspace or talkpages. A possible technical solution is to ask upon account creation "are you going to engage in paid editing with this account?", permanently flag the account per the editor's response, create a "paid" namespace open for any editor, and restrict mainspace editing to non-paid accounts.

Note that best practices for WP:COIEDIT already effectively outline this strict separation and some paid editors successfully follow these practices. Also note that many editors with GLAM or WMF roles also effectively separate their paid accounts from their volunteer accounts. I am not aware of any claims that it is burdensome.

Investigation and remedies

Existing powers of investigation residing in Checkusers and others may be up to the task of enforcement if Chinese wall standards are adopted. Without a solid understanding of the current scope and rates of the issue it is hard to say with certainty. It is to be hoped that by removing the "instant Google gratification" as described above, the attraction of undisclosed paid editing will be blunted to an extent that volunteer resources can catch up with the inflow.

A cleanup remedy might be to bounce undisclosed edits back to the COI pool, either edit-by-edit or a whole article. Having this option, vice deleting the material outright, might appeal to some inclusionists.