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Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2023-04-26/Opinion

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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)[reply]
  • 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)[reply]
    • 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)[reply]
      • 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 Wikipedia 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 Wikipedia 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)[reply]
  • 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)[reply]

lists of paid editing articles

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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]

The Nygard was a great before/after! Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 08:31, 27 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • Excellent piece. Minor point, "To the outside world, it might have still seemed that he was the embodiment of Wikipedia." 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 Wikipedia'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)[reply]

Convenience break

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  • 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 Wikipedia 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 Wikipedia. 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 Wikipedia. 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)[reply]
  • @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 Wikipedia." 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 Wikipedia 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)[reply]
    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 Wikipedia 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 Wikipedia. Beeblebrox (talk) 15:53, 1 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]




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