What else can we say?
Last week the Arbitration Committee made an unusual decision involving the policy on outing. An editor was topic-banned based on an article published in The Daily Dot which apparently outed the long time editor. The unusual part was that ArbCom specifically allowed editors to link to that article in discussions about conflict-of-interest editing. Some editors were delighted that an offender of our COI rules had been caught. Others fear that ArbCom was unilaterally changing a major protection against harassment. A discussion at WT:Harassment seems to indicate that the editors there don't like the idea of allowing linking to a reliable source that both names an editor's real name and their username. But it looks like they'll accept links to the Daily Dot article now since ArbCom has given special permission. The Signpost has a different take on the controversy.
We've been trying for years to report serious COI and paid editing problems while staying within the outing policy. We believe that it is outrageous that accused sex offenders like Jeffrey Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell, and Peter Nygard were apparently able to edit Wikipedia, either as COI editors or through paid editors, though we recognize that administrators were successful in catching or at least slowing down these editors.
We linked to The New York Times where they gave a username that they state was named by Epstein in an official document as an account that he used. Since we also had on-Wiki evidence of paid editing including the following edit summary, we believe we were following the current outing policy.
To be clear, the policy, as written, is convoluted, at times self-contradictory, and just poorly written. Violating the policy has dire consequences – up to an immediate ban that can be imposed by any administrator. We just wish that the community would write an easy-to-understand policy that would apply to everybody. We don't want to ask ArbCom for exemptions for specific stories, which would look like submitting our stories to pre-publication censorship.
Last month we reported that accused sex offender Peter Nygard apparently used paid editors to edit Wikipedia. The evidence included a story in The Guardian, which we linked to, that documented a UK court order requiring that the Wikimedia Foundation release the identities of editors. The court order could not be enforced, but there was strong evidence on-Wiki that Nygard, or more likely, his paid representatives, edited Wikipedia.
The essence of the outing policy is that an editor's username should not be connected to "personal information [including] legal name, date of birth, identification numbers, home or workplace address, job title and work organisation, telephone number, email address, other contact information, or photograph, whether such information is accurate or not," unless the editor has stated that information themself on the English Wikipedia.
When discussing COI or paid editing "workplace address, job title and work organisation", can be tricky but we believe that simply establishing a strong possibility that the editor behind a username is a paid editor does not out their workplace address or work organization. For example a COI or paid editor may work for an individual person, a company that is the subject of an article, or their lawyer, or a paid editing company. Or they may just be a friend or relative editing from their own home or workplace.
We request that the community – and ArbCom if they wish – take another look at some of the articles we've written in this series, and let us know what, if anything, they think violates the letter or spirit of our policy on outing. Then the community will have an idea of what needs to be clarified – or possibly changed – in the policy for us and other editors to be able to seriously discuss possible paid or COI editors inserting disinformation into Wikipedia. Not having a clear policy on outing will prevent Wikipedia from addressing these matters in a world full of disinformation.
Please review the following Signpost articles and let us know in the comments section below whether you believe we have violated the letter or spirit of Wikipedia's outing policy
Please note that we are not asking for a special rule for The Signpost. Outing policy should apply to all editors, whether they are editing at WP:COIN, at a sockpuppet investigation, on an article talkpage, and even in mainspace articles.
Given a clear rule The Signpost can continue to report on COI and paid editing, albeit in a somewhat less informative way if the rule is extremely strict. Really? What if the policy prohibited mentioning any real-world names, usernames, anything related to a specific workplace or even location, as well as the current prohibitions?
The following section presents a story, using the above super-strict rules, that we were going to report in the normal way in this issue. Please let us know in the comments section whether you think that a story presented in this way is useful and informative, or whether it violates the dignity of a fellow human being and shouldn't be allowed even under such strict rules.
The case of the boss's father's article
A high-level government official who is married to a very well-known legislator was recently reported to have ordered government employees on January 6, 2018, to edit the official's father's Wikipedia article. The report was made by a high-level investigating office who forwarded it first to prosecutors, and then to the national legislature, who then released it to the public. At least two reliable national news organizations then reported the Wikipedia connection. Two news sources posted the slightly redacted investigative report online.
The government employees told the investigators that their boss had told them to perform many possibly illegal actions, with editing Wikipedia – which is just an infraction of WMF's terms-of-service ban on undeclared paid editing – a minor part of the report. An employee told the investigator that editing their boss's father's Wikipedia article was legal because it was important for the boss to present themself to the public as a dutiful son or daughter. Almost like clock work, an editor made a minor edit, their first and last edit, to the rarely edited article about the father on January 6, 2018.
From there the case of the boss's father's article gets a bit murky. While there were multiple new editors cleaning up the article from time to time, there's only a small amount of evidence that these editors were sockpuppets or had been banned for conflict-of-interest editing. Most of the edits were related to a slow moving edit war involving naming conventions in a country other than the one where the high government official served.
Similarly the article on the boss's mother, and the article on the boss's father's company showed only a few signs of conflict-of-interest editing.
What is clear is that the article about the boss was heavily edited by apparent COI editors, who were likely undeclared paid editors. Long, fairly unimportant material that appeared to be government press releases about the boss were inserted a dozen times by single-purpose accounts. This press release material was reverted by other Wikipedians as often as it was added. The single-purpose editors were questioned about their editing but did not respond and simply disappeared. About twenty accounts were blocked as sockpuppets, meatpuppets or COI editors; a couple of them had also edited the father's or mother's articles.
We're asking you
The apparent COI editing in this story has been discussed on talk pages, WP:COIN, and in a sockpuppet investigation. All of these discussions at least implicitly referred to the high official's name and their spouse's name, the government agency where they formerly worked, as well as the COI or paid editors' likely place of work in the government.
Is there any reason that this publicly available information can't be brought to a wider audience at The Signpost or elsewhere on Wikipedia? Is there any benefit to anybody if this publicly available information couldn't be reported here or elsewhere on Wikipedia? Is there any substantive reason that a reliable media source or the official investigator's report couldn't be linked to document the facts?
What is the cost to Wikipedia and its readers of not reporting this information?
Please just let us know in the comments section below.
What else can we say?
Discuss this story
I know the subject in question that is being alluded to here (I'm the one who raised the matter with The Signpost I believe). Was there an official threat of banning or something that has led to this? Where's the editorial discussion that brought about this convoluted way of discussing the problem? -Indy beetle (talk) 05:40, 29 March 2021 (UTC)Reply[reply]
WP:OUTING as written is a childish piece of policy that is an embarrassment to what, after twenty years, should be a mature project. It is unbalanced. It is reminiscent of the "libel laws" practised in dictatorships, where you end up in jail when you dare criticise a functionary. It is not fit for purpose. It's been regularly abused by the likes of Tenebrae and Wifione (for the real-world damage the latter admin did, see Newsweek) – all they had to do was shout "harassment" and "outing", and trigger-happy admins would threaten, block and ban people drawing attention to their editing.
The policy's chilling effect is evident from the fact that in Tenebrae's case, someone created an SPA to raise what were – with the benefit of hindsight – clearly justified concerns, rather than risking their real account. Can we really blame them, when WP:OUTING calls for an "immediate block" (rather than suppressing the edit and advising the editor on what channels to use instead) for any post touching even remotely on an editor's identity, regardless of whether there is a good-faith concern about the integrity of the encyclopedia or not?
All the SPA in Tenebrae's case posted was diffs, as one would in an ArbCom case, yet they were still blocked in response to Tenebrae's cry of "harassment and attempted outing", which was immediately endorsed by Baseball Bugs and Knowledgekid87 and swiftly responded to with a block, all done in less than two hours. Quick work! As it was, another six years passed before the issue was raised again – off-wiki, i.e. in the press – and appropriate action was taken on-wiki.
Drmies, are you not embarrassed by this block today? It's kind of telling that the two administrators who blocked the Nola Carveth SPA and suppressed the discussion of Tenebrae’s COI editing (now thankfully unsuppressed again by Beeblebrox) are among those who object most loudly to the sort of bare-faced lying that Wifione and Tenebrae (or Qworty, for that matter) got away with for so long. In other words, even admins who intellectually understand the problem still are drawn to do the wrong thing when actually faced with such a situation, as though on autopilot – through peer pressure, I guess. What is the solution? --Andreas JN466 15:14, 29 March 2021 (UTC)Reply[reply]