Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2018-08-30/News and notes
Flying high; low practice from Wikipedia 'cleansing' agency; where do our donations go? RfA sees a new trend
WMF hires a spam outfit
Executive Director
Evoking Cambridge Analytica, Smallbones demands a statement from the very top, Katherine Maher, after Only in death brings the partnership up on Jimbo's talk page. As mentioned in last month's issue of "In the media", however, with Maher spending 200 days a year at 35,000 feet, her business travel apparently leaves her little time to keep an eye on what is happening in the company she is charged with managing. Jim Heaphy (Cullen328), lead host at the Teahouse and otherwise well-known for exercising extraordinary restraint even in the most contentious situations, concurs and beats around no bushes while Maher beats her daily way through frequent flyer lounges and crowded departure gates:
| “ | ...this is a major WMF scandal that requires an immediate and substantive response. Katherine (WMF) should get off her transcontinental jet, sit at a desk for a few days, and fire the responsible people. And then report fully and frankly to the community in a transparent way. To be perfectly clear, I think that white hat online reputation management is a perfectly legitimate business. But it is a type of business that the WMF ought to have nothing whatsoever to do with. | ” |
| — Cullen328 | ||
While Maher may well be doing an excellent job as ambassador for the Wikimedia movement, the word 'executive' appears to be a misnomer in her job description. (executive – A title of a chief officer or administrator, especially one who can make significant decisions on their own authority. Wiktionary)
"[T]his is a gross misuse of donated money. Whoever hired or signed off on hiring a company who brags about performing such manipulation of information which is available to the public should immediately resign in shame or be fired. This is unforgiveable and inexcusable."
The story begins to unfold with a message on the Wikimedia mailing list from MZMcBride that states: "How is it appropriate for Wikimedia Foundation Inc. to work with a company that is, by its own admission, whitewashing Wikipedia?" Expressing his concerns further about a paid editing syndicate being hired by the Foundation and given privileged access to inside information, he continues: "Is it appropriate to give a company that sells whitewashing Wikipedia services access to private user data, as was done in <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T192893> and <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T193052>? The Wikimedia Foundation Inc. legal department apparently approved this access, but I'm curious to know why, given the company's role in selling an 'Online Reputation Management' product. This looks bad to me."
"Go Fish Digital is a company that whitewashes Wikipedia" explains McBride. On its website at "Online Reputation Management" (July 22 edition via the Internet Archive), Go Fish claim:
The primary platforms that define your online reputation include:
- Google Search
- Google Autocomplete
- Wikipedia [Editor's note: "Wikipedia" since redacted]
- Yelp, Google Reviews, and other review websites
With Online Reputation Management, we work hard to make all of the positive information easy to find. At the same time, we use many different strategies and tactics to diminish the visibility of negative content, or in some cases, remove it from the web altogether. The end result is a positive online reputation because when people search your name or brand, they immediately find positive content.
The page continues, stating:
We have custom-built a number of tools to help us with very specific monitoring activities. We can see Wikipedia updates as they happen, track the smallest of changes in search results, and monitor online reviews in real-time. These capabilities allow us to quickly assess changes in your online reputation and adjust strategy as needed to triage any immediate problems.
[Editor's note: As of publication, this is still on their site.]
Smallbones saw through the poorly veiled college-taught marketing technique and helped Wales' talk page readers to understand: "GoFish has not said directly – in any of the quotes here – that they are available to edit 'your Wikipedia article' for pay, but their meaning is clear. It's not a case of being able to read between the lines, just of being able to translate AdSpeak to English."
Lead Product Manager for Editing
Dan Garry (Deskana), Lead Product Manager for Editing and a Wikimedia employee since 2013, is responsible for "build[ing] and maintain[ing] the editing experiences on the Wikimedia wikis." He stated in a late-April Phabricator ticket titled "Access to Google Search Console for Go Fish Digital" that "[t]he Audiences department is currently engaging with Go Fish Digital to help us improve our understanding of search engine optimisation." He goes on to specify that "[t]hey have signed a master service agreement which fully covers our privacy policy, data retention, and data security requirements, and the agreement received signoff from Jim Buatti (in Legal) and Toby [Negrin] (the Chief Product Officer), amongst others."
Communications Strategist
Garry can probably be forgiven for being in the dark about Go Fish's actual commercial objectives. He concluded the ticket with a suggestion to "creat[e] an account for them with access to these tools, so that access can be easily revoked at a later date, but I'm happy to go with whatever the best practice is here." And who would be accessing them? "I don't know specifically who at Go Fish is going to access the console", replies Garry in early May, "I've spoken to probably around 10 people there, and any one of them might access the console."
Communications Strategist Gregory Varnum later denied that such a request had been made, stating that "they did not request or receive access to any Wikimedia user data." However, in the Phabricator ticket, Go Fish Digital were given access to the Google Search Console for the various encyclopedias' data (including the English Wikipedia's mobile version) over two months earlier, granted by Operations Engineer Rob Halsell. Admitting yet another gross Foundation blunder, Varnum replied with a press release–style letter:
Hello,
Thank you to everyone that has provided thoughtful and constructive input on this discussion, and to the volunteers who are investigating the possible policy violations. We have some additional information on this vendor relationship and on steps being taken that we believe will be helpful to this discussion.
The Wikimedia Foundation entered into a short-term contract with Go Fish Digital to conduct a search engine optimization (SEO) audit on Wikipedia. They were contracted to provide information needed by the Audiences department to improve how our sites communicate with search engines and services which provide data to devices like artificial intelligence (AI) assistants. Overall, SEO performance is a strength of our projects, but we were able to identify areas for improvement, and the audit was helpful for Audiences to more effectively focus their efforts. During discussions about Wikimedia values and activities that were held in selecting the vendor, they did not disclose anything which raised suspicion, and we failed to identify this specific concern and question them about it more.
The Foundation's Legal department received the proposal after it had been approved by Audiences and drafted a contract for this agreement following standard procedures. This included a privacy review, which resulted in the inclusion of extra privacy and security protections in the contract. Their activities did not involve reputation management services, and they did not request or receive access to any Wikimedia user data. The contract concluded last month.
As we are now aware of the vendor's possible violations and feel they should have shared this information with us during discussions, we will not be pursuing any future working relationship with Go Fish Digital and will be requesting that they honor our contractual agreement by not discussing their past relationship with us for promotional purposes. Additionally, we are reviewing the way that this vendor was selected in an effort to see if we can identify what led to this issue and better identify these types of concerns when identifying future vendors and executing agreements with them. Finally, as they regularly do, our Trust and Safety team in Community Engagement are working with the functionaries investigating the possible policy violations.
Again, we appreciate the attention provided to this by the functionaries and others who raised these concerns. We agree that the Foundation should avoid working with vendors who violate our policies, and hope the discussion around this will help reduce the chances of this happening in the future.
Thank you, -greg
Gregory Varnum,
Communications Strategist,
Wikimedia Foundation
On the Wales talk page thread, TonyBallioni – who, like Cullen328, is also known for his restraint – spoke out, evoking Orangemoody and the connection to the BurritoSlayer sock farm mentioned by MarioGom, who discovered that the article on 1776 (company) was created for a confirmed Go Fish client:
| “ | I avoid this talk page, and am typically very pro-WMF, but wanted to state that if the WMF hired the company behind the BurritoSlayer sock family, they hired what in my opinion is other than Orangemoody the worst UPE ring in recent memory: they sought to delete articles as well as create them, and it wasn't clear if it was whitewashing or an attempt to delegetimize competition for their clients. There were other things here that were also nasty. This case was a very big deal at the time, and I wanted to go on the record with my views towards its handiwork: it was by far the worst UPE opperation I have personally dealt with. | ” |
| — TonyBallioni | ||
Smallbones added: "We can also stop the noise about firing lower- and medium-level WMF employees. The problem IMHO lies near the top – senior managers need to get the word out that paid editing is a very serious business that is a very serious problem on Wikipedia. They need to take a look at the length of the sock puppet investigation and how much editor time was put into just the investigation."
The Signpost deputy Editor-in-Chief, Bri – currently on a wikibreak – joined the discussion, saying that "I added Go Fish Digital to the PAIDLIST on December 12, months before the Phabricator tickets were opened, giving the firm access to our logs. At that time the evidence of activities on-wiki in contravention of ToS [Terms of Service] was suspected, based on their own advertising. Now the connection to the BurritoSlayer sockring is known. And I agree that this should be treated with utmost seriousness, as a de facto data breach of PII [Personally Identifiable Information]. One that was preventable."
As of publication, neither Maher nor Wales have offered a comment – not even to decline giving one.
Wikimedia moves to WordPress
The new Wikimedia Foundation website was announced on 1 August in another mailing list missive by Gregory Varnum. The Signpost editors came across the site by coincidence while researching early this month for the lead article above. Looking for the current staff list, they had to use Google to find it, and were unable to decide whether the large German text was an error or an embellishment.
Built on WordPress, a free and open-source CMS software which was initially developed for blogging, it took a team of "over 100 individuals around the organization and movement" and "many months of work" to come up with the concept and creation. The new website came under criticism from MZMcBride, who says that "[m]any people, including employees of Wikimedia Foundation Inc. and volunteers, repeatedly raised objections to this decision to move to WordPress and they were ignored. I think this type of behavior by the communications department is really inappropriate, unbecoming, and inconsistent with Wikimedia's values." From ED Katherine Maher, there is again no comment, not even "no comment"; due to her travel commitments, she may have been unaware that it was being made.
In a step which combines the flexible creativity of web design beyond the constraints of MediaWiki with their move from their traditional software originally developed by Magnus Manske and deployed in 2002 to run the Wikipedia encyclopedia, the WMF distances itself yet further from its volunteer communities, ensuring also that the WordPress site has no talk page and is only editable by its approved webmasters. Perhaps if the Foundation's communications department were to use that time and funding to give those encyclopedias a more modern look, the complaints would not be so loud, so many, and so critical.
Further information about the 2017–18 WMF website update can be found at its documentation page and feedback can be provided here. The Signpost welcomes readers' views on the design.
Wikipedia still has cancer – where does the money go?
In July, Guy Macon updated his user essay on the transparency of Foundation spending, "Wikipedia has Cancer", with the following:
Observations as of July of 2018:
- It is difficult to derive a trend from one year's data, but it appears that the rate of spending is beginning to level off. How much influence this page (and the previous posting of the same argument on various pages) had on this is an interesting question.
- We still have a marked lack of transparency on spending. For example, [1] has numbers for "Grants and awards" and "Professional service expenses" but there is no obvious way of finding out the details of those expenditures (please note that this information may very well be in one of the many, many documents the WMF publishes each year).
- All efforts to persuade the WMF to enact any spending cap, even "limit spending to no more than double last years spending" have failed.
- We appear to be building up our endowment, but it is unclear whether the WMF has structured the endowment so that the WMF cannot legally dip into the principal when times get bad. Without this we have no protection from a sudden drop in revenue while the WMF maintains the current spending levels in the hope that revenue will recover. It is also unclear whether the endowment is legally protected against a large payout as a result of a lawsuit. The current management of the WMF appears to be committed to making immediate and drastic cuts to spending if revenue suddenly drops. Hopefully we will never have to find out.
This follows up on his original analysis, which The Signpost published in the "Op-ed" of its February 2017 issue.
Close calls at RfA – a new trend?
Apparently, our recent three-part series in The Signpost on adminship fell on stony ground (May, June, July). This month sees both Requests for Adminship (RfA) closed balancing on a knife's edge.
In one of the most hotly debated runs for adminship in Wikipedia history with a total of 318 participants, it included opposers evoking antics on Wikipedia hate site Wikipediocracy and an old spat with an arbitrator who graciously and magnanimously supported the bid for the mop. Jbhunley, author of the user essay "Identifying nonsense at NPP", stoically awaited closure. After a belated closing freeze (~11 hours) with the final tally being 196/86/10 (69.5%), a Bureaucrat discussion reached a 7–3 verdict (1 recusal) of 'no consensus to promote'.
A week later, another new perennial topic thread was started on Jimbo's talk page titled "Term Limits for Admins", following a discussion at last month's "Op-ed". In the thread at Jimbo's talk page, the RfA was mentioned as yet another example of how RfA is broken. Jimbo chimed in, agreeing completely with Carrite's point earlier in the thread that a system which considers 70% support a "rejection" is broken.
The second RfA to close this month was Philafrenzy's, which ended on time with the result 'no consensus to promote' at 143/80/19 (64.1%) with a total of 263 editors participating.
Brief notes
- 40,000 biographies missing for academics:
| “ | Machine-Generated Knowledge Bases. This group used 30,000 existing articles on academics on WP, and trained an AI with other external data, then feed it over 200,000 other names; the AI came back with over 40,000 persons that do not have articles on WP that otherwise appear to have the same type of coverage as the other 30,000, and within the existing 30,000, several examples of out-of-date/missing content. The group noted that their results have been used in a few Editathons and were partially driven to improve the coverage of women scientists and academics here. | ” |
| — Masem, "Machine learning to suggest new articles for academics" | ||
- New blocking tool: The Wikimedia Foundation's Anti-Harassment Tools team is currently developing the ability for partial blocks to be possible on Wikipedia. According to the Foundation: "Sitewide blocks are not always the appropriate response to some situations. Smaller, more tactical blocks may defuse situations while retaining constructive contributors. The goal of this project is to give wiki administrators a more robust set of tools to be able to better respond to different user conflict situations." New wireframes have been posted for users to comment on and its development is currently being discussed on the talk page of the Community health initiative's documentation for "Per-user page, namespace, and upload blocking".
- New user-groups: The Affiliations Committee has announced (diff) that "[i]n the coming weeks an Affiliate Data survey will be launched to reach out to update key information about all affiliates."
- Milestones: The following Wikipedia projects reached milestones this month:
- The Santali language Wikipedia, India's first tribal language to have a Wikipedia in its own script, went live on Thursday, August 2.
Discuss this story
Excellentcoverage of the Wikimedia mire...certainly worth following. -Indy beetle (talk) 03:47, 30 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]Hate site
Fishing in the console
At least the WMF legal team took measures to prevent that Go Fish Digital uses Wikipedia name to that end, but they did after the fact and once the controversy was hot.This should have never passed previous due dilligence. --MarioGom (talk) 08:02, 30 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]wikimediafoundation.org
The issues with the new WMF site are quite alarming; the site is closed-source and is sending user data to a third party for advertising targeting purposes, among many other issues. --Yair rand (talk) 06:25, 30 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Uh yeah, what Kaldari asked. I'm not aware of any user data being sent to a third party for advertising targeting purposes.Regarding the closed source issue, my understanding is that publishing the source is in progress, but it is all free software (GPLv2 or later) because that's what WordPress requires. Legoktm (talk) 06:44, 30 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]Confusing
The article assumes the reader already knows about the topic. Wrong. BeenAroundAWhile (talk) 05:26, 30 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Once the WMF was made aware of the situation, the contract already had ended, although WMF legal team took steps to prevent Go Fish Digital from using Wikipedia name for advertising purposes.(see Deskana (WMF) comment) In my opinion, the Search Console and crawler logs stuff is a minor issue, since I do not think there was actually personal information there, and I'm sure Go Fish Digital objective was not obtaining private data, but to legitimize their shady Wikipedia service. I have been involved in the investigation about Go Fish Digital sockpuppets and I have followed this case very closely. So feel free to ask any question and I'll help clarifying. --MarioGom (talk) 08:10, 30 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]Misogyny
I was under the impression that there were extenuating circumstances that resulted in Kudpung being misogynistic towards me and another editor, but when we talked offwiki I thought he was taking a break. I'm sad to see that he's continuing this campaign against Katherine Maher. I'm no stranger to criticizing (female) leadership in the Wikimedia movement, but I can at least say I save it for the folks who are doing a poor job. GorillaWarfare (talk) 07:59, 30 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
A new low
This is possibly the worst Signpost article I've ever seen. Tony (talk) 10:08, 30 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Since I think it's possible I am the person who inpsired this article, I'd like to respond to that judgment. Because I believe these three stories are closely related.
First we have the issue that the Foundation has contracted with a company that has a unit which offered sockpuppet services & engaged in undisclosed paid editing on Wikipedia. In short, hired one of the bad guys. While Deskana (WMF) above indicates there were some guidelines that prevented any real harm to Wikipedia, it still is one of those mistakes you'd expect the person in charge to notice ahead of time, ask some questions, & maybe prevent. Was any of this done? Nothing from the Foundation.
Then we have the issue that the Foundation overhauled their website & decided to use a proprietary product that is better associated with blogging than a static website. This is especially odd because (1) the same thing can be done & has been done with the Wikimedia software; & (2) part of the WMF mission statement involves advocating non-proprietary (aka Free) software. Maybe there is a good rationale for this choice, & if the person in charge had asked for the reasoning for this decision, it would be simple to share that with us.
However, the ED of the Foundation has been out of the office a surprising amount of time. Maybe there's a reason for her flying around the world; maybe she's talking to people whom someone at the Foundation needs to talk to. But the article where it's stated she spends 200 days a year travelling was published on 19 May, & she's had plenty of time to provide some kind of explanation why she travels so much.
Why is this all important? Very simple. There are hundreds of people who contribute work, time & resources to the various Wikimedia projects who get little if any acknowledgement from the Foundation for what they do, let alone any help from the Foundation. Yes, they provide the servers & maintain the software, & sponsor conferences around the world for Wikimedians -- but that's 75% of their budget. And as the essay mentioned above that Guy Macon wrote points out, the Foundation keeps raising even more money than they need. Someone is benefiting from all of this, & it isn't the average Wikipedian who not only donates their work but has to spend money on their research, & for all this receives nothing more than an impersonal blanket thanks. Apparently the Foundation believes their responsibility to the projects ends with providing servers & bandwidth & the volunteers ought to be content with that; everything volunteers have created -- an encyclopedia, a dictionary, collections of free media & books -- are the results of letting people scratch their itches. (It took the Foundation years to get around to starting the Wikipedia Library, which runs primarily on donated access to digital archives, which only came into being due to a volunteer's -- not a staffer's -- efforts.)
Despite what it might appear, I don't enjoy criticizing the Foundation. I'd rather spend my time working on articles & ignore all of this bullshit. But knowing this happens is a disincentive to do more than just scratching my itch, & I suspect I'm not alone. When all we volunteers are doing is only scratching our itches much will not get done. Maintenance duties get ignored, people decide not to take on duties such as seeking the Admin bit, & people find they have less time to contribute than they thought they had -- & leave.
But all of this would be easier to handle if the Foundation were to share information with the volunteers -- realize we are partners, not customers or clients -- & not be as secretive as Amazon with their latest marketing strategies. -- llywrch (talk) 22:48, 31 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Not just any questions, but pointy questions that might get to the core of the issues you're going to deal with in the story—questions that might generate responses of interest to readers, and that might provide the scaffolding for the structure of the piece. Questions that make the respondent work hard to weedle out of. To a certain extent, it's a cat-and-mouse game. Always has been.
Direct contact also enables you to satisfy an often-essential, usually desirable feature of journalism: giving those who are criticised the right of reply. So the story is a balanced product, with institutional politics and the interpersonal blended into a deeper, more engaging account than this tawdry attempt, which instead indulges in the expression of personal hunches way beyond what credible journalism would accept. And whoever wrote it has a very odd idea about narrative—especially how to induct us at the opening into the thematic environment you're going to explore. The first paragraph is as organised as an upturned garbage bin. Tony (talk) 09:34, 2 September 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Thoughts on undisclosed paid editing
Lack of communication
The Go Fish case just goes to show that there's a lack of communication between WP users and WMF staff. In Wikimedia projects, the WMF has a great repository of crowdsourced info it can consult, for example, WP:PAIDLIST and the editors who maintain it, yet obviously they didn't check it in their "privacy review" of Go Fish.
I'm also annoyed by the tone, e.g. the statement that "we ... feel [Go Fish] should have shared this information with us during discussions" -- seriously?? I don't share the general feeling here that identifiable information on WP users has been shared with Go Fish, but I still think the tone of the letter is inappropriately aloof: we had followed our policies, we still tripped, but we kept walking, and now move along everyone...
This WMF error didn't hurt Wikimedia's partners (in face of whose interests they've already ignored the users' privacy in one case last year), only its readers, who may now find themselves better deceived as a result of Go Fish's R&D that WMF just financed. This silly, avoidable mistake could've been acknowledged as such by at least someone from WMF by now without hurting anyone's financial & PR interests, but unfortunately legalese vagueness is what you get when dialog is so scarce. When you think of that, you've got to wonder what's next in store. Daß Wölf 04:10, 31 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Organizational incompetence
I am only learning that this happened now. Thanks for describing what happened.
As an organization, the WMF's a) condemning black hat paid editing for years now; and b) paying GoFish for work and giving GoFish data, is a result of incompetence of the organization.
Criticism of the organization is appropriately directly at the top. The board should have been mentioned. The culture and structure of the WMF should have been mentioned. Jytdog (talk) 13:57, 31 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Question about the data
One thing I am not clear on - did WMF get the data back from GoFish, or does GoFish get to keep it and use it internally? Whether the WMF could retrieve it, would depend on the contract. If WMF has the right to retrieve it and that GoFish destroy any copy it has, I hope that right was exercised. (I deal with contracts and data transfer agreements in the real world). Jytdog (talk) 13:57, 31 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
SEO terms to watch for
Now that one SEO optimiser has obtained the data on the most effective terms to add to the articles about their clients, can we have a list of those terms so we can monitor for them and remove or rephrase where appropriate? ϢereSpielChequers 20:35, 31 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Need help updating image for Wikimedia financials
At User:Guy Macon/Wikipedia has Cancer the table of financial data has been updated for 2017-2018 but the image at commons:File:Wikimedia Foundation financial development multilanguage.svg (also used on this page) only goes to 2016-2017. Could someone with SVG editing skills please look at that table and update the image? --Guy Macon (talk) 22:51, 15 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]