Texas ← Back to ContentsView Latest Issue2 May 2016 Some of the attendees at the chapter's recent annual general assembly The Swiss chapter's logo Home About Archives Newsroom Subscribe Suggestions
The first thing we should always ask about paid editors is whether they are following our rules. It's nice to see that they declared their paid status pretty much in line with the Terms of Service. Certainly they followed the spirit of the rules there, but they could use the proper templates "suggested" at WP:COI
Of course when you declare the paid for articles, we get to check whether they are up to snuff. There are only 5 articles declared (they can't be getting rich off of this!), but IMHO at least 2 should be deleted - the main sources are the companies involved. The prose is a bit flowery, closer to PR speak than to the usual Wikipedia fare. So we see once again why paid editing needs to be reviewed.
The presence of paid editors on chapter boards is AFAIK not against the rules, but probably should be. There's bound to be an actual conflict of interest sooner or later, and there is an appearance of a COI now. I think the board could make this clear - no money from the WMF - if you have paid editors working for commercial organization on the board or in the employ of a chapter. I write "for commercial organizations" because that is where the usual problems are, and to make clear that the usual exemptions apply, e.g. Wikipedians in Residence.
They should also check Swiss law. If it's anything like German law, they have to declare the paid editing *in the article itself* But we can't allow companies to make such a declaration in the article, or to assert the article ownership that would entail, so they wouldn't be able to do any paid editing for Swiss companies in this case. Smallbones(smalltalk) 03:32, 2 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]
I'll just copy the relevant section from WP:COI, the German case is in the footnote.
European fair-trading law
In 2012 the Munich Oberlandesgericht court ruled that if a company or its agents edit Wikipedia with the aim of influencing customers, the edits constitute covert advertising, and as such are a violation of European fair-trading law. The ruling stated that readers cannot be expected to seek out user and talk pages to find editors' disclosures about their corporate affiliation.[Smallbones1 1]
Smallbones(smalltalk) 13:45, 2 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]
[reply]
The paid editing company was never common knowledge
I must correct a statement that was attributed to me.
The very existence of this consulting company was never "common knowledge" in Wikimedia Switzerland before April 2nd 2016, the board was never officially informed of it's existence and most of the members found out about the whole issue at the general assembly on April 2nd. People did not have time to properly discuss the issue, the general assembly was running very late and everybody wanted to get the meeting over and go have lunch. News like this takes time to digest. What I wrote about (in French) on April 6th was "common knowledge" because this was a few days after our general assembly...
I must add that I brought up the subject of paid editing in Switzerland during three board meetings in 2015 and 2016, Not once was there mention of a possible COI, and these consulting company partners took part in all the board discussions without even hinting about it.
I am quite disappointed that the editors of this article contacted a few Wikimedia Switzerland board members and allowed them to go over the text, but they did not bother to contact me. I could have set thing straight from the beginning. GastelEtzwane (talk) 13:51, 7 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]
About the disclosure of WMCH board members being active in paid editing activities within the Raccosch company
After reading the article and the above, I want to add information. It is not true that the Raccosch contributors announced their activity spontaneously on their user page. During the general meeting, some people expressed the fact that being director of such a chapter while at the same time mounting a company was not acceptable and that it was representing a risk for the Swiss chapter. The interim director expressed publicly the advice that he disagreed with this. I had personally come to this assembly to express concern about the fact that the budget dedicated to small projects and community building activities was not enough in the swiss francophone area, and I expressed concern about the conflict of interest arising from the situation. I was told before by one of the Raccosch protagonist that his activity did not represent a conflict of interest and that in fact a special page dedicated to this issue had been issued (this did not at the time of our discussion which was prior to the 6th of april imply for him the obligation of disclosing his paid contribution activity on his user page. He was opposed to it in fact, and saw absolutely no conflict of interest!). During the general WMCH assembly, I did not have the impression that the local swiss community from the association seemed really opposed to the paid editing activity, and this was a real shock to me personally. I expressed concern to the new director after the general assembly. The Raccosch contributors have been asked by the French community to clearly state their paid contributing activity on their user page, but this happened only after I in fact had asked a confirmed francophone contributor and admin in Paris for his advice, as I was relatively new to the community and was myself leading a local project aimed at reducing the gender gap for which I was paid by the University of Geneva. After expressing my concern about Raccosch to local swiss contributors, I had been told that what I did could be considered as paid editing. As I did not know the exact rules for paid editing I therefore set out to ask for advice and was surprised to see that the matter in Paris (France) was not considered as unproblematic as it was in Lausanne (Switzerland)! The disclosure on the user pages of the Raccosch contributors happened only after the issue was released publicly here on the french Bistrot on the 6th of april, see here: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipédia:Le_Bistro/6_avril_2016. It was disclosed publicly only after the protagonists had been asked to do so in private (for those who would be tempted to think no chance was ever given to them to deal with the issue befre it was made public). Furthermore, the paid contributions posed problems because they were making cross contributions with several accounts on the paid contribution articles, and also intervening on the admissibility of articles, contacting firms which had their subjects rejected by one of them. The articles, among others, concerned a famous Swiss bank (Group Pictet) and multinational active in the pharma industry (Debiopharm).
This poses problems not only in terms of neutrality and scope of the concerned articles. The fact is, when there is such an interaction between corporate and NGO activities, there is a danger of not doing enough community building and distributing budgets according to the visibility they provide to the protagonists (all appearing in the local media as confirmed wikipedians and experts). This does not go hand in hand with the necessity to attract new contributors and do more community building in francophone Switzerland. So I do hope this is going to be evoked during Wikimania, especially for new contributors like me, as there seems to be no clear operational policy. One cannot pretend to be a free and participative movement, while at the same time admitting these shadow paid editing activities. We should be more persistent in tracking paid contributions, and oblige the protagonists to have it disclosed on their user page, or renounce to be called a free encyclopedia. --Nattes à chat (talk) 16:59, 7 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]