What Actually is Wikipedia's Conflict of Interest Policy
Whatever your position on the Rick Jeliffe/Microsoft/OOXML story, Rick's spirited defense of why he thinks what he did doesn't violate Wikipedia's conflict of interest policy is worth a read, if only for its concise clarification of what that policy appears to be. But I think it's worthwhile for more than that, since this story exposes a fascinating issue about the evolution of online media.
Just as the web itself was originally the sole province of amateurs and enthusiasts, but was soon discovered by marketers, and as new innovations like Google PageRank seemed to give power back to the people, but were thereafter encroached on by aggressive SEO, wikipedia has tried to secure an island of pure intent on the net. They have set aggressive policies to try to prevent abuse, but there is no doubt that a huge amount of the editing activity on wikipedia is still partisan and self interested.
It's a hard problem, and it's particularly difficult around current topics. Why? Because for current topics, wikipedia's policy disallows primary sources, who are often the most knowledgeable, but who do often have a stake in how history appears. But on the other hand, if you don't prohibit people with a stake in the issue, you get potential abuses, like people hired to work a particular position. (FWIW, this happened to the IETF as well. It's "rough consensus and running code" policy was outflanked by big companies who just sent enough people to the meetings to affect the "rough consensus," and gradually, the IETF became driven more by politics than pure technical excellence in some areas.) But on the other hand, open source projects have survived an influx of paid contributors, and in fact much appreciate the support from companies who obviously have a stake in the outcome, so just being paid is clearly not the issue.
One aspect of the problem is separating the individual from the corporate mandate. One of my favorite experiences in the history of open source came during an X Consortium meeting. People used to speak as peers, as engineers, but occasionally, they'd put on their corporate hat, and suddenly instead of saying "I think," it would be "Digital thinks," or "Apollo thinks," or "IBM thinks." And one time, I remember someone starting, "Digital thinks..." and then catching himself, and saying, "I don't care what Digital thinks. They're wrong about this..." If Microsoft could handle Rick saying "f*** it, they're wrong about this," it might be more palatable for them to pay him to participate in the discussion on their behalf. But it's not clear that that was the case.
I don't really want to get into the specifics of this case -- I don't know enough of the details to have an opinion that I'd fight for. I'm more interested in the general question of how Wikipedia manages self-interest (which is always present.) What's your take on this issue? What could wikipedia do to recognize self-interested parties yet also keep them in check, rather than pretending that self-interest isn't a factor?
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And I should add - our policy on conflict of interest is pretty hard-arsed because of everyone's eternal friends, the spammers, marketers, search engine optimisers and so forth.
For most people, conflict of interest is not a hard concept: if you're editing on a matter you have a personal or financial interest in, it's a conflict of interest. This present case was one because Doug offered recompense for Rick's time. (In all innocence, I must stress.)
The problem in the general case, of course, is that it's hard to get a clue across to people who think their income depends on not getting said clue. Hence our eternal friends the marketers, SEOs and other spammers. So we went hardarsed because they'll take a mile whether you gave an inch or not.
But for the clueful, let me repeat: Conflict of interest is not a difficult concept, and if you make out it is then you're being disingenuous; please don't.
"For most people, conflict of interest is not a hard concept: if you're editing on a matter you have a personal or financial interest in, it's a conflict of interest"
David Gerard, that sounds more like an after thought than careful pre-thought.
A person may not have a personal or financial interest in Microsoft technologies, but still have strong opinions and biases that would impact on how they portray the company and its products. Yet according to you, that's not a 'conflict of interest' and therefore, they are free to contribute.
A person can have a personal or financial interest in a topic, but want to make a simple changes to correct out-of-date information, or even information that's innocently inaccurate. However, according to the Wikipedia policy, such action is considered unacceptable.
Conflict of interest is a difficult subject, made more so by Wikipedia's seeming inability to realize that bias doesn't always arise out of 'self-interest'. Perhaps it's Wikipedia's wild frontier beginnings: when you start with no rules, rules grow organically; unfortunately, all organic things need one thing to grow.
As for being disingenuous, the aw shucks, toe kicking about being interviewed and oh my we're really BIG and POWERFUL now is such, when you consider that most Google searches now return Wikipedia results as the first result.
We all realize that Wikipedia is the world's largest movable feast for spammers. My idea for some of your spamming problems: remove Wikipedia from search engine results, and put relevant Wikipedia matches into a sidebar, with a link to a disclaimer as well as a FAQ for the uninformed. Should remove much of the spamming problem, and educate the naive as to the 'organic' nature of much of the information: perhaps include a warm welcome to those who would contribute.
Shelley's comments about the lousy conflict of interest guidelines are absolutely correct.
It's interesting that Wikipedia's strong bias against primary sources goes so far as to discourage primary sources--persons and organizations--from editing their own entries.
There's probably a very interesting postmodernist "What is Truth?" philosophical question in all of this, but to my mind it's a shallow way to get around the problem that, at any given point in time, any given entry may reflect someone's opinion.
Then again, I never started from the point of view that reliable, truthful, and dispassionately neutral consensus will magically emerge from the open participation of deliberately unpaid volunteers who obviously cannot have a financial interest in a subject and hopefully do not have a personal interest in the same--nor that even if such a thing were possible, that it would be desirable.
Why is sunlight not the best disinfectant here as well?
Wow, Shelley. You just called THE David Gerard "disingenuous"? You might get banned from Wikipedia!
But, seriously, folks -- let's consider something. Wikipedia's top administrators right up to the short-bearded God-King Jimbo have made it abundantly clear on many occasions that when they say "conflict of interest", they are talking about MONEY. Okay, if money causes such a crippling conflict of interest, how is it that NBC could ever report a news story about General Electric (it's parent corporation)? For that matter, how could they ever report accurately on any company that has ever advertised on NBC?
The answer?
Because paid individuals (the news editors and anchors) have their own PERSONAL reputations as unbiased reporters to consider. In fact, their loyalty to themselves outweighs their loyalty to NBC.
So, when a company like MyWikiBiz.com comes along, headed by a man (myself) who is 38 years old, studied History up through his PhD comprehensive exams, and has about 15 years experience in marketing research (another field where your reputation depends on TELLING THE TRUTH to your clients who pay you)... when that company announces in broad daylight that it's going to write Wikipedia articles for one-time clients, in HOPES that the Wikipedia community will then take them, shape them, and help them to evolve to perfection... why does Jimbo Wales literally put them out of business? To avoid bias entering the encyclopedia, or to avoid the APPEARANCE of bias entering the encyclopedia?
Look, the bias is already there. Volunteer editors write about what pleases their leisure time. That's why Wikipedia has a fairly decent wrtie-up of a rather average major league baseball player from the 1970's and early 80's (e.g., Enos Cabell), but has NOTHING to mention about the Chief Executive Officer of the 15th largest company in America (i.e., Bill Klesse of Valero Energy). Are you kidding me?! If you can't see this as an inherent (not nefarious, mind you) bias in Wikipedia's content, then you're truly being disingenuous.
It only becomes nefarious when you witness Wikipedia leadership scolding PR firms by name, shutting down small businesses by defacing their User pages (another violation of Wikipedia policy), and admonishing people from editing with a "conflict of interest", when the ultimate arbitors of neutrality are people like Jimmy Wales (who has edited his own article on Wikipedia multiple times) and Angela Beesley (former Wikimedia Board member and co-owner of Wikia.com with Jimmy, who edits the Wikia article on a regular basis). Do as we say, not as we do, I guess?
I too find the "no primary sources" policy to be problematic. Often, a primary source has knowledge that no one else has. If, as chromatic says, sunlight is the best disinfectant, why not trust primary sources to provide information, just like anyone else. After all, if it's wrong, or excessively biased in some way, it's likely to get fixed by someone else with a different POV.
But I also recognize that, whatever its rules, wikipedia has been extraordinarily successful, and some of that success is likely due to rules that they understand that others do not.
Got a source on "no primary sources"? :)
I hadn't heard of this, and all I could find after a few minutes on the 'pedia was this page:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:No_original_research
which currently says:
'''Although most articles should rely predominantly on secondary sources, there are rare occasions when they may rely entirely on primary sources (for example, current events or legal cases). '''
Wikipedia does not have a "no primary sources" policy. It does (through practice and policy, which is largely an attempt to document practice) have a policy limiting what primary sources can be used to document. Primary sources can be used to document views. Primary sources can be used to document uncontroversial facts (if it's controversial, then it's a view, by definition). Primary sources cannot be used to prove that something's a worthy subject to document (because every company etc. thinks it's important, or at least their PR people do). It is also forbidden to perform substantial creative analysis of primary sources and use that in a Wikipedia article ("No original research").
Secondary sources are often better than primary sources since they can perform evaluative judgments, which primary sources cannot.
I'd add that our conflict of interest rules are far from perfect, of course - like all of Wikipedia, a work in progress.
In practice, what we want is for people to avoid directly editing articles when they cannot achieve sufficient neutrality to strive towards a fair and neutral summary of the issue and all the significant points of view involved (our "Neutral Point Of View" policy).
We observe that this is most significantly a problem when the article involves the person themselves (our "No autobiography" policy is one of the oldest parts of our conflict of interest policy). This has been extended to many instances where the individual themselves has a substantial financial stake in the article subject.
We also don't like people editing Wikipedia "on behalf of" organizations - in other words, if you are editing Wikipedia as part of your job, the conflict of interest is severe.
In practice, it is rarely a problem if someone makes minor corrections to an article, even if they might be personally interested, provided they source the facts properly. It's not controversial to e.g. fix your own date of birth, if you can point to a published source that has the correct info so that others can verify the accuracy of the change.
The other issue is that people personally involved cannot simply edit from personal experience: Wikipedia's policy of requiring verifiability means that simple personal recollection is not sufficient - we want to be pointed to somewhere where that was written down, preferably by as prestigious/reliable a source as possible.
Drew and Matthew -- I guess I was over-reading "no original research" (and by extension, "no autobiography.")
As someone who's been involved in a number of big technology waves over the years (the original commercialization of the web, open source software, Web 2.0), it seems to me that anything I might say on these subjects is perhaps to some extent autobiographical. If I write something about the genesis of the term Web 2.0, it's a primary source.
Now, maybe I can do that, and maybe I can't. But I find myself deterred by the uncertainty. And it seems a bit odd that anyone else can edit, but the person best positioned to say what happened can not.
I understand the rathole that you can go down if you let loose of this policy, but the ambiguity seems to deter possibly valuable contributions. Might there, for example, be a class of wikipedia page that explicitly could be used for primary source documentation, labeled as such and uneditable otherwise, and then referenceable by other wikipedia entries?
It certainly might be worthwhile to establish such a site - where people can document their personal experiences in such a way that it can be then referenced on Wikipedia. I feel it should be a separate site, though, to reduce any confusion. We do have a WikiSource project, but I don't think its mission includes such original documents. WikiBooks might or might not - that's another WikiMedia Foundation project - mostly open-source textbooks, but I believe some people have done non-textbook original writings there. However, I believe that the works there are freely editable, while this kind of idea requires the unedited original writings of someone.
Of course, if you have your own website and it's fairly stable, self-publishing it there is just as good, except for the fact that you have to make sure it stays available! Self-published info by notable individuals in a field should be citeable.
It would probably keep some people happier if it was not you who directly added the information to the page, in many cases - but an edit on the talk page or a note to frequent editors might do the trick.
And yes, we're trying to work out policy that lets people doing The Right Thing to just do it, while forbidding those doing The Wrong Thing. It's just hard to do it well!
Wikipedia does, of course, have the core policy of 'Ignore All Rules', which basically means - if following the rules means not doing the Right Thing and breaking the rules in an open and upfront manner allows it, feel free to break the rules - but expect controversy if you do something not obviously the Right Thing, of course.
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David Gerard [01.26.07 04:38 PM]
It's A Tricky One, all the way down.
I've spent the last few days doing volunteer (volunteer!) press stuff for Wikipedia on this particular issue 16 hours/day. I gave our first reactions ("WHAT ON EARTH") to the English-language press. Then Mathias Schindler did the same for the German-language press, then he got in contact with Doug Mahugh and Rick Jelliffe to sort out just what was up with all this, then he cc'd me into the conversation.
Basically, Doug wasn't sure how to approach this one. Microsoft's contact with Wikipedia (that they have mentioned in the press) was that he added a note to the talk page - which is the right thing to do - and people didn't take much notice. So he approached Rick, in all openness, and Rick posted to his blog, in all openness, and now Microsoft have damaged their good name in press around the world.
Doug really didn't know the right way to do this. I've since directly invited him to participate on the talk page of the OOXML article, and it's now got a lot of editorial attention, so it should suck less forthwith. (And it did suck before. Advocates and anti-advocates are a plague on Wikipedia, and as an ardent fan and user of FOSS myself, I tell you, free software advocates are amongst the worst. Neutrality schmality, IT'S A PLATFORM FOR ADVOCACY! Argh.)
But this has actually been a bad thing for Wikipedia, because we don't want people or companies being scared to talk to us. We don't want people thinking one step wrong gets an AP story about how awful they are appearing in a hundred newspapers around the world.
We handle legal concerns - libelous edits, privacy violations or whatever - reasonably efficiently now. So I posted the question to the English Wikipedia mailing list today, asking "so ... is it possible to set up a clearing house for editorial concerns with articles?"
It's pretty clear any such channel would get a FLOOD of comments. Quite a lot would be unjustified, and we'd have to work out how not to have the justifiable ones flooded out by them. And the big problem is how to make that channel something the experienced regular editors would be interested in looking at in workable numbers. i.e., what would be the tuna to attract the volunteer cats?
I haven't come up with something that would attract volunteer editors - and the thing about volunteers is they will do RIDICULOUS amounts of work but only if they feel like it today - to spend their Wikipedia time looking at. But I do think this current case makes it clear we can't just do nothing any more. I did my first television interview for Wikipedia today on the topic ... we're apparently really big and powerful now. WHAT ON EARTH?!
I welcome ideas from your readers who have ideas on how to actually make the volunteers want to work on concerns flagged in such a channel. That's the key, and it's a cat-herding problem.