User talk:Kevin Gorman

Swazi

Hi Kevin,

Could you take a look here?

Thanks — kwami (talk) 01:40, 3 June 2014 (UTC)

• Hi @Kwamikagami: - between Wikiconference USA and some issues that required me to return to San Diego for a while, I've both been without internet for a while, and not been in Berkeley for a while. Once I get back in a week or so, I'll look in to finding it for you. Since if it's only a physical holding I'll be limited in what I can practically copy to pass on, can you shoot me a list of the parts of greatest interest to you? Best, Kevin Gorman (talk) 06:10, 6 June 2014 (UTC)

A list of all consonants, maybe with sample words, would be my first priority. Vowels and tone would also be nice.

Thanks! No rush; I'm busy with other things right now too. — kwami (talk) 15:37, 6 June 2014 (UTC)

I should be able to get the relevant parts to you within the next couple weeks. There may be a nominal cost associated with it, but it should be small enough that I can just eat it. Best, Kevin Gorman (talk) 18:43, 6 June 2014 (UTC)

• Just postdating this section to make sure it doesn't get lost before I get a chance to get to it. Best, Kevin Gorman (talk) 18:43, 25 June 2014 (UTC)

Paid editing

Hi Kevin. I came across your user page, which says that you are interested in helping disclosed paid editors. I have a long track-record for creating GA company/BLP pages on behalf of the article-subject and thought I might take you up on your offer at some point if you're interested. However, I also thought you might have some interest in this project or in helping with Request Edits as it's currently backlogged by six months. CorporateM (Talk) 12:41, 11 June 2014 (UTC)

Oof.. that backlog makes me cringe. I'm sadly still with limited internet access (back in the bay, but Comcast is really Comcasting it up,) but will take a crack at dealing with some of them once I have full internet access again. Best, Kevin Gorman (talk) 17:08, 11 June 2014 (UTC)

If you and yours really want to eliminate paid COI editing from Wikipedia, six months backlog needs to become six hours, among other things. Not saying it can't be done; realistically, it's going to take WMF's own crew of paid content editors to work on corporate-related stuff that volunteers have no taste for. One of the secrets about paid editing is that topics like those have to be paid, because they tend to be very, very, very boring. best, —Tim /// Carrite (talk) 17:59, 11 June 2014 (UTC)

@Carrite: - now where have I ever said I want to eliminate paid COI editing? :) I pretty much agree with most of your post. Large chunks of corporate editing involve boring stuff few volunteers want to touch, but that is significant to the corporations they are about, and potentially significant to our readers. I seriously doubt we'll get good coverage of a lot of this stuff at any point in the near future, and thus I explicitly support disclosed paid editing. For that matter, I support it being done in a more aggressive style than Jimbo/Bill Beutler/CorporateM/most other disclosed paid editors floating around - I don't think we have the volunteer bandwidth to make the brightline rule anything near enforceable, and since we have the ability to both block and embarrass the hell out of paid editors/PR groups that step over the line, I don't have an issue with disclosed paid editors making direct edits to article space. Kevin Gorman (talk) 18:05, 11 June 2014 (UTC)

Well... I think spending a few hours managing Request Edits can provide a lot of perspective. Each situation is different and I think needs to be handled individually. COI participation is discouraged because the editor is not likely to be neutral (whether they are ethical or not they are still unlikely to be neutral), but it is not forbidden because sometimes there are errors, the company is treated unfairly, or they are neutral-enough to be productive. Each situation needs to be handled responsibly and individually. CorporateM (Talk) 19:12, 11 June 2014 (UTC)

I've helped more than a few COI editors, just not through that board :). I actually disagree with the statement that COI editors are unlikely to be neutral - in my experience, many COI editors do a better job of being relatively neutral than many ordinary newcomers. Neutrality being far more of a process than an outcome, they certainly need a counterweight in the form of other eyes on articles they touch, but pretty much everyone needs that, even those aren't being paid to edit (with the possible slight exception of someone who takes it upon themselves to do something like catalog every species in the genus Clavaria - all inherently notable and pretty much none are controversial, so the possibility of lack of neutrality is minimized (except in terms of the language literature they are using - often, different language papers on the same species describe different ranges, etc.)

Stephen Hauser (where I still need to do some cleanup) is an example of an article written primarily by someone with a COI and good intentions - she wrote it after he was appointed to a presidential commission so that people googling for him could get some info about him, since UCSF didn't have a working faculty bio page at that time. I full-heartedly believe that most CoI editors are well meaning, and that most who are aware we strive for neutrality strive for neutrality as well - and as a whole, do a better job than an average cohort of new editors at it. I'd much rather work on cleaning up minor issues in a thousand articles like Hauser than the type of issues that typically show up in 1000 BLPs created by new users.

The actions of a small number of well motivated COI editors who actively want to game Wikipedia can cause a hell of a lot of damage, but on average I don't think that COI editors are especially worse than most other cohorts of editors we have, and think that except at the extreme of the tail, the work of COI editors - even bad ones - can be dealt with relatively effectively through our normal editing processes (as long as they are working in an area that has other working in it.) I've definitely seen plenty of corporate articles whitewashed by people with COI's, but we also have plenty of problems with nonpaid advocates (often, even on the same pages.) One reason why I like the Donovan House Statement - since people are publicly committing to follow it, it raises the publicity pain of future non-compliant actions (and I would be surprised if a single signing agency wasn't already acutely aware of the publicity pain that screwing with Wikipedia can generate.) Kevin Gorman (talk) 20:43, 13 June 2014 (UTC)

Thanks for reverting me at Waggener. Sometimes I am like a mother-hen protecting my GA articles from.... everybody with a twitchy finger on the revert button. I have to apologize that this is the first time I am noticing your lengthy note above. I think neither of us is necessarily incorrect, but rather it is the balance of different viewpoints, created from different experiences, that create a positive middle-ground. I am exposed to a lot of covert paid editing practices that gives me a jaded point-of-view. + I spend quite a bit of time cleaning up promotion, which makes me frustrated with those it originates from. To be honest however, editors insisting on adding unfair negative material tend to be more persistent than paid editors. CorporateM (Talk) 03:49, 20 June 2014 (UTC)

@CorporateM:... Heh, trust me... I've dealt with a pretty ridiculous number of shitty covert paid editors. Although a lot of it was handled through email, I think I'm responsible for north of 400 blocks of paid editing accounts either directly or indirectly, including a lot that were not related to Wiki-PR. One day I need to finish up and publish somewhere off-wiki the infographic of PR agencies directly tied to lame paid editing practices that I have somewhere, just haven't had time yet... I think the last time I poked at it I was tracking forty or fifty. I've just also run in to a ton of paid editors of one sort or another who didn't engage in lame practices - like the person who wrote the article I linked above. I don't actually even remember why Waggener was on my watchlist originally, but took out that line because for a firm of that size that has generated that much coverage in various places over the years it seemed to be quite a bit of undue weight to mention that in the lede. I find the number of times I end up removing negative information about companies I'm not necessarily especially find of kind of comical sometimes. It's being worked on by someone from Bechtel in conjunction with other volunteers at this point, but for one of the most amazing examples of a corporate hit job I've come across, take a look at what the article about Bechtel used to look like. Kevin Gorman (talk) 04:03, 20 June 2014 (UTC)

I have a COI with another construction company Fluor Corporation, which is currently waiting for a GA reviewer, so I won't get involved in the article about their competitor. However, I will make a general point that I think that article represents in a slight way. Promotional articles become magnets for excessive controversies to "balance" the page and overly-critical articles become magnets for poor COI editing. The result is that we have a lot of articles that are half-promotion and half-attack content. Like this one I came across at ANI. In some cases, a very negative or very positive article is actually justified and the page needs to be protected in that state, but in most cases, the harder one side pushes, the harder the other side pushes back. Therefore, it is not a good strategic decision for marketers to push, unless you are confident the article will not attract anyone to push back.

For the sake of conversation though, is it accurate to say you are assuming bad faith regarding that particular article? I am curious, because it looks like about average for a COI editor to me... CorporateM (Talk) 04:43, 20 June 2014 (UTC)

Do you mean w/r/t the Bechtel article in the version that I linked? There was certainly bad faith involved with the diff that I linked. It was a 40kb long article, and about 39kb of the article was dedicated to portraying the company in about the most negative light possible. A company like Bechtel certainly deserves a pretty hefty criticism section, but there's rarely a good reason for a company with a more than hundred year history to have an article where literally 97% of it is negative. I hate to Godwin myself, but the Bechtel article in the state I linked quite literally had a larger portion of the article dedicated to making Bechtel look bad than the articles about any dictator or oppressive regime I can think of offhand spend on criticism of their respective subjects. That diff probably comes close to being the most one sided page I've come across on Wikipedia - if it was a BLP and that was the only version of it around it would've been G12 worthy. Kevin Gorman (talk) 04:56, 20 June 2014 (UTC)

Hey, I'm glad to see people using the COI EditNotice template I made a long time ago; that's really picking up. I'm not really comfortable continuing to talk about a clients' competitor's article, but I think maybe you provided me the wrong link? This is the one you sent me. CorporateM (Talk) 05:30, 20 June 2014 (UTC)

The first few paragraphs look reasonable, and a little bit towards the end of the article looks promotional, but, though 97% might be a bit on the high side... look at the middle of the article. The 1940's section basically describes Bechtel as wartime profiteers more destructive to the American war effort than any act of sabotage, the next 40s/50s section isn't actually too bad, the 60s/70s section focuses significantly on installing a nuclear reactor vessel backwards (which I must admit is a rather funny though rather serious error) as well as some other not total flamebait stuff, and the next *fourteen* consecutive sections focus solely on allegations of misconduct by Bechtel. There really aren't too many other articles I can think of where something like 17 out of 25 content sections (and 17 out of 22 sections with actual substantial non-list content in them) are significantly negative. If you ever end up with a client with a similarly bad article, drop me a link to it and I'll be more than happy to kill most of the article until it can be rebuilt to a reasonable state, especially if it's a BLP. Kevin Gorman (talk) 05:47, 20 June 2014 (UTC)

This is along those lines. A substantial portion of the entire article use to be like that (filled with primary sources, blogs and op-eds to make it a slam piece). However, I think this is the last remaining section from the old "Criticisms" section that's still like that. I have a COI. CorporateM (Talk) 20:04, 21 June 2014 (UTC)

Without looking back in the history of the McKinsey article, I do agree with you that the section you've highlighted has some problems. At the same time, McKinsey has a long enough corporate history, that quite a bit of criticism should be included in to their final article - it just shouldn't be *that* kind of criticism. McKinsey has certainly experienced it's fair share of criticism in well-regarded outlets such as the NYT, etc - and that's the kind of stuff that belongs in the article. If you'd like, I'd be quite happy to integrate well-sourced and balanced criticism in to the article about McKinsey, either after it goes live, or while it's even still in your draft space. One of the interesting things to me is that many large corporations *realize* that have done stuff wrong, and don't want those things suppressed or hidden - they just want to their Wikipedia articles to present an adequate evaluation of what actually happened (which many of them currently don't) - and that's the kind of text I'm good at writing. Kevin Gorman (talk) 01:30, 22 June 2014 (UTC)

Yes, if you scroll down on the link I provided, there is an alternate version I offered that is more balanced and uses proper sources. I would say there are a lot of "controversies" rather than "criticisms". They are involved in some pretty heavy topics, such as international environmental policies, which leads to a lot of debate about their methodologies, etc.. They also have a very complex reputation regarding their corporate culture (scroll up to see that). CorporateM (Talk) 15:18, 22 June 2014 (UTC)

Online Ambassador Question

Hi there I have applied for the Online Ambassador position and user right. After I get 2 endorsements from the education community what is the next step? About how long does it take to receive endorsements? I appreciate your help. Akifumii^Talk 17:28, 15 June 2014 (UTC)

• Hi @Akifumii: - it's worth keeping in mind that most education program classes are currently out of session, so most things are running a little bit slower than they typically would. In the past we've had a formal system for pairing up OA's with individual students or particular classes, but we currently don't. Essentially, there's very little that formally being an OA lets you do that you can't do as a simple editor - it's basically just volunteering your time to make sure that the online component of education program classes runs smoothly. It's likely that as the next semester approaches, there will be a number of posts from campus ambassadors or instructors at WP:ENB requesting help - you can always offer assistance there, or find a class in need of help through a different manner (from randomly stumbling in to one to just surfing the courses list for people who don't currently have help) and offering your help. Endorsements take a kind of random period of time, but if you don't get two relatively shortly, I'll just look back through your editing history and grant you the userright myself. Best, Kevin Gorman (talk) 23:21, 16 June 2014 (UTC)
• @Kevin Gorman: Thanks. I appreciate your help. Hope to see you around the Education program soon! Akifumii^Talk 15:35, 17 June 2014 (UTC)
• @Kevin Gorman: Hi again. I recently looked at the Wikipedia:Education noticeboard and it seems like my request has been removed from the page. Can you explain what happened by any chance? Thanks. Akifumii^Talk 15:40, 17 June 2014 (UTC)
  • Hi @Akifumii: - the page is set up to automatically archive any section that hasn't been commented on in a certain number of days, so your section ended up getting archived. I went ahead and flipped the userright on your account to set you as an online volunteer, which will allow you to enroll as an online volunteer in a course etc, though, really, you can pretty much act as an ambassador even without the userright. You're probably already familiar with most stuff covered, but it would be worth taking a look at this when you get the chance. Best, Kevin Gorman (talk) 20:59, 17 June 2014 (UTC)
• Hi there. Thanks so much for your help. Now that I am working with the Education Program, I would like to request the account creator right if possible. I see many other OA's have this and may find it useful to create acounts with no restriction in the future. Akifumii^Talk 22:39, 17 June 2014 (UTC)

Hi Aki - it's actually not generally a very useful userright for people doing online outreach/support. Most people who have it either have it because of their involvement in the request an account process or because they are involved in doing physical outreach - usually if people involved in online outreach/support end up needing to create more than six accounts per IP per day they can find an admin or account creator to help pretty much instantly if needed. It's mostly useful for in-person outreach events (editathons, in-person assistance to classes, etc,) where people may end up needing to create a bunch of accounts at once. +Accountcreator has significantly more potential for abuse than most other non-admin userrights on ENWP, since it also grants you the ability to override the title blacklist and the ability to override the normal antispoof limits on usernames. Because it comes bundled with those two rights, it's usually handed out fairly conservatively. Since you aren't currently involved in physical outreach and currently have a relatively short editing history, I'm hesitant to grant it to you currently - but if you ever end up needing to create more accounts than normally possible, please feel free to ping me/use the RAC process/pop in to IRC and ask for someone to help you out with it. Best, Kevin Gorman (talk) 22:57, 17 June 2014 (UTC)

(talk page stalker) @Akifumii: To put a finer point on it, don't be a hat collector. I see from your user page that you're proud of our current hats and that's fine, but this isn't a game. User rights are given when needed, not for self-aggrandizement. You have less than a thousand edits and the edits you have aren't impressive. Only days after registering your account you asked for mass-message sender which doesn't look reasonable to me. You quit your Counter-Vandalism training so that doesn't bode well, either. Participate in the WikiProjects you've already joined, create content, and earn barnstars. When there's a need for you to have a user right then it'll be addressed. Chris Troutman (talk) 00:48, 18 June 2014 (UTC)

• @Chris troutman: Hi there. I see your perspective. In my opinion, I am not hat collecting, in fact I have no intention of gathering multiple user rights. I am a user who is very enthusiastic about Wikipedia and wanted to dive right in. I got started on some WikiProjects as soon as I joined. I joined WP:Galicia and found that it was inactive and thought that it would be great to have former members join on the project again. I wanted to use the MassMessage tool to send out newsletters etc. to promote this project in particular. I also somewhat regret quitting CVUA and am considering rejoining in the future. My Counter Vandalism skills can always be polished by someone who is more experienced than me. Akifumii^Talk 04:20, 18 June 2014 (UTC)

@Akifumii: You might consider contacting Jianhui67. He started out like you and has since become an impressive editor. He and I both are graduates of CVUA so we can both vouch for that program. Also, if you would like to be adopted there are mentors that can provide guidance, me included. Chris Troutman (talk) 05:25, 18 June 2014 (UTC)

@Chris troutman: I don't know if I have time. I have been considerably busy during these days. Jianhui67 ^T★C 05:28, 18 June 2014 (UTC)

Famous

And your picture in the paper and everything. My, my.--Bbb23 (talk) 00:57, 17 June 2014 (UTC)

You mean "Providing content not yet found on Wikipedia, in areas that suffer due to our systemic biases, is vital work"? Agree, --Gerda Arendt (talk) 06:44, 17 June 2014 (UTC)

Heh, thanks for the note. I wonder how long stuff related to my Berkeley edu work will keep popping up - the groundwork for the LA Times article was done in early April. I'm starting to get excited for the next semester.. it's going to involve more classes, but significantly smaller ones, mostly graduate STEM classes focusing on improving or creating socially significant content that intersects with the areas they are focusing their doctoral work on. Kevin Gorman (talk) 20:53, 17 June 2014 (UTC)

generally...

You should not empty categories that are under discussion, but should feel free to add additional elements to the category. The scope of the VAM category, like the VAW category, is for adults and children. see [1] for a state department brief on trafficking of men; in some countries, such as Sri Lanka, boys are actually more likely to be trafficked into prostitution that girls. In this domain it is best to not make assumptions, the world is a complex place... I think once this discussion is over, we should have a broader discussion about the use of both the VAM and VAW categories, and come up with inclusion criteria for both that are fair and balanced. The current status quo is, if a woman is killed, it can be placed in "violence against women", but if a man is killed, people get twisted in knots screaming "it's not gender-based violence" blah blah blah. My point is, we need to be consistent. --Obi-Wan Kenobi (talk) 06:08, 26 June 2014 (UTC)

There's absolutely no reason why categories that are under discussion should not have items removed from them. It's bordering on preposterous to suggest that it's okay to add items, but not to delete items - especially when the deletion of items is in line with the consensus of the last CfD. We don't need to operate on some sort of artificial equivalency, we need to operate on the basis of what reliable sources say (as is supported by every single content policy we have.) Kevin Gorman (talk) 06:14, 26 June 2014 (UTC)

see Wikipedia:Categories for discussion which says "Unless the change is non-controversial (such as vandalism or a duplicate), please do not remove the category from pages before the community has made a decision." I'm not arguing for artificial equivalency, I'm arguing that we should apply inclusion criteria in a similar fashion, which isn't the case now.--Obi-Wan Kenobi (talk) 06:30, 26 June 2014 (UTC)

(cont'd)You even have some people arguing that there's no such thing as violence committed against men because they are men (even though plenty of literature says exactly that). My point is, we need to be consistent, and the hysteria this category is caused is completely undue.

You may be interested in this recent report, which looks at the scale of sexual violence against men and boys globally: [2] [3] - it found in some refugee populations in DRC, 1 out of 3 men had experienced sexual violence. This is not some historical oddity from a million years ago, this is today, this report was released last MONTH. One of their recommendations is "We recommend changes that move beyond regressive gender assumptions, which can harm both women and men" - and these same gender assumptions we see played out in the category discussion, where people dismiss violence against men as propaganda, etc.

As further evidence of the problems of POV in this space, there are a number of editors who take delight in removing items from the Violence against men and Misandry categories, but who pay no heed whatsoever to the Violence against women and Misogyny categories, each of which has 10x-100x the contents, many of them equally dubious. If those editors were truly editing from a neutral POV ,they would apply the same criteria and empty those categories as well, but they don't. I actually do, I have both added things, and deleted things, from VAW, and it bugs the hell out of them, that someone might be removing something from VAW, but they have no qualms about removing everything they can from VAM and arguing about it for months. You may not see the double standard at play because you are somewhat bought into a particular POV, but it's there and I can see it quite clearly. I'm appealing to your intelligence here, to recognize what is going on is a smear campaign against me (a number of those !voting are those I have recently had disputes with about this category, so they aren't coming to this from a neutral POV, they are emotional), that is unjust and improper and NOT improving the encyclopedia; deleting a whole space of human experience - that has a lot of potential to expand, by the way - because of some nitpicks over a few contents we disagree on, or because some random editor who has never met me or interacted with me besmirches me and accuses me of MRA propaganda pushing is the height of idiocy, and I wish you'd see through it and come around to support keeping the category with a broad consensus discussion AFTERWARDS (not in that snake pit) around inclusion criteria. Thanks for listening,--Obi-Wan Kenobi (talk) 06:08, 26 June 2014 (UTC)

Hi @Obiwankenobi: I don't need links to refs to know that violence against men and boys exists - I know it does. I own and have read almost every book published in the last thirty years about domestic violence as well as men's movement and the construction of masculinities. I've also own and have read huge swathes of material about essentially every postcolonial conflict to have occurred in the modern time period, and many others besides. Besides that, although I obviously can't use my personal word as a source on Wikipedia, I've personally experienced gendered violence, more than once. I'll fix this myself eventually, once I'm sure you've had time to see this and once I figure out where best to insert it - but I find it pretty sad that throughout our entire article tree and cat tree related to the use of child soldiers there is no cat related to violence against children attached anywhere.

That said, the fact that someone chooses to work on one cat tree or article group and not another isn't evidence of any sort of bias - if you look at my work on articles about fungus, you would notice that I work primarily on articles about macrofungus. In fact, I'm not sure I've ever even edited an article about a microfungus on Wikipedia. That's not evidence that I hate microfungus - I just find articles about macrofungus more interesting and rewarding to work on. Similarly, I've worked on many more articles about women philosophers than male philosophers - that's again not because I hate men who do philosophy, but because I find articles about women philosophers more rewarding to work on (primarily because they are so poorly covered.)

Your assertion that people voting to get rid of the category are not coming from a neutral point of view doesn't mean much - Wikipedia editors are not required to come from a neutral point of view, rather they are expected to edit towards a neutral point of view - and that's using Wikipedia's definition of NPOV, which differs so significantly from the common understanding of a neutral point of view that it's almost funny. You also really hurt your case when you do stuff like accuse people you disagree with of disagreeing with you because they are simply excessively emotional. That's an allegation that has, for many years, been levied almost exclusively towards women in order to silence them. Whether or not that is how you intend to use it, that is how it will come off to a large number of people who read what you write - and it will undermine significantly any valid point you are trying to make.

Some of your recent edits also look really silly to outside observers. The article about forced prostitution talks about the forced prostitution of adult women, and the forced prostitution of children (of both genders.) The one major group it doesn't talk about: forced prostitution of adult men. Are some adult men forced in to prostitution? Yes, of course - but it's both an absolutely tiny minority of those who are forced in to prostitution overall, and the forced prostitution of adult men is literally mentioned nowhere in the article. Removing the violence against women cat and replacing it with gender-based violence and child sexual abuse as cats as you did here absolutely looks like an attempt to minimize violence against women. Kevin Gorman (talk) 00:29, 27 June 2014 (UTC)

Kevin, I was the one who added it to vAW in the first place so relax please. The VAW cat was added because we do not have a VAChildren AND because the scope of VAW includes VABoys who are definitely included in the article. In any case we categorize articles based on their topic not purely on their content - thus an article about a female novelist that doesn't mention she's a noted woman novelist can still be added to that category. In the same way, even if the forced prostitution article doesn't directly mention the specifically the prostitution of boys, it is indeed part of the topic of forced prostitution thus that category belongs. Finally you should absolutely not remove an article from a category up for deletion, esp if you have been reverted. You keep forgetting that vAm isn't just for violence against adult males, in this case there is a clear and obvious gender aspect to this particular form of violence and removing it from the VAM category is directly suggesting to boys who are prostituted that they don't matter. Categories aren't about majority rule, and VAM does not diminish VAW. Anyway we can continue that discussion at the relevant talk page im re-adding it in the meantime since the edit remained uncontested and thus has silent consensus. As for your point about fungus, you're missing the point Kevin. There's a dual standard at work here. If an editor is neutral they will apply the same criteria across either category. If for sample satire is not allowed in VAM category then it should not be allowed in the VAW category. But there are editors whose only purpose is seemingly to minimize violence against men by trying to empty the category or delete the whole thing and that is the very essence of POV editing. If I attempt to make edits to the vAW category applying similar criteria I am accused of misogyny. --Obi-Wan Kenobi (talk) 00:48, 27 June 2014 (UTC)