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8 April 2015

Op-ed

We are drowning in promotional artspam

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By Piotrus

I used to think of myself as an inclusionist. I used to write articles. I still do, certainly. However, I recently came to a sad realization that I am spending less and less time creating new content, and more and more deleting things.^[1] Let me tell you a slightly worrisome story of how this came to be. From 2007 I have been regularly monitoring the list of new articles related to WikiProject Poland. This started as a (moderately successful) attempt to recruit people for WikiProjects I am involved in. Over time I sought to automate this process (reviewing all of those articles and reacting to them can take several hours each week). To this end I developed a few templates. At first, they were only invitations – to WikiProjects, DYKing, such. But looking at them now, a big chunk of my tools are paste-in prods for "ARTicles that are merely SPAM" (aka "advertisements masquerading as articles", ADMASQ), most commonly in the categories for biographies and companies/products. It is a sad testament of what I thought I would need (rewards and words of encouragement) and what I ended up needing (in essence, words of discouragement). I haven't kept specific numbers, but for the past few years, at least, each week I have to prod/AfD articles, whereas I use my WikiProject/DYK invitations maybe once or twice.

Not all of my deletion nominations come from the new article reports. In fact, if I was just limiting myself to those, I would not be here, calling for your attention. Few year ago I started to realize that many of the articles I prod/AfD share similar topics. What's common? Biographies (primarily artists failing WP:CREATIVE). Music bands, songs, and tours failing WP:MUSIC. But I can stomach them, perhaps it's what remains of my inclusionist sentiment – I will prod those articles with no mercy, but the poor fame-starved artists are not whom I want to draw your attention to. No, we have a bigger problem, or – perhaps, a fatter, juicier and more problematic target. Those of you following The Signpost for a while know well the recurring theme of paid editors and promotional advertising of products and companies. I personally don't have a problem with paid editing if our policies and guidelines are respected. Unfortunately, they – namely, Wikipedia:Notability and its child-guidelines- are not. I would go as far as to say that in fact they are rampantly disregarded. They are disregarded by WP:VANITY-seeking individuals, but even more so, by those creating articles about products and companies (and here I sadly have to concede that majority of such articles are almost certainly a work of people who were paid to create them).

What I am looking at right now are several categories: Category:Business software, Category:Websites, Category:Law firms, Category:Internet marketing companies, Category:E-commerce. They are gateways to many related categories, and I estimate that they are filled with lots of spammy articles. Let me now define spam in the context of this op-ed as advertisements masquerading as articles (in short, artspam) rather than external links spamming. The latter is more easily identifiable through automated tools, and Wikipedia:WikiProject Spam and others seem to be managing it well enough, as far as I can tell. What I am concerned with is the former: articles that fail notability criteria, aiming to promote a certain topic, not (only) through biased wording, but through their very existence ("I/we/our product is/are on Wikipedia, hence we are important/respectable/famous/encyclopedic").

I said, now, that those categories are filled with lots of artspam. By that I estimate that between 25% to 75% of entries in them would not survive PROD/AfD. And those are not the worst categories; I am afraid they represent an average of hundreds of categories related to companies and certain types of products (websites, software, etc.). After a while – having reviewed hundreds of such articles – you learn to recognize patterns. Few are created by editors active across numerous topics. Most are the work of single purpose accounts; either ones focused on a single article, or a group of them. A small percentage are so bad they classify for near-speedy deletion (zero references, for example) – but those are rare, as the proverbial low-hanging fruit of deletionists they don't survive long. Through just few days ago I stumbled upon an unreferenced product stub from 2005, so... Distressingly, in the last year or so I have noticed a significant proportion (<20%) of problematic entries as having passed through Articles for Creation process or similar.

This leads me to conclusion that (as observed by some prior research on the subject) many Wikipedians (even myself) often pass quick assessments of articles by looking at the reference list. If there are many references (bonus points for being formatted), we check the article as "probably ok" and move on. This is a problem, because while understandable (we are all busy), many sources fail the reliability requirements, while others mention the company just in passing (notability requires in-depth coverage) and this is a trick that artspammers have learned to use against us – and it appears, very successfully. Most of companies and product pages I nominate for deletion have several, if not dozens of inline references. Many are to their own pages (in other words – self-published), but quite a few are masked better. It is quite common for slightly smarter artspammers to use other websites – such services are cheaply offered by various PR companies, who maintain extensive portals filled with dime-a-dozen press releases such as PRWeb, many of them are distributed through news sites and appear in search engine results, giving them a surface appearance of legitimacy.

Here's a case study. "www.reuters.com/article/" looks nice, until you notice the literal small print: "Reuters is not responsible for the content in this press release". The article about the associated product, Faircoin, had been deleted twice so far. Those articles are often rich mines of bad sources: I have seen everything from twitter, youtube, facebook, irrelevant awards (another PR trick), to numerous blogs and the myriad of low-key promotional websites masquerading as professional press. Such websites might sport names that imply reliability, but usually are quite WP:QUESTIONABLE. Those, at some point, transition into reputable sources (magazines maintained by professional associations), but with tens of thousands of websites out there, it's a pain to figure out which are good and which are bad (i.e. ones that do fact checking and have editorial oversight from ones that will publish anything for few dollars); we desperately need more initiative like the few found in Category:WikiProject lists of online sources. For now, however, thousands of articles about organizations or products linger in the mainspace, sustained by nothing but false appearance of being well references, well defined as nothing but numerous. Even worse, we have even worse articles – ones that clearly sport no reliable references (usually referencing their own websites), or ones with no references at all. Notability may be "just" a guideline, but Wikipedia:Verifiability is a policy. Yet it is a policy with patchy enforcement, and numerous artspam entries survive happily with no reference to speak of.

What's the scope of this problem? Category:All articles with topics of unclear notability has about 63,000 entries, but less than 20% (and that's a generous estimate) of articles I prod/AfD have it; ditto for the nearly 18,000 of articles with a promotional tone. Of course, not all categories have similar levels of artspam, but I am afraid that we are looking at a number of up to, maybe, 300,000 such articles. Now, this is a napkin type calculation, based on extrapolating from the few, very rough, statistics presented here ("if out of five artspam articles, only one is tagged as such, and we have about 60,000 tagged ..."). Yes, I am well aware not everything with a notability tag on it will fail notability once some research is done, but if, let's say, just about a half will, then the napkin equation ends up with 150,000. That's something like 3% of our total articles. Even if I am grossly exaggerating this, and we just have few thousand entries to clean up, this is a significant number – and there's no way the few of us working on this can make any sizeable dent in this amount of artspam. Worse, I am afraid we are losing – our backlog in just notability topics goes seven years and the one for promotional tone is about the same. If you think that we are doing better with unreferenced content, the backlog for Category:Articles lacking sources goes back to 2006 and lists over 200,000 entries (including over 2,000 in Category:All unreferenced BLPs)^[2]!

This shouldn't come as a surprise. Artspam, by its very definition, is about things nobody else cares about; it is advertising. Neither experienced editors nor newbies visit such pages often. They are underlinked, hidden in the dusty corners of our project, with the scope of the issue only visible on few cleanup backlogs, or during category reviews. Many die early, when they are spotted by a recent change patrollers, but those that survive the first few weeks can feel pretty secure, particularly if (counter-intuitively) they were created by a SPA whose further actions won't draw scrutiny to their prior creations. In short, by their lack of encyclopedic value and obscurity they become the proverbial bugs not seen by many eyeballs. And so they linger, bloating numerous categories with are quietly becoming little but business and product listings with little concern for notability.

Enough is enough, I say. It is spring of 2015. Wikipedia has been gravitating towards a vehicle for business and product promotion for too long. We need a major artspam cleanup drive, a literal purge of promotional articles, and a push for development of tools and frameworks to stem the tide of such articles in the future. Perhaps something similar to Wikipedia:WikiProject Unreferenced Biographies of Living Persons, an effort which few years back cut down the number of unreferenced BLPs from 50,000 or so by more than a tenfold.

Either way, it is high time for some spring cleaning. Please help out, go to a category for a business type or product of your choice, and start enforcing notability, with fire. Prod an artspam each day, and save this project, before we become a Yellow Pages clone, with a small encyclopedia attached to it.

Piotr Konieczny is a Polish sociologist at Hanyang University in South Korea, specializing in Internet studies and wikis. He edits Wikipedia as Piotrus.

The views expressed in this op-ed are those of the author alone; responses and critical commentary are invited in the comments. Editors wishing to submit their own op-ed should look at our opinion desk.

Notes

^ In my last 500 edits to Wikipedia namespace, over 70% are in the AfD space. Going back in time, those numbers are 50% for 2014, 45% for 2013, 12.5% in 2012, 11% in 2011, 10% in 2010... well, that's enough, the trend should be clear, and few care about my editing patterns.
^ And no, it's not just from the recent weeks – I saw at least one dated to 2012 – but that failing or WP:BLP enforcement is probably a topic for its own opinion piece...

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Being driven away from Wikipedia

I am not paid for my Wikipedia editing (who would want to pay me anyway?) yet a search of my talkpage brought up the term G11 (Template:Db-spam) 8 times. Recently I had an article deleted with this rationale: Seems to be vandalism or a hoax. The article was about a gender discrimination lawsuit and was supported by no less than 9 references from reliable sources. Another article on the same topic is now languishing in wp:AFD.

Wikipedia deletion processes are drowning in frivolous nominations for deletion: is it a surprise that those who know how to navigate this convoluted system are thriving, while good faith contributors are leaving Wikipedia? Ottawahitech (talk) 18:59, 9 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]

You are part of the problem. I can't see the content of Turbotax database knows your secret, but just the title suggests it's very unlikely to be an encyclopedic topic. As another editor commented on your talk page "One only has to look at the multiplicity of notices ... from many other editors for your inappropriate and/or completely unreferenced articles to see that the problem [is] your own approach to creating articles here.". DexDor^(talk) 06:01, 10 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Lets agree to disagree that my contributions to Wikipedia are less valuable than yours. The point I am trying to make is that if all good faith contributors are chased out of Wikipedia there will be no one left to contribute content that brings readers here, and no one left to fix errors. Ottawahitech (talk) 18:34, 11 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]

@Ottawahitech: You clearly create many articles of value, and are a valuable member of our community. At the same time, I think you also need to pay closer attention to the notability criteria. Some articles, through not many, that are part of the problem I describe here have been created by more experienced editors who should (by now, at least), know better. A few of my own articles have been deleted from the projects (biographies, mainly). It happens to all of us. But if you get a series of deletion notices, it does usually mean one has to re-examine some of one's writings. I agree it could be handled better - if we had more volunteers. Sadly, we have too few, and so we are templating everyone. A lesser evil, I am afraid (to not policing the project at all). --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 02:44, 13 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for soothing my ego, Piotrus, but the point I am trying to make is if all good faith contributors are chased out of Wikipedia there will be no one … left to fix errors. You may feel it is OK to have SOME of your contributions deleted, but there are/were thousands of wannabe editors who feel/felt differently. This is why we lack volunteers , IMHO. Ottawahitech (talk) 13:21, 13 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]

I think deleting newewbies' articles is not the problem, it's how it is done: with little explanation other than a boilerplate tamplate. And yes, perhaps a better, more friendly idea would be to move deleted newbies contribution back to their sandboxes...? --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 02:23, 14 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]

I agree that moving rejected articles back to the user's sandbox would be much less offputting than outright deletion. Deleted material can always be recovered, but newbies don't know that, and it's very discouraging to have one's WP:AGF efforts deleted, even if it's for a good reason. The spammers wouldn't be encouraged by this kinder, gentler policy, since they know the tricks of resurrecting material anyway (and they probably kept backup copies just in case). "Never attribute to malevolence that which can be explained by pure incompetence." Reify-tech (talk) 17:56, 14 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Artspam - bad neologism?

Artspam? Worst. Neologism. Ever. Only on Wikipedia do we have people coining words and phrases loaded with ambiguity. Our job as knowledge workers is to eliminate ambiguity, not encourage it. Viriditas (talk) 03:11, 10 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Agree, when I first saw "artspam" I assumed it was something to do with art. The op-ed really should be reviewed by a critical editor before going live (I've just corrected several other problems in it). DexDor^(talk) 06:01, 10 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]

No offense Dex but this is hardly cause for substantial criticism. ResMar 06:06, 10 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]

I am an editor who spends considerable time working on biographies about artists, and I object deeply to the term "artspam". I am also an editor who has written and expanded a number of articles about what I sincerely believe to be notable small businesses. I have never, ever been paid a penny for such writing, nor the smallest denomination of currency in Poland or South Korea. I readily concede that we have a problem with paid editing, but must oppose any blunderbuss response that tars articles about artists, or about businesses. I especially object to unjustified blanket criticism of good faith editors working in such topic areas. Cullen³²⁸ Let's discuss it 06:17, 10 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]

+1, Cullen; well said. Piotr, I think the word you're looking for is "spam". Ironholds (talk) 12:52, 10 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]

I just used the established term from WP:ARTSPAM, after a reviewer of the draft suggested to me that the term spam is too generic. I thought about WP:ADMASQ but I found it less clear; through I was also aware of the "Art" being confusing. If you can suggest any other term that's better, do let me know. I considered ADSPAM, MASQAD and MASQSPAM, too, through I was wary of creating a new neologism. But, as I note in the op-ed, there is certainly a good amount of art-spam too. I am less interested in going after hungry artists wannabes or vanity-seekers than after yellow pages paid editors ilk, but... --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 00:57, 11 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Piotrus, "art" is not a commonly used abbreviation for the word "article", so "artspam" should not be used at all. You say that it was an "established" term, but actually, it isn't used anywhere. An editor created the redirect as a shortcut, but that's the only known usage. The shortcut redirect should be sent to deletion and the shortcut should be removed from the content guideline. I've seen this kind of thing happen many times on Wikipedia. We tend to attract "unique" individuals who often invent esoteric words and phrases that 99% of people wouldn't recognize or understand. User:Eddie_Segoura's creation of the word "exicornt" comes immediately to mind; there's probably a dozen or so other examples that have slipped under the radar and into our guidelines and policies. You said yourself that you found it confusing, so I'm curious why you used it in the first place. It would help greatly if people like yourself would question things a bit more rather than accept them at face value. If something is confusing to you, that's a red flag you should pay attention to, as there's a greater possibility that others will find it confusing as well. Viriditas (talk) 03:25, 11 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]

@Viriditas: As I said above: I used it because I could think of nothing better, and I was told that just using spam was also confusing. And, to be frank, such a confusion (about art) may be good - perhaps some of our readers here wouldn't have came at all if not for being curious about the term in the first place. But yes, I am open to developing a new, better term. On the final note (better late than never), I'll ping the creator of the ARTSPAM redirect, User:Ukexpat. --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 02:47, 13 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]

When I created the WP:ARTSPAM redirect, I did so an an abbreviation for WP:ARTICLESPAM, because I am lazy. If the redirect is considered unhelpful, I would have no objection to its deletion.--ukexpat (talk) 14:49, 16 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]

I just want to add my voice to this- though I do think that this is a solid article drawing attention to a real problem (one I've been peripherally aware of for a little while, but have done nothing substantial about), "artspam" is is a poor term. I wondered whether you were talking about small placeholder articles for individual works of art/episodes/songs/albums/etc from the title, and was intrigued to see what was said. On a more constructive note, I do think you've prompted me to cast a more critical eye on these kinds of articles. Josh Milburn (talk) 10:37, 13 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]

"Artspam" is a terrible neologism, since it misleads readers (including me) into thinking that it concerns art, but it's really about articles. Why don't you just call it "spam articles" or something like that? However, I agree with you overall concern about spam articles. I don't go looking for them, but if I stumble across them, I tag them or send them to AfD. Perhaps more thought needs to be given to incentives and plugging gaping holes, to ease the burden on the bilge pumping and cleanout crew. You have my sympathies and respect. Reify-tech (talk) 17:56, 14 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]

I strongly agree with Viriditas and Cullen. What really disturbed me about this was the thought there were subjects or images that no one cares about? Seriously? Encyclopedic value takes a back seat to judgment calls based on point of view. Well OK then...--Mark Miller (talk) 20:26, 15 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Various comments

Thanks Piotr for this op-ed. In the last year I also spent more time on deleting spam, vandalism and unencyclopaedic content than adding content. I think is time to provide more incentives for quality improvement than simple additions. The main page should indicate the number of quality articles, not simply that of total articles, for example like this mock-up. Welcome templates shouldn't invite new editors to start new articles but to improve existing ones. Perhaps the WikiCup should value cleanup work, such as AfDs, etc. -ELEKHH^T 07:06, 10 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Interesting idea @Elekhh:. May I suggest slotting those stats in the blank area between the logo and the category area, instead of replacing the category area outright? Maury Markowitz (talk) 12:38, 10 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]

AQ problem is also a covert refusal to get to the bottom. Quite often when I nominate articles with a rationale like advertising or spam, the articles are in fact protected. Most of the time comments appear like "yes, this article is promotional, but this can be fixed by normal editing". But after closure, nothing happens and the spam stays where it was. This trend is slowly undermining the no advertising policy of Wikipedia. The Banner talk 10:39, 10 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]

I think we should continue going tough on such junk, Piotrus does a good job. Having spamish articles may also have a depressing effect on genuine contributors. Brandmeister^talk 11:04, 10 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]

After adding comments to support an AfD on some of these spam articles, I've seen them ultimately remain. The AfD discussions are left open another seven days to obtain more consensus and ultimately the article stays for "no consensus". It somewhat turned me off to even bothering with AfD. I don't know what the answer is except to perhaps allow deletion if there is no solid consensus for the aricle to remain. Blue Riband► 11:43, 10 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]

A few observations:
- The rate at which spam is added to Wikipedia is be proportional to the spam that's already there -- we've all heard the OTHERSTUFFEXISTS justification for creating articles on non-notable companies and products. This means the amount of spam grows exponentially as a function of time.
- Too much time is wasted dealing with COI users who aren't here to build the encyclopedia. A subset of these editors are being paid, some by the hour, to trash the encyclopedia with their promotional garbage and waste your time. Editors who aren't here to improve Wikipedia need to be removed from the project expeditiously. I got sick of being Captain Obvious, so I made myself this page to aid this task.
This oped is long overdue, but the fact that this problem has to be explicitly pointed out is highly concerning. MER-C 12:21, 10 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]
- This is a very scary observation, User:MER-C, sadly I can't disagree with it. --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 01:15, 11 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for a very important reminder. Every marketer out there knows that a WP article, appearing at the top of unpaid search-engine results, gives whatever they are selling an air of legitimacy (regardless of merit). Miniapolis 13:55, 10 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Enough is indeed enough. We have to get an efficient way to stop this adcruft (my alternative word for artspam). I'm afraid just going through the 2-3% of our articles that have this problem and nominating them for AfD won't do it - it just takes too long. One recent example was a wanabe publishing company. They hadn't published anything yet but intended to publish 3 books that had previously been published by others. It took three weeks to get that article deleted! We do have the rules to stop this. Our policy WP:NOT prohibits marketing, promotion, PR, and advertising. The Terms of Use prohibit undeclared paid editing (and almost none of these folks declare their paid status). New rules (e.g. prohibiting admins like User:Wifione from paid editing) are almost impossible to add, especially if we consider that there will be opposition from self-interested editors. Perhaps the WMF can do something similar to what they did when the funding of chapters became chaotic and a constant source of controversy, get input, form a committee (in that case the FDC), and then do something about it. I don't think volunteer editors alone can fight well-financed advertisers.

The one thing we know for sure is that this problem will not go away by itself. There's a new scandal every 3-6 months on related topics Smallbones_(smalltalk) 15:56, 10 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Out of curiosity, since Wifione was banned for conflict of interest, did he/she participate in an AfD discussions? I'd say that would justify relisting those articles. -- llywrch (talk) 23:00, 10 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Part of the blame lies with the WP:RFA "inquisition". The way new admins are grilled there means that by the time the survivors are confirmed as admins they are so intimidated that they don't have the confidence to boldly enforce the agreed standards and simply delete this type of rubbish. Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 09:52, 16 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Just spent a "happy" 40 min or so on one of these spamticles (another alternative :-), IZA World of Labor, part of a group of articles around IZA. Lots of cruft, lots of references, mostly to press releases, related sites, blogs, and such. I'm not even going to take it to AfD. Some newspapers quoted some articles that appeared in this thing. Despite WP:NOTINHERITED, that's going to be reason enough for many editors to !vote "keep" and nobody will care to clean up this mess. The problem is that some of these subjects may actually be notable, so that the "keep" !voters are actually correct, but we don't have the personpower to clean up all these articles. If you really want to do a good job, checking all references for what they actually say about a subject, checking whether the sources are RS, etc., it'll cost you more time than the spammers spent to write the darn thing... I see no real solution to all this. We have more and more articles and fewer and fewer admins and editors, the problem is only going to get worse. I recently saw somebody advocating tightening our notability guidelines (sorry, can't remember who/where...) In theory, that's a solution, as it would reduce the number of articles to maintain and we could concentrate on the really important stuff. However, I don't think it very likely that we'll ever get a consensus in favor of tightening the notability criteria... --Randykitty (talk) 17:22, 10 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]
- @Randykitty: Perhaps you mean the discussion I started at Wikipedia_talk:Notability_(organizations_and_companies)#Common_invalid_.22keep.22_arguments_for_commercial_organizations, which interestingly seems to be leaning to making it more inclusive. Through sadly, it seems the consensus is to make it more inclusive for commercial organizations, and don't change anything for the non-commercial ones (Wikipedia_talk:Notability_(organizations_and_companies)#Non-commercial_organizations). Sigh. Anyway, you do point out to a major issue: it often takes more to analyze and prepare an AfD report than it takes to write an article for some of those entries. And compounding this problem is that few non-experts in field can truly know if a given niche publication is a reliable source, or a PR "we will publish anything" outlet masquerading at one. --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 01:15, 11 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Bad example - notable company?

Davis Graham & Stubbs is a major Denver law firm. Why no one has created an article I don't know but using it as an example grates. There is constant press coverage. The only significance it has is that there are articles we should have but don't. User:Fred Bauder Talk 08:47, 10 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, "enough it enough". It is about time we stopped deleting stubby articles on notable subjects like Davis Graham & Stubbs - a 100 year old law firm which is a leader in its region, with alumni that include a US Supreme Court judge and a US senator and the Governor of Colorado - and tried to expand them instead. Ferma (talk) 18:08, 10 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]

This is not the place to discuss specific articles; still: please read WP:NOTINHERITED. --Randykitty (talk) 18:16, 10 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Indeed. Which is why the rankings from the likes of Martindale-Hubbell and Chambers & Partners are important (bizarre that Chambers and Legal 500 are redlinked). In Chambers USA, the firm is ranked alongside Hogan Lovells for Corporate/M&A in Colorado, and in Environmental it is ranked alongside HogLov, and Faegre Baker Daniels and Holland & Hart. Ferma (talk) 18:41, 10 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Can we get back to the discussion of the Op-Ed please? And leave the discussion regarding the notability status of specific articles to the appropriate forum? Blue Riband► 19:08, 10 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]

No, these are all helpful comments and specific examples like this help to lend insights to the discussion. The point is that amateur editors without expertise in every topic area cannot always be expected to distinguish the stub of a notable firm which should be kept and worked on from a less notable firm whose article appears to be better developed and referenced. We don't want to punish the firm who doesn't spam by deleting a good-faith stub about them which may have been created by a disinterested editor who may not have the time or motivation to finish their stub, and is hoping someone else will do it. Can better tools for identifying spam be developed? Then we also have the issue of pop-culture cruft created by good-faith editors who want to document every episode of a TV series in detail. The producers don't have to pay for that; we have volunteers who willingly do it. What is considered to be spam varies by the eyes of the beholder. Wbm1058 (talk) 22:10, 10 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, I agree— we don't want to punish the firm who doesn't spam… As DGG writes later …let us not fool ourselves, Like It/Don't Like It is the basis of most afd discussions, though anyone with experience here knows how to word it otherwise Ottawahitech (talk) 18:30, 11 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]

User:Ferma, User:Fred Bauder (I hope you don't mind me moving your comment here), why don't you join the discussion at mostly inactive WP:LAW, where I asked if we have any experts to help draft criteria for notability of law firms. Sadly, so far no expert has volunteered to join me and DC there. But please keep our policies in mind. Having notable employees does not matter. Neither does being the biggest in a city or province of. Now, if either generated significant, in depth coverage - great, add sources and we are done. For the record, I didn't see such sources for this article (our policies specifically require, by the way, non regional sources, co a city newspaper doesn't count). As for which professional law magazines/websites/rankings matter... we don't know. No expert has really bothered much to tell us that, in few months I've been asking. --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 01:10, 11 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Your criteria do not appear rational. I don't have the patience to engage in a discussion which assumes "Having notable employees does not matter. Neither does being the biggest in a city or province of" are not relevant. Davis Graham & Stubbs is notorious for its political connections. You can say that is merely "notable employees" but that makes no sense. Nor does the notion that articles in The Rocky Mountain News, The Denver Post, to say nothing of the speciality legal paper, Law Week Colorado, in Denver, don't count as reliable sources. Nonsense! User:Fred Bauder Talk 06:38, 11 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]

It is not only a matter of patience, but more the availability of free time for most volunteer conriutors here. Just my $.02. Ottawahitech (talk) 18:30, 11 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]

My comments are unnecessarily nasty, but I have lots of time for productive work; none for wasting days arguing over "policies" that violate basic Wikipedia policies such as verifiability and using reliable sources. User:Fred Bauder Talk 09:11, 12 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]

See Article content does not determine notability:

Shortcuts

Notability is a property of a subject and not of a Wikipedia article. If the subject has not been covered outside of Wikipedia, no amount of improvements to the Wikipedia content will suddenly make the subject notable. Conversely, if the source material exists, even very poor writing and referencing within a Wikipedia article will not decrease the subject's notability.

User:Fred Bauder Talk 10:22, 12 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]

It would help determine notability for some legal firms if we had better articles on the history of the legal profession in America. (I just looked at American Bar Association, & except for the date of its founding, & a few controversial events during its existence, there is nothing about its history: not about the challenges it faced getting established, not about its relationship with state bar associations, not even an explanation why the ABA was founded. So if a given legal firm was notable for, say, improving the quality of lawyer training & professionalism, there is no way to objectively determine it.) And I suspect this weakness exists for many other professions: accountants, doctors, engineers, etc. Having links from articles where notability has been proven (or is self-evident) helps disinterested editors to believe that a given article is notable. -- llywrch (talk) 20:09, 13 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Why shall we care? Let Capitalism do its job

Why don't we look at the issue from another point of view? Applying the WP:DGAF principle, why should we give a shit for all these pitiful businesses? By wasting our time on filtering the "notability" we ourselves create a problem for ourselves, by supporting an illusion that having a wikipedia article will make you exclusive and rich. This is capitalism, right? Let the competitors kick each other's ass, nominate each other for deletion, clean the hype, double check the references, etc. If competition does not give rat's arse, then why must we care? Don't we have better things to do? Why deleting the article "Mike Bob's Banana Shack" will save the world? Staszek Lem (talk) 22:21, 10 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]

"This is capitalism, right?" WRONG. The WMF is a non-profit, with a mission to provide the "sum of all knowledge" to every person in the world. By allowing business propaganda in articles, we are working against our mission. It's destroying Wikipedia. Our reputation for reliability will go down. Our community will be subverted, e.g. by paid editors changing our rules. Folks who try to make a quick buck off of charitable institutions are among the lowest of the low. If you donate $100 for the victims of a hurricane, you want the money to go to the victims, not into some conman's pocket. The hidden advertisers here are no better than those conmen. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 22:34, 10 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, it is capitalism, YES. Have you ever seen organization edscribed "non-profit" in a Communist state? Let me reiterate: let competition fight each other's propaganda. Once they grasp an idea, they will do this much better than a a thousand of deletionists (I doubt that we have that much of them). (And we solve another problem: the dwindling number of wikipedians, too! :-) If competitors don't give a fuck, then why you think (let me put it in an opposite way) an article "Mike Bob's Banana Shack" will ruin the mission of "sum of all knowledge"? Who gives a shit about the reliability of information about "Mike Bob's Banana Shack"? Once again, why don't we focus on more important things, such as reliability of information in medical and legal topics. Staszek Lem (talk) 22:58, 10 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]

P.S. My post does not imply "allowing propaganda". We have policies to remove unsourced and dubious text. We are routinely doing such kind of cleanup by from bona fide but unexperienced editors. Just continue doing it, even until it leaves a one-liner stub of an artcle. Staszek Lem (talk) 23:02, 10 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]

P.P.S. This also would solve a yet another nightmarish problem: the cottage industry of "paid contributors", whose expertise is gaming wikipedia rules. If "anybody can edit" without fear, then (Capitalism, buddy: "Supply and Demand"!) another headache is gone. Staszek Lem (talk) 23:08, 10 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]

P.P.P.S. Neither I am calling against AfD whenever you see fit. Just Don't Panic. Staszek Lem (talk) 23:18, 10 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]

"Who gives a xxxx about the reliability of information about ..." Try 15,000 Indian students, who were, at least in part, misled by by ads placed in an "MBA program's" article by the admin USER:Wifione. If you want that kind of propaganda allowed on Wikipedia, you don't understand our rules or our purpose, and you are undermining them. I don't think any more discussion along this line is worth the bother. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 23:20, 10 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]

This is a red herring and out-of-context misquoting. The Wifione case has no relation to small businesses Piotrus is after. This is a completely different fish. Please explain how his call for AfD crusade would have helped in Wifione case. Please explain where my suggestion calls for abandoning our core policies WP:V, WP:NPOV, etc., which should have worked in Wifione case but obviously didn't. Staszek Lem (talk) 01:00, 11 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]

I'm just shocked. Simply shocked. Gug01 (talk) 23:56, 10 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]
- It this your only argument? Staszek Lem (talk) 01:00, 11 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Guys, I have done my share of deletionism myself and got scolded for that, because I was targeting software tools and companies, and stepped on many toes of wikipedian's statistical majority. My post here is an attempt to rationally questioning this approach and NOT defend paid advocacy. We are severely understaffed and spending our best time in policing wikipedia, and I am just brainstorming new approaches to the problem. So instead of going ballistic and politically-correct, why don't we discuss the suggestion in a civilized way. Staszek Lem (talk) 01:12, 11 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]

So I think Staszek's argument is a tongue-in-cheek one. But, here's an easy counter: I have never seen a SPA/paid editor going after competition. There is little negative marketing out there. 99% of them focus on adding spam, not fighting the competitors. So unless you want to educate paid editors about AfD and try to change how promotional industry works... I don't think this will achieve much other than wasting hot air here. --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 01:28, 11 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Staszek Lem, are you arguing for free market fundamentalism? I'm curious how that has ever solved a single problem on the planet. As far as I can tell from my reading of history, it creates more problems than it solves. Viriditas (talk) 02:47, 11 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]

different suggested directions

One way we could go is to to include even small companies and all schools, all local churches, all people running for political office, all active researchers, all productive artists. We would need to would like to remove the provision that WP is not a directory. The only valid reason for keeping this fundamental rule, besides that of looking like a traditional encyclopedia, is that we have not been able to do this while still having objective coverage. To me a provision for tightening the rules of inclusion is a very unfortunate compromise--I would rather we ourselves had the people to write proper entries for these organizations. We might perhaps do this by writing systematic basic articles in advance, as we do for places,, but we would still have to monitor content. I do not think this a likely direction at present; the sympathy is in the other direction.

If we are not going to be all-inclusive, we need a basis for selection. The current basis is a combination of one factor: what happens to interest people here and what people are willing and knowledgable enough to argue for effectively--a factor which causes our well-known distortions in coverage, and the second factor: the availability of easy to find online sources that meet the artificial requirements of WP:GNG which does not match any normal concept of notability that makes sense to anyone outside WP. The result is very susceptible to manipulation by paid editors, who can write specious sourced articles, and which will survive through indifference unless we happen to catch the stupider among them as sockpuppets. This is not in my opinion an acceptable direction to pursue, and I suggest that we need to stop following it: any alternative would be better.

Personally, I would prefer to follow a direction by which we have true objective standards of real-world importance, based upon achecklist, or a quantitative factor. This would have to be specialized for each topic, and also modified at a geographical level: the size of a business that is notable in a small country would not be notable in a large one. I think this would be quite difficult to do with organizations, and though I can think of criteria for various businesses in the US, it would be quite difficult to specify in a way which would get general acceptance. I think the current mood is against this,but I think the real problem is agreeing on a set of specification that would involve years of inconclusive debating between the people who like different subjects -- and let us not fool ourselves, Like It/Don't Like It is the basis of most afd discussions, though anyone with experience here knows how to word it otherwise. The one potential merit of the GNG is that it is supposed to eliminate this effect, because the standards apply to everything. But they don't, in practice,, because the amount of easy to find publicity is different in different areas, and, curiously enough, they just happen to favor those areas that most people here are interested in.

The increasing attractiveness of WP for paid editing has upset this balance. I think it essential to differentiate an encyclopedia form an advertising medium--if advertising is what one want to find, google et al. already give a n extremely effective way to find it, especially taking into account the advertising placements that is the basis for their financial success.

The most effective way to address it, and the one I currently suggest, is essentially the same as the one Pietrus suggests also: to adjust the application of the key phrases in the GNG "substantial coverage" and " third-party independent sources" . I think the best approach is to say that material only about funding or acquisitions is non-substantial for the purposes of notability, though certainly reliable; and that local news stories and interviews are intrinsically non-independent; and that a trade interview with a person is not even reliable for anything other than what they would like us to believe. (As an example , we were was able to get the principle accepted that local book reviews of local authors are unreliable for notability--no one really challenges that one.) If we were to do it formally, we need to think much more about the wording. Along with Pietrus, I don't thing doing it formally is the best idea: we will spend more time trying to find a consensus than we do in removing the AdSpam.

The way to proceed is informal: to individual propose higher standards at the discussion of each article. This iwill only work if people pay a great deal more attention to AfD than any of us have been doing. There are all too many articles being passed because not enough people bother to comment. There are now about 100 AfDs a day: If 100 people make a point on commenting on 4 or 5 a day, we'll get a good representative opinion. (Like Pietrus, I hope the discussions will generally go the way we think they ought to--but if they do not, it is because not enough people want to support removing advertising, and against such indifference, WP is helpless. DGG ( talk ) 04:48, 11 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]

sorry count me out. not interested in a dysfunctional process. the essay is useful to illustrate the siege mentality that bites all newbies, and is impatient with AfD. you have determined the scope of work, and backlog, but have no method. you need to build a team (like the teahouse) to engage with new comers / spammers, without templates. you may not think you have the time, but the time is always right to make a culture change. Duckduckstop (talk) 20:09, 11 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Wikipedia:Notability sets an effective limit on simple listing. If a subject, concept, or process has attracted human attention there will be journal articles, books, and media coverage about it. That is the test. User:Fred Bauder Talk 20:07, 13 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Unreferenced BLPs

Just to clarify, the WP:URBLP project didn't reduce it "ten-fold", but it completely eliminated the known backlog at the time. The project was created and completed under admin and User:Jimbo Wales endorsed threats of bulk deletion, regardless of notability. Not a nice way to encourage the elimination of a backlog. And, whilst some of it was cleared by topic specialists or wikiprojects, a lot/majority was done by a very small number (10-20?) of extremely diligent editors who just kept going and going. The number of users willing to do that sort of thing is minimal, as can be seen by most of the huge backlogs we have.

All articles in that cat now have been tagged since it was cleared (some have been backdated), and similar to the discussions above about notability or quality of references, many of them are incorrectly tagged because some users don't recognise anything not in ref or cite tags as being a reference. As an example, most, if not all, of the 193 NFL related articles tagged as BLPunreferenced would have a link to the NFL or a similarly reliable stats website in their infobox or external links section. (and this isn't a place to argue about the low notability bar for sportspeople, that's WT:NSPORTS.)

But as it has risen from 0 to many thousand, it does show that the tagging of problem articles is only part of the solution, finding the "lost/hidden" articles is also critical. The-Pope (talk) 05:15, 15 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Appearance of articles

The ~~three~~ four articles shown look different from anything I've ever seen. Two have their titles in red. I've also never seen the article described as "sub class" or "unassesed" at the top.— Vchimpanzee • talk • contributions • 18:14, 14 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Actually, they look very different. I see lots of red links and the formatting is just very strange.— Vchimpanzee • talk • contributions • 18:52, 14 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]
- I am not sure what you are talking about. Images? The first one comes from a Wikipedia mirror... --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 09:19, 15 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Vchimpanzee, the way articles look depend on your preference settings, mostly which skin you use. The article class ratings appear if under "gadgets" you activate the option "Display an assessment of an article's quality as part of the page header for each article". It also changes the color of the article title depending on its class. --Randykitty (talk) 09:27, 15 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Okay, I see now the first one is from something called Deletion Wikia.— Vchimpanzee • talk • contributions • 16:36, 15 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Sources for company notability

I've been reflecting on business analysis/journalism lately and I think a big issue here is that the underlying culture of business coverage is antithetical to building a neutral encyclopaedia. Businesses generally have no interest in neutral coverage, and typically actively try to prevent that or block access to company materials that would form the basis of such coverage.

I actually think that many businesses (like the law firms in the article) are important parts of our culture and society that don't get enough neutral coverage to display their worth (or in a way that our encyclopaedia can interpret). Businesses of all sizes sit at the heart of our communities (whether we like that or not) and are of much greater importance than plenty of other topics we allow coverage of (such as footballers who played one professional game fifty years ago...). Sadly, the lack of good source material ultimately leads to company articles being a controlled expression of brand image, rather than a true reflection of how they affect our communities every day. SFB 00:13, 17 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]

I think that's a very thoughtful analysis I agree with. Sadly, it still leaves us with a problem of not enough reliable sources... --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 02:43, 17 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]

I disagree. Our articles need to be neutral but there is no rule that requires sources to be neutral to be usable. If a business is really notable the mainstream business and financial media will reflect that. We are far too tolerant of the PR industry. Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 05:33, 17 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]

@:Dodger67 the word I would use instead of tolerant is inconsistent. Our deletion guidelines are too convoluted and as a result, subject to interpretation. Have a look at the history of Realtytrac, one example of a company constantly in the news (foreclosure statistics) which did not have a wiki presence until years later (when most people lost interest in the topic). Ottawahitech (talk) 12:26, 17 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]

@Dodger67: While we can interpret some neutral facts from non-neutral sources, if they are all we have then essentially they have defined the scope of our coverage. Also, in-depth coverage by business and financial media touch only the tip of major companies. Numerous large companies with between 1000 and 2000 employees (~5,500 in the US) won't receive that level of coverage, yet are clearly important social phenomena. It is recognised that settlements much less populous than this are important and warrant an article here. However, as Piotrus hints in the op-ed, there is also no natural editor-base to cover and maintain such articles neutrally. SFB 17:11, 17 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Problem is communication

Problem as I see it----(1st of all something is wrong for me. I cannot bring up this issue of The Signpost maybe my cache is bad I don't know? But I found my way here because of an article that I created which is AfD'd and the confusion and questions. As I see it the "deletion editors" are deleting articles for reasons of WP:NOTE when really the notability is there. That is what the little links are for! (news...) so reviewing editors can easily check notability. I think the confusion, in my case at least and a few others I have been looking at, is that it is the ARTICLE that "deleting editors" are having a problem with? example here Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/PhishMeThis should be made clear because it is insulting when they make deleting comments/reasons about notability of the topic or subject when it is THE ARTICLE that is stubby or does not show WP:NOTE. There is a severe communication problem with this. TeeVeeed (talk) 17:03, 9 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]

And just for the record let's not forget the "articles for ransom" scandal. Inclusion/deletion is a two way street. There have been and are project-damaging motives that have been used via deletions by editors with an agenda that is not related to encyclopedia building. Not accusing anyone here or currently, but when communication is stifled or sloppy I know that questioning possible motives happens.TeeVeeed (talk) 17:14, 9 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]

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@@ Line 21: / Line 21: @@
 [[File:Making sense wikistub.png|thumb|center|800px|A software company, [[Making Sense]], present in the high-level [[:Category:Software]] (sigh). No references outside two [[WP:EL]] violations in text, one to a press release, one to another company's website. Another December 2014 creation, this one didn't raise any red flags for our recent changes patrollers beyond acquiring an advert template (with its ~eight-year backlog). Software category likely contains dozens of similar problematic entries, and its child subcategories - hundreds. How many other categories like this we have?]]
-What's the scope of this problem? [[:Category:All articles with topics of unclear notability]] has about 63,000 entries, but less than 20% (and that's a generous estimate) of articles I prod/AfD have it; ditto for the nearly 18,000 of articles [[:Category:All articles with a promotional tone|with a promotional tone]]. Of course, not all categories have similar levels of artspam, but I am afraid that we are looking at a number of up to, maybe, 300,000 such articles. Now, this is a napkin type calculation, based on extrapolating from the few, very rough, statistics presented here ("if out of five artspam articles, only one is tagged as such, and we have about 60,000 tagged ..."). Yes, I am well aware not everything with a notability tag on it will fail notability once some research is done, but if, let's say, just about a half will, then the napkin equation ends up with 150,000. That's something like 3% of our total articles. Even if I am grossly exaggerating this, and the we just have few thousand entries to clean up, this is a significant number – and there's no way the few of us working on this can make any sizeable dent in this amount of artspam. Worse, I am afraid we are losing – our backlog in just notability topics [[Category:Monthly clean up category (Articles with topics of unclear notability) counter|goes seven years]] and the one for promotional tone is [[:Category:Articles with a promotional tone|about the same]]. If you think that we are doing better with unreferenced content, the backlog for [[:Category:Articles lacking sources]] goes back to 2006 and lists over 200,000 entries (including over 2,000 in [[:Category:All unreferenced BLPs]])<ref>And no, it's not just from the recent weeks – I saw [[Mohamed Abed Bahtsou|at least one]] dated to 2012 – but that failing or [[WP:BLP]] enforcement is probably a topic for its own opinion piece...</ref>!
+What's the scope of this problem? [[:Category:All articles with topics of unclear notability]] has about 63,000 entries, but less than 20% (and that's a generous estimate) of articles I prod/AfD have it; ditto for the nearly 18,000 of articles [[:Category:All articles with a promotional tone|with a promotional tone]]. Of course, not all categories have similar levels of artspam, but I am afraid that we are looking at a number of up to, maybe, 300,000 such articles. Now, this is a napkin type calculation, based on extrapolating from the few, very rough, statistics presented here ("if out of five artspam articles, only one is tagged as such, and we have about 60,000 tagged ..."). Yes, I am well aware not everything with a notability tag on it will fail notability once some research is done, but if, let's say, just about a half will, then the napkin equation ends up with 150,000. That's something like 3% of our total articles. Even if I am grossly exaggerating this, and we just have few thousand entries to clean up, this is a significant number – and there's no way the few of us working on this can make any sizeable dent in this amount of artspam. Worse, I am afraid we are losing – our backlog in just notability topics [[:Category:Monthly clean up category (Articles with topics of unclear notability) counter|goes seven years]] and the one for promotional tone is [[:Category:Articles with a promotional tone|about the same]]. If you think that we are doing better with unreferenced content, the backlog for [[:Category:Articles lacking sources]] goes back to 2006 and lists over 200,000 entries (including over 2,000 in [[:Category:All unreferenced BLPs]])<ref>And no, it's not just from the recent weeks – I saw [[Mohamed Abed Bahtsou|at least one]] dated to 2012 – but that failing or [[WP:BLP]] enforcement is probably a topic for its own opinion piece...</ref>!
 This shouldn't come as a surprise. Artspam, by its very definition, is about things nobody else cares about; it is advertising. Neither experienced editors nor newbies visit such pages often. They are underlinked, hidden in the dusty corners of our project, with the scope of the issue only visible on few cleanup backlogs, or during category reviews. Many die early, when they are spotted by a recent change patrollers, but those that survive the first few weeks can feel pretty secure, particularly if (counter-intuitively) they were created by a SPA whose further actions won't draw scrutiny to their prior creations. In short, by their lack of encyclopedic value and obscurity they become the [[Linus' Law|proverbial bugs not seen by many eyeballs]]. And so they linger, bloating numerous categories with are quietly becoming little but business and product listings with little concern for notability.