User talk:WWB/Archive 5

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question two, on dealing with paid editing of an article of questionable wikiNotability

This one is much more of a "quick question" ... by my standards at least. :-) There was an entry in the AfC queue, an article about a company, which was deleted (as opposed to the usual declined) as being spam. (( Various similar incidents led to ahrbcohm drahmahz, but none of that is related to my question, however, don't worry. <grin> ))

details about $companyName, which prompted my question

This particular company-entry on enWiki was being edited by a single-purpose-account, who has disclosed they are an employee in the PR division of the corporation in question. The company has an entry on the home-language-wiki in their home country; the refs are not obviously WP:RS over there (which methinks suiggests that the cupboard is bare for non-English-language cites), and WP:GOOG suggests that no such cites exist in the English-language.

Looking into the details of the company, they were founded in 2008 on one continent, incorporated on another, registered as a stock-trading-entity in a third, and host their website in a fourth. The business is in the retail forex trading industry. It is a brokerage firm of sorts... FAQ#7R == What is a multi-level commission and how is it calculated? FAQ#8W == What does it mean that trading participants are anonymous...? Big popup when you visit their website: "Warning! $companyName does not provide and services for the US residents. According to the $companyName company internal policy rules, we do not provide any service to the U.S. individuals or legal entities. ...The Company does not proceed any financial transaction from the US citizens.... okButtonLabel==I_have_read_and_understood."

They advertise leverage up to 200:1 for large accounts, leverage up to 2000:1 for small accounts. These are extreme methinks... but I'm not in the biz. The also offer "flexible margin requirements." Their tech-platform used in their MLM business is the Metatrader app (deleted from enWiki in 2007 as advertising-slash-copyvio and deleted again in 2010 per "one author who has requested deletion"). MetaTrader/MetaQuotes was itself founded in 2000, to serve the "specialized forex broker software market". Their main product is a client-side-programmable automated-stocktrading app, and they have a big link on their homepage ("Become a Broker") which explains how to use their 2005 and 2011 product-flavors to start an online brokerage. Which is apparently just what $companyName has done, reading between the lines.

To be fair, I did not find anything *BAD* about $companyName itself... not counting foreign exchange fraud#Cyprus which is of course not WP:RS and also circumspect^[vague]. But the article on $companyName does not belong in enWiki mainspace, it seems abundantly clear methinks. Yet, the employee in the PR department is quite determined to achieve exactly that.

My question is this. How should we deal with companies that are WP:NOTHERE ... and definitely do not satisfy wikiNotability requirements in the usual way? The bright-line-rule is silent on how to manage the companies which are attempting to use wikipedia as a means to boost their brand recognition. The traditional approach is to delete the articles, salt if necessary, put the COI template on the user-talkpage, indef if necessary. But this approach seems like it will have unintended consequences: companies determined to mis-use wikipedia will become secretive, invest in developing sockpuppet technology, try to break the rules without getting caught. Or more likely, hire some firm that specializes in such practices: the most interesting statistic about Wiki-PR is that their claim of 13k customers is 100% plausible.

two other companies which don't belong in mainspace... but reacted differently

In a totally different part of wikipedia, I've investigated one particular spam-message which was blasted cross-wiki by some spambot. The spam gave the website of the customer-firm. It was a local real-estate firm in Virginia, one of 400 franchisee-operations of a mid-sized company located halfway across the country... the CEO has a BLP page in mainspace, but the company has no page yet, and of course, the 1-out-of-400 guy in the franchise-branch-office has no shot of getting a wikipedia page for his franchise (nor for himself). Point being: wikipedia is a huge red bulls-eye. Companies want to get into wikipedia. Most of them are quite open about it; we should encourage that. Most of them understand that wikipedia is not for every firm in the world: that is why they want to be in wikipedia.

Most of them also understand that, just like life, wikipedia ain't fair. There was a page I ran across yesterday about a mom-and-pop grocery store, which expanded into the import-export business; their single borderline-WP:RS was a court case where mom-n-pop sued the local government over a commercial license dispute (the mom-n-pop lost the case and no newspapers bothered to ever mention it). Clearly, the page needs to be out of mainspace... but the contributor was age 19, and ESL, and is doing good work elsewhere in wikipedia, improving our coverage of their university, and uploading photos to commons, and so on. The page has to go, but I'd like the contributor to stick around. Besides, WP:CRYSTAL applies... maybe someday the grocery-slash-import business will become wikiNotable, and deserve a dedicated article.

Solutions... maybe instead of just deletionism, we should consider using the AfC process... or the new Drafts namespace... or maybe some separate domain-name registered (or re-purposed) for this issue... isn't there some way we can keep the article on the forex-multi-level-marketing-corp, the article on the 399th-real-estate-franchise-corp, and the article on the mom-n-pop-store-that-lost-their-court-case? That might help make the COI folks more happy: they won't be in mainspace, but at least they wont' be deleted, and at least they'll be able to see how many other corporations also fail to make it into mainspace.

It also might help contributors here on-wiki... rather than seeing thousands of new articles created every day (many of them re-creations of already-declined work), and seeing COI folks hit the teahouse, helpdesk, refdesk, AfC reviewer talkpages, deleting admin talkpages, and so on, ad infinitum... asking for help on somehow getting their articles into mainspace... we can put them in the "not yet ready for mainspace" area (NYR4M), and specify what is needed before they *can* be ready for mainspace. This approach could apply to things besides corporations: musicians/bands, BLPs, and so on. We might even permit academics to host "original research" in that space... and in fact, allows WP:FRINGE topics in that space, might keep mainspace (and the talkpages/noticeboards/etc surrounding mainspace) considerably less drama-filled. We could fund the extra server-space with cash fees, since many COI folks are being paid, and won't mind five bucks a year... but methinks a better idea would be to "fund" every kilobyte of NYR4M with the "fee" of one constructive non-COI edit to mainspace per month.

My wall-o-text alarm has been blaring for some time now, so I best stop. I'd be interested in hearing your thoughts on the general issue... and also on the purposely non-specific forex MLM $companyName covered in my first green box, since I'm not sure what to do about them, and they have a PR person going from talkpage to talkpage trying to get help recreating the deleted article. Sorry to talk your ear off; it is my disease. :-) Hope this helps, and while I'm here, thanks for improving wikipedia, it's appreciated. 74.192.84.101 (talk) 02:12, 28 December 2013 (UTC)

Hi there, 74. I just got this notice, and I'm about to spend all day flying from the West to the East coast of these United States, so it'll take me a bit of time to read, digest, and respond—so look for a reply from me sometime before the end of the calendar year. Hope that's OK! Cheers, WWB (talk) 15:28, 28 December 2013 (UTC)

I think you ask some really, really interesting questions. Depending on how much you've read about me on-wiki or off-, improving the relationship between the enWP community and company / PR representatives is a big thing for me. I am probably not going to get to everything you asked about in a satisfactory way in this reply, so please feel free to press me on specific points if you like. Here goes:

First thing, about $companyName—it just doesn't sound like they have any business being in the mainspace at the present time. As something of a mergist, I'd look for a relevant industry entry for creating a hard redirect. In the case of this particular article, I would support userfication (at least for now, see next) and a clear explanation for why this happened.

Now, I am following the development of Drafts fairly closely and, assuming it continues to gain consensus and becomes the project it wants to be, I think placing it there would be better still. And while it seems less likely that either of the two other companies you describe would rise to notability, nor do they sound like patent nonsense; moving to Drafts seems like the way to go. These pages would be non-indexed, so they shouldn't give Wikipedia a bad name by allowing substandard articles to appear in Google search results. That shouldn't be the end of it—if AfC is going to be merged with Drafts, I think it's critical that the community support it seriously.

I've heard some compare this to creating Nupedia all over again—remember that Wikipedia was originally the "farm team" of sorts for that project—and while it's an interesting analogy, I don't think it has to carry the same negative connotations. Nupedia had no articles and had tight restrictions on editing; Wikipedia has no shortage of articles, and in fact looser restrictions on editing.

Meanwhile, you also asked about the confusing and off-putting COI rules which created the situation where Wiki-PR was able to do what they did. Unfortunately, I think it is the case that the community and WMF both have failed to address the issue in a serious way. Paid editing (or paid advocacy, if you prefer) is a very uncomfortable topic among this volunteer userbase, but the issue has only gotten bigger as Wikipedia itself has become more prominent. And while I am glad that Jimbo tried to make things more clear with the "bright line" announcement in 2012—and I do follow it—I think the unintended consequences are beginning to reveal themselves, and this almost certainly will not be the last word on it.

I have more thoughts still, but this is already very long itself. The only other thing I'll add is that I am quite concerned that all of this attention is given to the creation of new articles, when so many existing articles have real problems. Drafts does not seem to be intended to deal with this, which is disappointing to me. Anyway, always interesting stuff to me, and I'm looking forward to your reply. Best, WWB (talk) 15:59, 3 January 2014 (UTC)

I'm still working on my reply to this. :-) Please go ahead and post additional thoughts, as they come to you, either as replies here, or in new talkpage sections, as you wish. I won't be scared away by TLDR, and if my wall-o-text generative-capacity starts to wear you down, please just say so, I won't be offended. Touching on some preliminaries, mostly to give you more reply-fodder whilst I work on my full response, I've skimmed your userpage and blog, in reverse order, so I knew you were interested in corporations and how to manage COI in a way that improves wikipedia, yes.

Agree $companyName does not belong in enWiki mainspace... and in fact, does not belong in mainspace on their home-language wiki (where they *are* already). The sources to satisfy WP:N and WP:V simply don't exist, and for a multi-level-marketing anonymous-transactions regulatory-regime-hopping leveraged-2000-to-one financial-daytrader startup ... that's no a good sign. But we both know, such firms exist, always have, always will. The question is, what should wikipedia do with them? How do we keep mainspace true to WP:N, which is only fair, and deal with the COI of the marketing-department and all the multi-level-marketeering-folks of $companyName... while staying true to the five pillars?

We can leave them on their home-wiki. We can try to get them off their home-wiki. We can add their URL to an abuse-filter-blacklist. We can salt their pagename. We can put them in AfC. We can put them in Incubation. We can put them in Drafts. We can put them in an external wiki, something like Wookiepedia but specific to startups, maybe? There are all sort of things we *might* do. I'm guessing you've thought longer and harder about the core problem here, which is giving folks the perception that wikipedia treats all editors fairly, and that getting into mainspace is an honor and a privilege (not something to cheat to achieve). Do tell, please, what your grand scheme is. If you have one. If not, tell me your inklings and hunches. :-)

p.s. What unintended consequences of the bright-line-rule? It seems to work out okay, see for example Talk:Jim DeMint where there is some heckling, but otherwise the relationship is productive. p.p.s. Drafts'14 and Mainspace'14 absolutely *is* very much a metaphorically similar situation to Wikipedia'01 and Nupedia'01 methinks. Remember when the wild lawless Wikipedia'01 usurped the throne? I'm hoping, with any luck, Drafts'14 can become the new&improved wikipedia 2.0, where the bulk of the five bazillion rules that have been piling up since 2007, crushing the gumption of new editors every year,[1] can be overcome. Call me an incurable optimist. 74.192.84.101 (talk) 07:38, 6 January 2014 (UTC)

I don't think there's much to be done vis-a-vis $companyName, except keep a lookout, userfy (or draft-ify) as necessary, and WP:SALT if it comes to that. More important is changing the big picture relationship between Wikipedia and companies. And not just Wikipedia and companies, but Wikipedia and outside interests who view view themselves as having something to offer Wikipedia (and, of course, vice versa).

As someone who has helped companies and organizations work collaboratively with Wikipedia, it's not always easy to find a Wikipedia volunteer with the time and interest to review an existing article or a new draft I'm proposing. And I'm not surprised; Wikipedians have their own projects and interests, so I'm respectful of volunteers' time and try to find editors already interested in topics relevant to one of my clients (in the case of C-SPAN, editors interested in U.S. politics and journalism, for example). Over time there have been efforts to assist, such as WP:CO-OP, simple questions can be asked at the WP:HELPDESK, and one can sometimes find help at WP:COI/N, and the creation of WP:PSCOI was a good step. But there has never been a focused effort besides WP:AFC and we know how well that has worked.

So this brings us to the so-called Bright Line. Considering that the enWP community has had at best a mixed track record of helping COI contributors, it seems likely to create more problems, especially if more COIs decided to go that route. While Jimbo is preaching abstinence, the community is already shrinking, already busy, sometimes confused about the distinction between "paid editing" and "paid advocacy" and not at all united around the notion that paid COI editors should never edit the mainspace. Better would be to encourage those with PR and marketing goals to announce themselves, agree to minimal training, and then be given the go-ahead to make direct edits with the understanding that their on-wiki activity would be monitored. This would relieve the pressure on editors to approve every single thing before it went live; call it a "passive flagged revisions".

This is what I'd like to see, and I think we're still far from it, but I think the community may be evolving in that direction even now. You may even disagree that it's a good plan. I hasten to add that I have followed the Bright Line since Jimbo first announced it (prior to that, I would make direct client edits when I believed I had consensus) but the lack of general support for it from the community is becoming more obvious. Meanwhile, if you are following the case of Sarah Stierch this week—see her Talk page and Jimbo's—then it's clear that the WMF and the community can't just keep kicking this can down the road. WWB (talk) 14:22, 9 January 2014 (UTC)

Well, as you may have guessed, I disagree. :-) But let us see if we can seek two-way consensus amongst ourselves, and if so, whether we come up with anything interesting along the way. 74.192.84.101 (talk) 00:53, 12 January 2014 (UTC)

what to do about borderline-spam definitely-not-WP:N insistent paid-editors

Your advice about $companyName is the standard operating procedure. Add the uid-contribs to watchlist(s). Add companyName to watchlist(s). Keep them userify'd ~~forever~~ "indef" so they are mostly out of everyone's hair. If they keep recreating the page often enough, salt the name and all variants. If they keep adding their URL as ref-spam / elno-spam / similar, add www.companyName.wildcard into the spam-blacklist.

(I recently ran across MoneyWeek which is a uk finance mag... blacklisted Oct'08 and now getting "decorated" in mainspace as spam whilst simultaneously used as WP:RS bangkeep-evidence in AfD ... and no obvious way to fix the trouble, because the log shows that half a dozen people have broached the topic in the last six months and were all declined just as fast as the half a dozen who brought up the problem in 2008/2009/2010/2011. Which seems nuts to me.)

Point being... I don't think all that stuff is helpful. The PR employee of companyName is getting paid not to give up, at least, not until the difficulty (as measured in hours of paid employee time) of getting into wikipedia exceeds the value of getting seen by 500M readers (and growing!). Is WP:NOTDIR so crucial to our existence, is WP:LINKFARM such a heinous problem, that we're willing to spend the time of six different volunteers, slowing tightening the screws on companyName until the people signing the cheques give up in disgust? I used to think so, but now I'm far less sure.

Especially when I've seen real-life examples of companies that failed to get companyName for a reasonable paycheque-related-price, and failed to manually elno-spam for a reasonable paycheque-related-price, and have thus decided to hire a "professional" like Wiki-PR to "help" them. I've also seen at least one case where the local real-estate-guy, one of four hundred territory-franchisees of the national investment-conglomerate-group which does *not* have a wikipedia page despite millions in revenue every year, decided to invest in the services of some botnet owner that specializes is cross-wiki semi-automated spams. It was easy to trace the spam to the company paying for the 'service' because they put their actual website right into the spam. (Tracing the spammer-for-hire, by contrast, is of course *much* closer to impossible.) All the local-real-estate-guy wanted, was his website-URL, and the word "mortgages", and the city, state. Maybe there's a better way. 74.192.84.101 (talk) 00:53, 12 January 2014 (UTC)

WP:NOTNOTDIR — The Better Way™

:-)

the tale of WP:NOTNOTDIR, as a means to fight spam

So here's my off-the-cuff proposal for WP:NOTNOTDIR, under the strategy-category of win-by-yielding. As long as the format is rigid, and the rules are fair, it seems well within wikipedia's purview as an almanac-replacement to offer a corporate directory in the form of List of legal entities that exist. The could have a bluelink to their wikipedia page iff the had achieved WP:N. They could have WP:ABOUTSELF columns indicating year founded, year out of business (if any... usually blank... for "gaps" where entity stopped operating but then restarted later there are footnotes), the name(s) of the CEO/dba/owner/founder (max two ... again with bluelinks if the founder has a BLP article). They could have one (1) main-website, to include if necessary weebly/facebook/wordpress; companies with no website could alternatively publish their (1) main-work-phone-number... and if we let some, I guess we have to let all, so if they wished they could use 1-800-INC-NAME for this contact-us-column. They could have one (1) headquarters-LatLong; more on this in a minute.

Beyond that, we have a "media/academia" column which contained WP:RS refs (strictly in reverse chronological order) which mention the company/products in either WP:NOTEWORTHY or WP:N fashion. To keep out the republished-press-release stuff, and the blogs/youtube/facebook/PRwire/similar stuff, we would *have* to compile an explicit list of sources considered wikiReliable for use in the media/academia column of the list of legal entities that exist. To keep *in* the unfavorable press, we would have to mandate a strict inclusionist policy; if one of the WP:CorpCoverageRS sources (major newspaper , teevee , bizmag , similar) mentions the company or the products, it goes in the list and cannot be deleted. As for getting an entry added into the entity-list itself, we would need to be a bit looser than our usual WP:NOTEWORTHY standard, but not too loose methinks: if you have a link proving that the IRS/StateOfDelaware/equivalent recognizes companyName as a legal entity, *or* a link to your yellow-pages listing in a phonebook published by a recognized telecom, then you "exist" enough to be in WP:NOTNOTDIR methinks. And of course, mention in WP:CorpCoverageRS also gets you in, no need to dig up some yellowpages link.

Last but not least, there is the question of how to categorize/organize/sort the huge table (which is called a "list" for historical reasons). For starters, let us return to the question of LatLon data; originally, I specified that each legal entity could have only one HQ-LatLon (and only one phone/URL and only one-or-two owners/founders/etc). This is find for the one-location mom-n-pop grocery store, which has exactly two founders-slash-owners, exactly one phone number, and maybe also a URL. But it isn't so fine for walmart, which has several thousand retail locations, plus a few hundred distribution-hubs and branch-HQs and such. There is also the flip side to consider: the cracker-and-spouse spam-service, which has exactly two anonymous founders-slash-owners with the stolen identities of several thousand ccards being used as their illegal fronts, hundreds of phone-phreaked numbers will all forward to one laptop-voip-based-spammer-call-center, and tens of thousands of web-visible seemingly-reputable URLs for their scam-sites, Less egregious is the case of the ambitious small-to-midsized business; they make pins, for instance, to use the classic Adam Smith example. They have one pin-factory, ten miles NW of London, and they sell pins in bulk to a couple of export-merchants, and pins in small but still wholesale quantities to five or six tailor-supply retailers, in the greater London area. They once got a money-order from Montana, when somebody there specifically wanted to import three boxes of 999 pins each from pinCo near London. Here is their listing in WP:NOTNOTDIR.

entity founded active thru key people contact main LatLon media/academia

PinCo 1776 2014+ Adam Smith +44-1-800-Go-PinCo 11.1 N , 0.0 W ^[1][2][3]

But for wikipedia to be *useful* to the readership, this bare list of factoids is not really enough. You cannot search for "needle" and find the company, for instance (they added needles to their product-line during the 1880s). You cannot search for "London" and find the company, even though that is their main market. You cannot search for "imported pins Montana" and find what you are looking for, either. This is a hard nut to crack, and we may not be able to crack it methinks, because too many dinky little companies will want to be listed as "worldwide" suppliers, so that every few years when the buyer from Montana willing to pay 100x what it would cost to buy local shows up, the dinky company badly wants to be ~~advertising their brand~~ factually listed as being in the pin-and-needle-supply-business, serving the great state of Montana, plus everywhere *else* in the world. Maybe we can use wikiData to solve this problem, and somehow add line-item-specific wikiData metadata-stuff which specifies that the company sells pins plus also needles, that they serve the wholesale as well as export markets, and that their primary area of operations is greater London. But at the end of the day, they basically just need one contact-datum, and one HQ-LatLon.

Contrast with McDonalds, or with Walmart, or with similar global-brands-that-sell-local. We need to have a separate entry in the table for every McD's and every WallyWorld, or the table is basically useless to the readership. Bentonville needs to be listed, as the parent (with contact info), but more important is the local +1-212-121-2121 telephone and the local LatLon. As for specifying the list of products available at walmart... that is another challenge, left as an exercise for the reader. :-)

maintaining the WP:NOTNOTDIR uber-list, using <credit></credit> tags in edit-summaries

Making the scheme work would be hard, obviously, but I'm not sure it would be too hard. Feist v Rural gives us an instant data-feed, which can be used to seed to WP:NOTNOTDIR contents. The bigger trouble is, how do we maintain the list? How do we keep out www.ch33pV1AJra4y00u.com in particular, and the hypothetical mom-n-pop-spamming-service-operators in general, while still dealing sensibly with the thousands of actual mom-n-pop grocers, and the thousands of actual walmarts-and-mcdonalds locations? The key of course, is to create a system of checks and balances, where the self-interest of the list-members will create a self-regulating self-maintaining emergent system. Give... my... creation... life! :-) Basically, I'm imagining that companies on the list will be responsible for doing the WP:FLAGGED reviewing of changes to the list made by *other* companies, in their geographical area. They can farm this service out, if they wish, to a specialist like yourself, or to a volunteer wikipedian like myself.

But if they (or their helpers) are too lax at their reviewing-duties of their neighboring-companies, we delete their own list-entry. This means partly that they should not be too slow... but mostly that they should not make too many mistakes. To encourage pre-emptive promptness, say that we specify each list-entry-member must review one pending-change per week, aka ~fifty per year. We can permit them to, in a one-hour session, review 25 changes all at once, before they hit the max-pcr-credit-threshold. Now, their list-entry is "paid up" for the next 25 weeks aka ~six months. We email them when they have three credits left, two credits left, one credit left... and then when they hit zero, a boht strikes through their entry. Once they hit negative ten or something, we go ahead and remove them from the list. Anybody can perform reviewing-services *for* a particular list-entry, without necessarily being "tied" to the entity in question. When doing some reviewing-work, if you want to give the credit to PinCo, then you would do something like say <credit>PinCo</credit> in your edit-summary, and later, a boht will come along and increment the PinCo credit (unless they are already at the max-credit-threshold). To prevent abuse, i.e. some employee of NeedleCorp doing a bunch of low-quality reviews with PinCo getting the 'credit' for the maliciously-committed mistakes, we don't assign any *blame* to PinCo, but merely block the uid of the saboteur... and if we can figure out they are a sockpuppet of NeedleCorp, possibly block and/or delete them.

Speaking more broadly, this sort of credit-in-the-edit-summary approach could be used for all kinds of stuff. Wikipedians that are acting for themselves, already always get credit, in the form of their edit-countitis, and their username in the edit-history-lights. <grin> But why not make it a rule, that if you are doing paid editing, you have to say something like <coi>Wiki-PR</coi> right in your edit-summary? Besides using that coi-tag for documenting coi, and the <credit>PinCo</credit> thing for meeting fiduciary duties as list-members-in-good-standing, we could do similar things for other reasons. There is already a wikiCup, right? Why not make some special tags, something like <wikiCup>2014 red team</wikiCup>, which will permit wikiCup to become a team sport? Oh, imagine the drama when a rockstar editor for the 2014 red team, switches midway through to using <wikiCup>2014 blue team</wikiCup>!

People could do things like <karma>Smithsonian</karma> to dedicate their efforts to a specific charity. And of course, we could encourage companies to let employees edit while at work... either during lunch-hour or after-hours or maybe even on-the-clock... with edit-summaries that contain <sponsor>$companyName</sponsor> in them. Once a day/week/month/quarter/year/decade, the bohts will tally up the scores, and print on the homepage the wikilympians. Reverted edits count as negative-two-credits (the edit gave you +1 and getting reverted gave you -2 therefore you end up -1 in the hole from your mistake), unless done by yourself, or by someone on your team. *Reverting* somebody on another team counts as zero-additional-credits for your *own* team's score (the reverting-edit gave you +1 editcountitis but +0 sponsorValue). Reverting the other team from your alternative accounts (legit 2nd uids or socks) and/or failing to give credit, also does *not* impact your own team's score. Alternatively, maybe when somebody else reverts your edit, that is simply neg-one to your score: that way, there is no *explicit* extra penalty for getting reverted, beyond losing what you worked on. Because clicking revert is so easy, and getting reverted is so painful, I'd actually like to see reverting have a slight cost for the reverter. First revert per day is free, but every subsequent revert that day costs you one of your own credits, perhaps? Folks that were dedicated reverters would therefore have to build up a large collection of acceptance-review-behavior. This would be a bit of a balancing act, but we can always fall back on the banhammer and other sanctions, if needed.

Anyhoo, although this is more like WP:SKYSCRAPEROFTEXT than my more usual WP:WALLOFTEXT, methinks you might find it an interesting concept. Sorry if your blood-pressure spiked when you clicked 'show' and saw this monstrosity. :-) I'd like to know what you think of NOTNOTDIR as a general idea, and in particular as a means for reducing timesinks from not-yet-notable-companies, who send their generally-not-very-clueful employees here, and end up wasting a lot of their money, and our time. If you don't like NOTNOTDIR, are you really actually satisfied with our current approach, of constantly guarding like a hawk?

The marketing-person of $companyName is the definition of WP:NOTHERE, all they care about is getting their own $companyName into wikipedia. That's not true in all cases; see for instance WT:Articles_for_creation/DUROMAC(M)_SDN_BHD which was instigated by the friend of the CEO of some company in Malaysia. Notability of the corp is borderline due to not enough in-depth coverage with their name in the headlines, but the company has a dozen WP:RS, and friends in high places in Malaysian politics. My reading is that they just fall to the good side of "significant" coverage in RSes. But in the time spent working on Duromac, the person with one-hop COI named clover has been helping the encyclopedia: they recruited a new editor Maartje to help translate something from a German supplier of Duromac's imported equipment, they helped point out a couple articles about Malaysian companies that don't belong in mainspace, they pointed out a couple Malaysian companies that clearly *do* belong in mainspace, and they helped me translate some chinese sources for a USAF-related project. Plus, they helped me find some folks in the AfC system, and try and improve the overall system. So basically, a net win, even if Clover *only* edits Duromac from this point forwards.

But there are two keys here, for why Duromac and Clover were net positives to wikipedia: first of all, Duromac really *was* close to being wikiNotable, and Clover really *is* a helpful intelligent contributor. There is zero hope for $companyName, and $companyRep, because $companyName has zero coverage in WP:RS that I could find (but plenty in multi-level-marketing blogs), and $companyRep has such a strong language-barrier (that doesn't make them unintelligent but it makes their intelligence unable to shine through), plus a severe IDHT barrier (cf 'helpful'), that they will not be contributing effectively to articles or processes elsewhere on enWiki, that I can fathom. They want one thing, and one thing only: to get $companyName into mainspace, so they can get paid. NOTNOTDIR is an attempt to nip the problem in the bud; sure, we'll let you into mainspace, and link to you homepage, and so on. But with restrictions. And with outside categorization. And once you're in, you have to help monitor other companies, and they have to help monitor *you*, else we boot the whole lot of ya. :-)

In the short term, though, we have some significant problems, and I doubt NOTNOTDIR will solve them. If anything, it will exacerbate some of them: hey look, wikipedia is finally letting me put my local pizza place and my friend's d.b.a. garage band and my mom's grocery store into mainspace! Yikes. So I'd like to solve other problems, or at least, *have* an idea of how to solve the other problems, before opening the floodgates. 74.192.84.101 (talk) 00:53, 12 January 2014 (UTC)

Hi there, 74. I'm afraid your suspicions are correct, this is more than I can respond to immediately, or comprehensively. So this reply is based on everything above, and everything below I'll have to get to later. I have read the entirety of your message (again, only above), and my reply is substantial but not exhaustive. Here we go:

On $companyName, it's correct that I think the SOP is good procedure, but the ideal way? I hadn't given it much more thought until about now. In most cases it works, and your hypothetical scenario where an employee tries over and over and over I think is a highly unlikely situation; even big companies have limited budgets, and are more likely to focus on something that works better before too long. I'd wager editors motivated by opinion or ideology are more likely to persist in such scenarios. Now, I realize that I'm thinking more of standalone entries and you are thinking more about spamming EL sections. It takes less effort to do the latter, so it's a different kind of problem, and I'm glad the blacklist exists.

Regarding WP:NOTNOTDIR, I'm reminded of AboutUs.org (with which father-of-the-wiki Ward Cunningham was once involved) which was an interesting idea but seems to have pretty definitively failed by this point. Maybe it could be absorbed like Wikivoyage, and become WMF's 13th official project? As you suggest, it could have a much lower threshold for WP:NOTABILITY—let's say, simply proving that it exists by state registration—and it could be friendlier to WP:SPS. I agree that it should be held to standards of neutrality and not simply become a billboard, however I disagree that it should list every McDonald's location in the world—there were 34,000 as of November 2012! Meanwhile, it's certainly an interesting thought experiment about how it would play out.

How to maintain? The checks-and-balances you suggest is intriguing, although it's difficult to know if it would work and would certainly be a departure from WP:NODEADLINE. Instead, I'd suggest that here is where we just let company representatives edit as they see fit, and volunteers could prune as necessary. As a directory—I mean, NOTNOTDIR—I'll bet stricter content rules could be put into place than is currently possible on Wikipedia. Considering how much WP:RCP is now automated, perhaps volunteers from that project might enjoy doing the same here. However, the question arises: would these company reps have to identify their affiliation? If so, then the possibility of sock puppetry still exists. If no, then it would truly be "focus on the edit, not the editor". It might be a worthy experiment for a project like this. I do think your mechanism is very clever, and I enjoyed imagining it, but it might just be too clever.

The concept of credit-in-the-edit-summary is a really interesting idea. Seems like it would have to be purely voluntary, and it might also be a good idea to have OTRS verify where companies and organizations are involved. Meanwhile, I'd be wary of using to enhance the "gamification" of Wikipedia. Competitions also lead to corner cutting, especially on a site where editcountitis is a thing. Who knows what would be the PEDs of Wikipedia?

As a parting thought, although I think the long-term health of Wikipedia requires the involvement of individuals in roles beyond the idealized classic model Wikipedian, I would still like to privilege the volunteer in some manner, which is one thing I do like about the Bright Line. However, more about that later in the week. Best, WWB (talk) 18:08, 13 January 2014 (UTC)

Going through your points in reverse order... yes, the classic-model-wikipedian, as the idealized utterly-neutral scribe-historian who concentrates on mirroring-the-reliable-sources-without-undue-weight... this is a valuable thing. It is also a pretty rare thing. And in particular, I've recently started to see *why* our editor-count is declining. A big part of it, methinks, is the ("relatively") new wikiCulture of revert-on-sight-unless-perfect. However, another big part of it, is the increasing pressure of groups with COI... and here I'm talking about religious-COI (including atheism as a kind of religion), and friend-of-the-band-COI (they're so awesome and yet they have no wikipedia article? I'll fix that right now), plus the usual nationalist/politicized stuff. Traditional paid-editing self-interest, and the dark twin thereof spam-COI, and other sorts of paid-COI, are getting sneakier over time, as wikipedia's readership keeps growing, and our standards stay strict. But in general, despite wiki-pr and similar fiascos, those *paid* sorts of COI type6 and type5 we have more of a handle on, than the other kinds of conflict-motivated-cliques. Walmart doesn't spam wikipedia; they don't want the bad press. Most companies don't!

So to my mind, people that are working for company X, and are getting paid by company X to insert neutral factual info about X and the products-of-X into wikipedia, *are* helping improve wikipedia. The employee is putting new facts in. The company is *motivating* the employee to do that work. It hardly matters if the employee is a W2 in the marketing department, or a form-99 consultant on a short-term contract, or a service provider on net 30. (Okay not true. It does matter what department the employee works in: I'd way rather have the tech-writer or the accountant entering neutral just-the-facts information into wikipedia, than somebody who works in marketing and was actually *hired* for their ability to add positive spin.)

I see companies like this, just-the-facts plus we-ain't-spammers-and-don't-wanna-be-perceived-thataway, as purely an asset to wikipedia: they are interested in their wikipedia-info being updated and correct, and they are not interested in being seen as spammers. From there, it is just a small step for them to be seen as Great Heros Of The Open Content Internet Revolution... or at least, Good Citizens Of. ;-) Out in the real-o-verse, we already have plenty of companies that sponsor the UnitedWay, and companies that sponsor adopt-a-highway, and companies that do this, and companies that do that. Wikipedia is more valuable to those companies than some sign next to a highway, or some press-release from a charity. Wikipedia is a top-ten-website in the known universe. But we cannot ask companies to give us cash; there's too much of a risk of corruption, first of the neutrality of our existing classic wikipedians, and second, of the content in mainspace.

Paid editing, which is overseen by a neutral classic-wikipedian-or-indistinguishable-variant-thereof editor, is a *very* indirect bribe... or rather, a charitable in-kind donation. Instead of taking cash-donations from companies, methinks the trick is to come up with ways to ask companies for paid-volunteer-time, rather than direct bribes: we host their corporate-history and their product-specs in a neutral trusted reliable online knowledge base, which hundreds of millions of people visit every month. In exchange, they provide us with some paid-volunteers from amongst their employee-base, who help police for vandalism (adopt-a-highway in the real-o-verse becomes adopt-an-article in the wikiverse). They provide us with some paid-volunteers who help act as wikiCops, fighting for neutrality (neighborhood watch in the real-o-verse becomes NPP/RCP/CVUA/TW/Stiki/Huggle/etc duty in the wikiverse). Last but not least, they provide us with some paid-volunteers who help staff the noticeboards, including CorporateM's COI-edit-request-noticeboard (see below). Capitalism is the engine, if only we can figure out how to harness it without compromising pillar two and pillar three.

And that, methinks, is pretty easy: everybody is largely neutral about *something*. Say we have a person who works for company X in industry XX and country XXX. They have a religion, and they have a political stance, and so on. But they aren't a stamp-collector. When this editor is helping a couple other folks, engaged in a content-dispute about stamp-collecting, and the other people are from Y YY YYY and Z ZZ ZZZ, our original editor X XX XXX is basically ideal for the role. Especially if, we don't just call in X XX XXX by themselves, but we also additionally call in a dozen other editors A AA AAA through L LL LLL to help decide the dispute. Where can we get all those editors? Pretty easy: we need volunteers, and companies willing to pay those volunteers, to do their wiki-jury-duty (just like most companies have to pay employees to perform real-life jury-duty in the real-o-verse).

crEdit-summaries. Getting back to the thread: yes, identifying with an edit-tag would be voluntary, of course. WP:NOTCOMPULSORY applies to all things on the 'pedia. As for the idea that edit-tags would need to be verified through OTRS, that's likely impossible on a per-edit basis. We can always have userpages which verify that "User:Sam_at_Walmart has verified with OTRS they work for Walmart" in the same way that people have their WMF-verified identities on their userpages now. But there's no room in the edit-summary for an 80-byte SHA3 hash-signature. The edit-summary will just say, <cred>walmart</cred> if Sam happens to want walmart to get the credit (if any) for that particular edit. Sam may *also* log in from home, on their own time, in which case it is up to them whether to use <cred>walmart</cred> or instead say something like <cred>unitedWay</cred> or maybe <cred>unitedMethodist</cred> or even <cred>voteCameron2016</cred>. They can also give credit to their local pizza parlor, or to their friend's business, or to their brother's garage band, or to their favorite movie-star, or to their dog. Whatever floats their boat.

By the same token (or the converse token or somesuch), if I do *not* work for walmart, I can still say <cred>walmart</cred> in my edit-summaries. Because that's a corporate trademark, in theory walmart corporation could actually send a cease-and-desist letter to my user-talkpage, if they became unhappy with me giving edit-summary credits to their trademarked name. In practice, though, I doubt they would bother: if my edits are non-encyclopedic, then they can be reverted, and it is no skin off walmart's nose.

Software is a drug: there is a reason they call us *users* after all. So, to my mind, there *will* be performance-enhancing-"drugs" to help companies improve their weekly crEdit-summary-rankings: wiki-tools that are designed to make editing faster, easier, more productive. Imagine if instead of the VisualEditor being funded on a shoe-string, and shoddily tested, and then pulled from deployment due to horrendous flaws, we had GE/walmart/mcdonalds/amazon/google/microsoft/oracle/etc putting out products to speed up wikipedia editing. :-) This is no small part of the reason I like crEdit-summary tags... they will quickly dwarf the WMF's monopoly-by-default on paid-devs who are out to improve wikipedia's ancillary editing-tools. That means we can fire the VisualEdtor folks (or more likely that they will be poached away by the big names mentioned above), and save our WMF-entrusted-donation-money for other stuff. Plenty of companies already want *reading* wikipedia and *searching* wikipedia to be easy, and have built e.g. android apps for that readership-related-purpose, but almost none of them want editing to be easy right now; my suggestion is that we incentivize companies, so they want to make editing easier.

As for NOTNOTDIR, interesting, thanks, I'll definitely look into Ward's stuff. The checks-and-balances thing may be too clever, or more bluntly, may have some holes though which one can drive a truck. That's part of the trouble. It is difficult to think of these things in the abstract, and get them right. Luckily, we already have something *close* to that NOTNOTDIR scenario: there are already plenty of List of ((insert product type here)) articles on wikipedia, usually requiring each entry have a dedicated product-page elsewhere in the 'pedia. More on this in a moment. As for listing all 34k McDonalds locations in NOTNOTDIR... why would we *not* list them all? WP:NOTPAPER applies. Feist v Rural means we can basically suck in the yellowpages of various cities, immediately, in most jurisdictions (if we want to do it thataway... rather than organic growth which might be wiser from a build-up-the-companies-who-pay-employees-to-maintain-stuff). Certainly, I agree that we would probably not have a single huge honking List of all legal entities with 34k mcdonalds locations and 10k walmarts and a million little pizza shops. That's not going to be particularly useful to the readership. But what *is* going to be useful to the readership is the List of eating options in Boise, Idaho. We already *have* a bunch of lists like that, actually... but with stricter inclusion-criteria than NOTNOTDIR envisions. But we can start with what we have, and grow from there, methinks.

$companyName is not hypothetical... they first created a page on their home-language-wiki a couple/few years ago, but in the last fourteen months, they have been methodically trying to get into mainspace here. Once a month on average. They gave up for a few months at one point, so it's really more like, once every week-and-a-half. They create a page, then contact somebody to ask for the page to be reviewed. They are persistent, if they get no answer. And in a way, there's nothing wrong with this approach, right? If you have a startup, and your startup has some notability, but not quite enough to demonstrate wikiNotability, we *want* you to check back in every month or so. But this company is an MLM, so there are a lot of employee-owned websites: BobAndLarrysFinanceNewsDotCom, that sort of thing. These are the websites being used as references, in the attempted article. They won't fool most wikipedians, but sooner or later, they will fool somebody. More to the point, each of the 9+ individual wikipedians that have reviewed the attempted-article on $companyName, have done it anew. Now that it's out of the AfC queue temporarily, it will be "new" again once it is recreated. It just seems like a waste; if we had NOTNOTDIR, then we would *list* the $companyName, and have a centralized location to add sources related to them (plus for them to add BobAndLarrysFinanceNewsDotCom as a source *one* time before it was crossed out as non-WP:RS by one wikipedian permanently). So it all ties together, in my mind, at least.

Anyhoo, appreciate your good-natured response to my ocean of text. :-) Take your time going through it, of course, and if you get overwhelmed, just say "skipping this section" and I won't have a tantrum. Well, *much* of one. <grin> I'm about to leave you a new ocean, with the rough-draft-ExecDir proposal. That one has more of a deadline than NOTNOTDIR and solving COI and implementing crEdit-summaries, so if you want my unvarnished advice, leave this ocean alone for now, and please read the upstairs ocean instead, about on-wiki open-noms for the time-sensitive ExecDir selection-process (which... if we make it work even halfway well... can later be re-purposed for Other Things). Thanks much for your time, and thanks as always for improving wikipedia. 74.192.84.101 (talk) 23:48, 13 January 2014 (UTC)

the big picture: harnessing the power of self-interest to Improve The Encyclopedia

Returning to your main big-picture point, about the long-term relationship between the WMF, DahCommuhnity, articles in mainspace, individual editors who have self-interest concerning their friends/family/work/charity/tribe/etc, and the legal entities which often underly such things...

friends == band && syndicate
friends == neighbors && theirBiz
family == relatives && theirBiz
family == ancestors && theirBiz
work == boss && marketingDept
work == customers && theirBiz
charity == preacher && theirChurch
charity == NGO && theirFunding
tribe == president && theirNation
tribe == ethnicGroup && theirCulture

These are probably the top ten sorts of self-interest, which can lead to biased editing. I've seen pride in the friend's band, pride in the town you live in, pride in family-members, pride in ancestry, pride in the workplace, paid editing for customers, pride in one's religion (especially proud are adherents to the noodly appendage), pride in non-profit foundations, pride in patriotism, and pride in culture. The bright-line rule only applies to #6 and to a lesser extent to #5. :-) You think the bright-line rule is too much, whereas for me, the bright-line rule just helps delineate the cases most likely to keep their POV/COI secret, at least, if there are no consequences to doing so. The BL rule is that consequence, and why most paid-editors disclose, methinks.

p.s. There is an "eleventh" sort of COI, which is some kind of hobby divorced from other pursuits... gardening is a good generic one, since almost nobody is in the "gardening business"... see also the article on breakfast which is not in fact dominated by restaurant-owners, but just people that like breakfast-foods. Some editor that is paid to be a commercial pilot, and has family members in various businesses, ditto for their friends, but don't happen to know anybody in the stamp business, is a good concrete example. They like to spend their weekends reading about and collecting British postal-stamps of the 1800s, and contribute thereto here on wikipedia. This is the only "fully approved" sort of COI we have; the other ten are frowned upon, to a lesser or greater degree. Of course, the eleventh-sort-of-COI is also reasonably rare, and most people that come here to work on 1800s-UK-philately-topics also contribute to bands, towns, stuff related to their relatives, stuff related to their ancestors, (maybe) work, (maybe) customers, religion, politics, nation, culture... not to mention teevee, music, etc. 74.192.84.101 (talk) 00:53, 12 January 2014 (UTC)

using WP:DTBRD to solve the bottleneck-problem with the Bright Line

it's not always easy to find a Wikipedia volunteer Yes, correct. In cases where the company-article is not well-trafficked... ahem unlike British Petroleum ahem... you often run into the situation where you (meaning you-the-person-with-COI) place an edit-request on the article-talkpage, which is perfectly legitimate, and then Nothing Ever Happens... so when you come back with a new edit-request, the old one is still just sitting there. However, that's not a problem with the BL in my book. Here is what I recommend, as the way to keep things moving, *while* still following the spirit of the BL. It's a bit more work, but not *that* much, and it maintains a clean COI-history-audit-trail, so when somebody worried about COI happens along, they can get a feel for how well the COI-encumbered-editors have been toeing the Big Bright Line. :-)

find WP:RS that justifies an edit
write neutral just-the-facts prose
place an edit-request on the article-talkpage ... there is a special template used with WP:FLAGGED which can help draw more notice
wait a few days (either 3 or 6 or 9 ... start with 9 and ratchet it down notch by notch iff nobody responds to the sequence of edit-requests)
if nobody has made the edit, leave a note at WP:TEAHOUSE asking for help
wait a bit longer... I usually say 3 additional days
if nobody has raised objections, but nobody has come to help, make the edit directly in mainspace yourself
make sure to specify right in your edit-summary that you have COI and are briefly stepping across the BL
you can even use the new&improved <coi>CorporateM</coi> tags, mentioned in the skyscraper above
finally, and this is crucial, leave a second talkpage-note, replying to your own edit-request, saying since nobody objected, you did it yourself
if somebody reverts you (plenty of people watchlist mainspace but not the talkpage), follow the usual WP:BRD procedures

This is basically just a modified WP:BRD cycle, with a bit of beating around the bush beforehand, to chase away the COI demons. For short, call it the DTBRD approach: (pre-)discuss teahouse bold revert discuss. Given you have some kind of COI, pre-Discuss (add edit-request to talkpage), teahouse (explicitly seek help if nobody shows up), bold (if *still* nobody shows up assume good faith and stuff your edit direct into mainspace), and so on. Does this scheme address your worries about the waiting-for-a-neutral-helper bottleneck to efficient editing? The editing-with-COI-encumberance rhythm is pretty clean, this way.

You show up to the talkpage on the 3rd, and make an edit-request (ER#1).
You come back on the 6th, hit the teahouse for ER#1, and create ER#2.
You come back on the 9th, push ER#1 into mainspace yourself, and hit the teahouse for ER#2, create ER#3.
You come back on the 12th, discuss the reversion of ER#1 on the talkpage, mainspace ER#2, teahouse ER#3, create ER#4.
And so forth... changes to mainspace will lag reality by a few days, but hey, wikipedia is for the ages, not especially for up-to-the-second contents.

Since you can combine your efforts into a short block of time, and then move on to a new page (possibly the "same" COI and possibly a different COI), this pipelining approach is decently quick. Do you like it, dislike it, can you improve it, or is it broken beyond repair? 74.192.84.101 (talk) 00:53, 12 January 2014 (UTC)

IP, This may be of interest to you. There is no need for a complex process for COIs to request and escalate correction requests, when a simple wizard would do. The trick, as it is with everywhere on Wikipedia, is finding volunteers to man it. I don't think the time-delay is as much of an issue as it may appear to be, but rather consistency is the root of the problem. If PR reps knew for certain they would get a response and what their position was in the queue, they would be less antsy about it. CorporateM (Talk) 01:20, 12 January 2014 (UTC)

Hello CorporateM, thanks for wading through my wall. :-) I saw you over at The Haus Of Drmies, once upon a time; you can call me 74, please, that's my jersey number. WWB's position is that *any* request-n-escalation mechanism is too much red tape, and that the best approach is passive review... in other words that COI folks should make edits directly to mainspace, unless somebody calls them on it. That is called WP:BRD-with-COI-encumbrance of course, and is *too* simple for my tastes, when strong COI is involved. Your approach is that, instead of posting an edit-request to the article-talkpage, and then waiting endlessly for somebody to notice, COI-editors should be provided with some kind of COI-edit-request-noticeboard.

But as you point out, the problem with that approach is personnel: who is gonna pay attention to that new noticeboard? Arguably, nobody. My scheme is not much different: I suggest that COI editors post their edit-request on the article talkpage, wait a bit to be WP:NICE, and then if nobody responds, get help with making the edit at WP:TEAHOUSE. This I've dubbed WP:DTBRD. Your approach sounds similar, but replaces 'T' with your COI-edit-request-noticeboard, which I guess we can call WP:DNBRD or WP:NBRD, depending on whether you think the edit-request should be put onto the article-talkpage prior to being requested at the noticeboard.

So how about this. Do you have any objection to the requests submitted via the COI-edit-request-noticeboard interface, getting sent straight to the teahouse as "questions"? That way, we get your cool interface-page-layout, *and* we solve the staffing-problem. Creating a separate COI-edit-request-noticeboard with *separate* staff just balkanizes things beyond reason; but there's no reason we cannot have a COI-specific front-end-interface, which uses the regular TEAHOUSE infrastructure on the back-end, for staffing-purposes. Does this make sense? 74.192.84.101 (talk) 21:43, 13 January 2014 (UTC)

I think that would basically solve that particular complaint. Put Template:COI editnotice at the top of Talk and change the Request Edit template so it tells them to post at Help if un-answered in 10 days (with a provided link). CorporateM (Talk) 22:41, 13 January 2014 (UTC)

Hey, neat template. :-) Right now, the message says this: "Individuals acting on behalf of this person or organization are strongly advised not to edit the article. Click here to request corrections or suggest content, or contact us if the issue is urgent." When you hit the edit-request link, it takes you to the create-new-section edit-window for the Template_talk:COI_editnotice talkpage, which is kinda clunky. Instead, it would be nice if one were taken to the User:CorporateM/request_edit pages (or similar-looking-pages in an official namespace), and when an edit-request was submitted, if it was automagically pushed to the teahouse. Are you on the same *page* here with me, about how the workflow ought to go, as it were? ;-)

There is also another template that I've seen, which includes the usernames "has a close connection to the topic" which is helpful if the person with COI forgets to disclose their connection every time they do anything. Template:Connected_contributor_multi is the thing, see Talk:SORCER for a live example. I'm actually working (in volunteer capacity as the neutral classic wikipedia scribe-historian who mirrors the sources religiously :-) with the SORCER folks, and with a few other groups suffering from COI-encumbrance. Is your COI_editnotice talkpage monitored by enough people now, than I should start using that with anybody who needs such a thing? p.s. WWB, if you are tired of the orange bar of doom from CorporateM and myself gabbing about COI templates, feel free to give us the boot and we'll go blab about them elsewheres. :-) — 74.192.84.101 (talk) 00:17, 14 January 2014 (UTC)

Connected contributor is a good way to add a disclosure that remains on the Talk page even when the individual strings are archived. I know of at least a few editors including myself that use COI EditNotice. There was a discussion to use a bot to apply it to the Talk page of every article about an organization, which was implemented on a trial basis, but it sort of lost steam, not for any one reason. I don't think every Request Edit should go straight to Teahouse. The first stop should always be the Talk page of the a article and then advertising the request should generally be intended to direct attention there - to the article Talk page - which should always be the hub of such activities. CorporateM (Talk) 23:24, 14 January 2014 (UTC)

history of the Bright Line

You bring up a bunch of projects, only some of which I'm vaguely familiar with. You also skip some.

WP:CO-OP, one effort to assist (but not with a "strong focus" ... a strong focus on what exactly?)
WP:HELPDESK, simple questions can be asked here (but not with a "strong focus" ... a strong focus on what exactly?)
WP:COI/N, one can sometimes find help here (but not with a "strong focus" ... a strong focus on what exactly?)
WP:PSCOI, was a good step (but not with a "strong focus" ... a strong focus on what exactly?)
WP:AFC, a focused effort, and "we know how well that has worked." (ahhhh, but I do not know... I'm tangentially involved with same... please elucidate/elaborate the good & bad & ugly)
WP:Drafts, not mentioned? This is the new&improved AfC, still taking shape as we speak. Good? Bad?
WP:ASSIST, not mentioned?
WP:RETENTION, not mentioned? not a strong focus, but has 150 members, most willing to be helpful as individuals
WP:TIAC, not mentioned? :-) There used to be a mediation-cabal, who were generically helpful folks, albeit now officially over
WP:TEAHOUSE, not mentioned? this one is the key help-system nowadays, I'm surprised you left it out
WP:INSERT_SOMETHING_HERE, what *do* you want to see?

If you would care to, I'd definitely appreciate your capsule summary of each of these things, whether they were/are good ideal, the key mistake if any, the key advantage if any. Feel free to go into depth if you like, but a couple sentences would help me (e.g. helpdesk was a good idea, but the focus is on answering librarian-lookup-questions, and since the librarians never come *help* edit articles, nor have time to deeply understand a topic-area they are not already familiar with, so requesting help with neutrally phrasing one's COI edits is usually pointless, effort wasted). 74.192.84.101 (talk) 00:53, 12 January 2014 (UTC)