I strongly agree that we should learn our lessons from this incident and seriously try to avoid any repetition of something similar. In my view, the key lessons are something like:
It’s probably best to avoid paid Wikipedia editing
It’s crucial to respect the Wikipedia community’s rules and norms (I’ve really tried to emphasize this heavily in this post)
It’s best to really approach Wikipedia editing with a mindset of “let’s look for actual gaps in quality and coverage of important articles” and avoid anything that looks like promotional editing
I think it would be a big mistake for one’s takeaway from this episode to be something like “the EA community should not engage with Wikipedia”.
Two more general lessons that I would add, which have nothing to do with the Vipul incident:
Avoid controversial and highly political topics (editing any such topics makes you much more likely to have your edits reverted, get into “edit wars”, and have bad experiences)
Avoid being drawn into “edit wars”. If another editor is hostile to your edits on a specific page, it’s often better to simply move on than to engage.
I’m actually working on a similar project www.oka.wiki, focused on funding Wikipedia translators (which we train on using Wikipedia, and hire in countries with low cost of living). We currently have ~10 FTE and already published hundreds of articles.
We initially got some pushback from the community, but so far it seems like the solutions we have implemented (around increasing transparency, more thorough quality checks) have helped.
I’d be happy to share more about the project and our experience if that’s helpful. I was planning to write a post in a couple of months about it once I have gathered more data/experience with this.
I strongly agree that we should learn our lessons from this incident and seriously try to avoid any repetition of something similar. In my view, the key lessons are something like:
It’s probably best to avoid paid Wikipedia editing
It’s crucial to respect the Wikipedia community’s rules and norms (I’ve really tried to emphasize this heavily in this post)
It’s best to really approach Wikipedia editing with a mindset of “let’s look for actual gaps in quality and coverage of important articles” and avoid anything that looks like promotional editing
I think it would be a big mistake for one’s takeaway from this episode to be something like “the EA community should not engage with Wikipedia”.
Two more general lessons that I would add, which have nothing to do with the Vipul incident:
Avoid controversial and highly political topics (editing any such topics makes you much more likely to have your edits reverted, get into “edit wars”, and have bad experiences)
Avoid being drawn into “edit wars”. If another editor is hostile to your edits on a specific page, it’s often better to simply move on than to engage.
I’m actually working on a similar project www.oka.wiki, focused on funding Wikipedia translators (which we train on using Wikipedia, and hire in countries with low cost of living). We currently have ~10 FTE and already published hundreds of articles.
We initially got some pushback from the community, but so far it seems like the solutions we have implemented (around increasing transparency, more thorough quality checks) have helped.
I’d be happy to share more about the project and our experience if that’s helpful. I was planning to write a post in a couple of months about it once I have gathered more data/experience with this.
I strongly endorse each of these points.