User talk:Buster7/Sandbox-Peach

(edit conflict)Was BP's culture, management, and safety record significantly worse that other major oil company? That is the question we should be trying to answer in WP' I disagree. The question we editors should be asking ourselves is this: Is this an on-line encyclopedic article about the company BP or is this an Annual Report to the Stockholders written by the company BP. Every editor should ask themselves "How am I helping or hurting the reader". BP had a bad safety record, one of if not thee worst in a "safety-record challenged" industry. If our reader didnt know that coming into WP to read the article, they should know that when they leave. ```Buster Seven Talk 15:41, 31 March 2013 (UTC)

The question we editors should be asking ourselves: Is this an on-line encyclopedic article about the company BP or is this an Annual Report to the Stockholders written by the company BP.

• "They" have economic incentives that other WP editors simply don't have. In fact, there are definite dis-incentives to getting involved in an article likre BPor Chevron
• What is Proper Public Policy.
  • Draw our community attention to these users
  • bring them and their actions into more public visibility.
  • raising public awareness
  • raising public consciousness
  • Maybe the public will take action.

SV and MC

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:SlimVirgin#Thanks

Thoughtful conversation about the situation

MC on Conflict of interest

• "I agree we do a piss-poor job of dealing with agenda-driven editing, but I at least have faith that amateur POV-pushers will be handled if one invests the time to bring the situation before a group with a sufficiently high clue level. On the other hand, I have zero confidence that true conflicts of interest, paid editing, or corporate PR influence will be addressed effectively by any of Wikipedia's mechanisms, including ArbCom."
• "To your last point, I do see a big difference between a freelance editor who happened across material on a BP website and a corporate PR group providing us with material. It's the difference between a physician scouring the medical literature under his/her own initiative, vs. a physician being presented with a pre-selected set of journal articles by a drug rep. These things do matter when it comes to credibility. I get that Wikipedia is different because of our open-editing model, but to me that only makes it even more imperative to think seriously about handling these sorts of conflicts of interest." MastCell Talk 19:42, 22 March 2013 (UTC)

comments

Please remember...that we are all volunteers working towards the same purpose, and while disagreements may arise, there is always time to stand back and attempt to understand one another. Wait! I take that back. Most of us are volunteers working toward the same purpose, and while...."

• What I don't understand is how editors can support the Corporation (pick one) and the obvious drive to "clense any article" over the maintaining of Wikioedia's good name. ```Buster Seven Talk 08:48, 1 April 2013 (UTC)
• Sanitizing the article so that it is fit for human consumption.
• hyjacking the article
• ....those that denigrate the collection of editors that support our reader.

I, JytDog, like to contribute to Wikipedia

"...companies pursuing their goals don't harm everybody else (i.e. good regulation is essential)."

I also believe that US society is rife with communities walled off from each other by the cognitive bias of community members. We don't get our news from the same places, and people unreflectively pass among themselves half-truth jokes and claims that make their side seem wonderful, and the other side seem buffoonish at best and evil at worst. "Our country faces unmitigated disaster if the Other Side wins." [1]. This retreat into bubbles is destroying our ability to have rational discussions about many topics and to strike reasonable balances that can effectively address the real problems we face. The fact that, as Harry Frankfurt has said, "our society is awash in bullshit," does not help. I believe that clearly presented, unbiased information is an antidote and that Wikipedia is part of the solution when the five pillars are followed.

I strongly recommend Harry Frankfurt's book, "On Bullshit"[2], as well as his follow-up book, appropriately called "On Truth." In "On Bullshit" Frankfurt says bullshit is speech intended to persuade, without regard for truth, and he says: "Someone who lies and someone who tells the truth are playing on opposite sides, so to speak, in the same game. Each responds to the facts as he understands them, although the response of the one is guided by the authority of the truth, while the response of the other defies that authority and refuses to meet its demands. The bullshitter ignores these demands altogether. He does not reject the authority of the truth, as the liar does, and oppose himself to it. He pays no attention to it at all. By virtue of this, bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are."

Strategy

...to be honest it seems to me that you keep doing things to undermine that goal.... If the pro-BP people don't like the section on the COI controversy, why would you fight that battle for them?... And if you think a section is a waste of time, why comment on it? And really most importantly, when the pro-BP people keep throwing the work back on you, why do you accept that, and not demand that they produce sources that refute you? It is a little hard to watch... my suggestion is to draft content, with really excellent sources that cannot be shot down, and write the content carefully with a NPOV, and then just add it to the article. IF it gets reverted, then go to Talk and ask for reasons for the reversions, and put the work on the reverters. This follows WP:BRD and I think is a much more effective way to get movement on a page. (talk) 16:25, 2 April 2013 (UTC)

"If the pro-BP people don't like the section on the COI controversy, why would you fight that battle for them?" Because my feeling was that they're right, that the stuff on Wikipedia was too "inside baseball," too picayune in the overall scheme of things, when compared to the environmental rampages that have made BP a symbol of a company that despoils the environment.

I don't have a "strategy" at all. I'm not "anti-BP" ... . I do think the article is skewed pro-BP, ... the problem is that the environmental disasters and legal consequences are downplayed. That should be the focus of editor efforts, IMHO.

I don't think you are 'anti-BP' - I was only talking about the kind of content you appear to want to get into the article, as per your own words. Be more strategic! We all have limited time, and we all want to use our time well... I have read the Talk page carefully, not just for the content but for the dynamic. And the dynamic that I see is that the pro-BP editors are very good at appearing authoritative and making demands - some of which are ridiculous - this dif in particular was an extreme version of what they do: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:BP&curid=947750&diff=548268505&oldid=548241595 That comment is really absurd, and the point is to bury you with work and distraction that is irrelevant to the content you want to add. That is what several of them do over and over again. It is a useful strategy for keeping content out of an article and keeping the ones who want to introduce it distracted. I/we/they all want to make the article great. If there is a problem it is not Arturo, but rather the editors who are working so successfully to exclude negative information from the BP article. Arturo has done nothing wrong, and the discussion of COI is a red herring - a distraction from the real issue, which comes down to working things out in Talk with other editors. Jytdog (talk) 16:59, 2 April 2013 (UTC)

far too much time on Wikipedia in recent days, and I think that you are going to find me totally absent going forward for the simple reason that I'm not a paid editor, it's not my job to edit here ...I am appalled how PR has worked its way into Wikipedia, but as you will be finding in coming days, unlike them I am not paid to impact upon them or their clients, so I am going to have to take a brief sabbatical. (talk) 17:08, 2 April 2013 (UTC)

look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:SlimVirgin/Ghostwriting#Concerns_raised (talk) 17:14, 2 April 2013 (UTC)

you could ignore Arturo's requests (which would not be very nice, but you could do it) - it is the pro-BP wikipedia editors who put his stuff in the article. Can you explain to me what Arturo has done wrong? Or do some of the pro-BP editors have a COI that I am not aware of? (talk) 17:19, 2 April 2013 (UTC)

Did I say he did something wrong? I'm talking about a process and a culture at Wikipedia that allows COI editors to inhabit and in some cases drive discussion on talk pages. Read the COI board discussion and that essay I've linked to. (talk) 17:25, 2 April 2013 (UTC)

II really hope you think about being more strategic. If you think a bit, you will see that it is really obvious, that if you describe what you intend to do using inflammatory language, the people whom you know are on the other side from you are primed to hate whatever you end up writing and are more likely to actually look for ways to kill it. Right? And your chances of having a successful negotiation with them are harmed, before you even start. You keep shooting yourself in the foot with that kind of stuff, and I hate to see it. (talk) 21:18, 2 April 2013 (UTC)

I do not believe that cordiality is going to win the day here. Civility, yes, I'm a stickler for that. But I happen to believe that it is necessary to be direct in the BP situation. I don't believe that even the most friendly kind of schmoozing is going to result in an improvement of the article when there are WP:OWN tactics employed with such heavy-handedness. Certainly Gandydancer is as pleasant and congenial an editor as I've encountered, and he or she has been trampled upon. Core 21:27, 2 April 2013 (UTC)

Added thoughts

• - We dont need to do battle/comment on every front.
• - We should not battle/comment against each other.
• - Its a bad sign when the COI editor asks for a specific editor when making suggestions.

"My corporate team and I..."

What I have trouble with is when a paid employee suggests an edit change, provides the favorfable references of choice, and then says, basically, "My corporate team and I have spun and sanitized and consulted 10 dictonaries so that the words we have used impart exactly what we want tne reader to think about US and here is the way we want the new sentence to read-----> "Blah, blah, blah, blah." O! and one more thing. Do this ASAP!"