Requests for comment/Interlinking of accounts involved with paid editing to decrease impersonation

This is a subpage; for more information, see the Requests for comments page.

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Statement of issue

We commonly see paid editors pretending to be established Wikipedians such as here and here.

Proposal

We require those involved with paid editing on Wikipedia to link on their user page to all other active accounts through which they advertise paid Wikipedia editing business.

This will means:

a) if we discover an account on a site such as Fiverr or Upwork which state they are involved with paid editing of Wikipedia

b) but yet there is no account on Wikipedia that discloses that account

c) we can more easily get these types of sites, some with whom we currently have good relationships, to remove those accounts.

d) this will help those here who are being impersonated to stop the impersonation

Example

If the above users were required to interlink the accounts they uses on Wikipedia and their Upwork profiles we could verify the claim that they are an admin or the admin in question. This will make legal's job easier when they are involved in follow up.

Support

• Support as proposer. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 15:24, 13 September 2017 (UTC)
• Support makes sense. Pundit (talk) 15:25, 13 September 2017 (UTC)
• Support Jcc (talk) 15:38, 13 September 2017 (UTC)
• Support Boing! said Zebedee (talk) 15:52, 13 September 2017 (UTC)

Oppose

1. I would support if it were stated to be not retrospectively applied, be time-limited and inapplicable to clean-start users who have made good faith attempts to comply with policy. It seems unfair to force a user to forever declare themselves as a paid editor and link to their "corporate" accounts if they happen to have been employed to do so years ago; we do not require ex-WMF employees to do this. I suggest there is a reasonable time-limit of one year after paid edits have ceased. --Fæ (talk) 15:58, 13 September 2017 (UTC)

   User:Fæ this is for people still involved in paid editing. If a person is no longer involved in paid editing than they should not have accounts on Upworks / Fiver still offering to do paid editing of Wikipedia should they? Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 16:01, 13 September 2017 (UTC)

Discussion

[1] I didn't know it was this blatant (in terms of selling their services/souls if they have any)...agree w/ above proposal--Ozzie10aaaa (talk) 13:30, 2 September 2017 (UTC)

That page used to say that "Andrew C." was an admin. There is an editor here who used to be an admin by that name but I think this upworks account is just impersonating the person as they say this is not them. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 13:38, 2 September 2017 (UTC)

This should be an RFC, not a Meta RFC, no? --MF-W 14:17, 3 September 2017 (UTC)

Thanks Excellent point and will move. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 15:40, 3 September 2017 (UTC)

The first of your two examples is a dead account; the second is a sign-in page. {also, to emit valid and accessible HTML markup, please only indent your first reply, to any uninedented comment, with one colon]. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 15:59, 13 September 2017 (UTC)

Ah cool. Good to see upworks finally took down the account that appears to have been pretending to be an admin on EN WP. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 16:02, 13 September 2017 (UTC)