Comment by maccard
9 days ago
> Essentially, you're given free rein to edit as you see fit with an encouragement to make many uncontroversial edits & befriend normal editors. You do not know who else is part of the project and do not interact with them on Discord. It is very antisocial in that sense.
Genuine question - where does the line between “group of people who are interested in a topic” and “shilling” lie? I don’t envy the arbitration group for having to try answer that.
Here's the applicable policy:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Canvassing
Generally, it is unacceptable to notify people of a structured discussion in a non-neutral manner to get them to advocate a specific point of view in that discussion.
This can be applicable to notifying specific groups of people if only groups likely to have a specific viewpoint were notified.
It's also generally considered worse to give these notifications secretly or off of Wikipedia.
In this case, it would be acceptable to notify a project related to Israel and a project related to Palestine of discussions related to the Israel-Palestine conflict.
But its not acceptable to only notify the project related to Palestine.
It's also not acceptable to instruct people in your notification to vote in a certain way. r/Palestine giving these instructions is a big problem.
The fact it's "secret" and offsite also plays a role. Collaboration on Wikipedia itself shows you didn't have malicious intent, so unintentional violations usually result in warnings the first few times it happens. The fact you need to join a Discord server hidden from others is a clear signal to any reasonable person that the group is against the rules.
The line is clear and the arbitration group has banned some participants, the challenge is detecting who participated.
I think the answer is that neither is an appropriate way to contribute to Wikipedia, and so a group of people interested in a topic who, knowing that their intent (politicizing controversial articles, rather than their particular valence) is unwelcome, take steps to avoid being recognized as part of that group, is pretty clearly not acting in good faith.
A shill gets a paycheck. Without one, I would call it activism or something.
So the /r/palestine group are paid but not actually told what to do?