Talk:Liberapay

Rename and clean-up of the “Content” section

On February 5, User:Bensin made significant changes to the article. One of the changes is a split into new sections, and another is a big expansion of the list of notable Liberapay users. The latter is particularly questionable, as its purpose is unclear and its end result is a bit messy. On February 14, User:Yae4 further expanded the list.

Although some of the changes are questionable, they don't appear to have been made in bad faith, so I worked to improve them. I renamed the “Content” section and reworded its first sentence, because I felt that it wasn't fully clear what the word “content” was referring to in this context. I trimmed the list of notable users by removing the ones which don't have their own page in the English Wikipedia, because that's an obvious and objective criterion for estimating notability. I also removed the “XMPP” entry added by Yae4, because it was a bit misleading, as XMPP isn't a single project or organization. I replaced most links to Liberapay profiles with links to each project's website, because a link from a project's website to a Liberapay profile confirms that profile's legitimacy, and because linking to lots of Liberapay profiles looks more like advertisement and less like neutral information. I removed the internal links inside the descriptions of the listed users, because they were extraneous and made the list more difficult to read. Finally, I reworded most of these descriptions to try to make them as basic and simple to understand as possible, even for non-technical readers.

On February 15, Yae4 undid my changes without providing any explanation as to what they thought was wrong with them, so I restored them. On February 16, User:Alalch_E. undid my changes again, ordering me to propose them on the talk page instead. This behavior goes against WP:ROWN, and is arguably WP:WAR. I see no reason to start asking for approval to modify an article that I have been maintaining for years, nor to document future changes in such painstaking detail as this one. I will now restore my changes once again, because I still think that they are significant improvements, and I don't see how they could be considered biased towards Liberapay. Changaco (talk) 09:45, 17 February 2023 (UTC)

Whenever I see paid editors restoring their changes when challenged, like you did, I will always revert, and direct them to the talk page. As a paid editor in relation to this topic, whenever you are reverted on this article, however lacking in detail the rationale may be, you should not revert back, but need to describe your changes like you did now. The description helped me understand the changes better and I am fully convinced now that they are uncontroversial, and should not have been reverted. But you're making a problem out of the fact that they were and accusing editors of misconduct, just making this more tense than it should be: Learn to deal with being reverted in an constructive way, even when the reverter made a mistake. You don't have to describe your uncontroversial changes on the talk page each time like you did now, but once you are reverted, then you have to. —Alalch E. 10:06, 17 February 2023 (UTC)

I am reverting again for the following reasons:

• The wiki-links are not extraneous. They give shortcuts for Type information when a reader is not familiar with a project in the list. Bensin and Yae4 supported including them: (Special:Diff/1137603781, Special:Diff/1139229120 and spent the effort to do so.
• Liberapay and Liberapay organization were removed from the list by Changaco, with no explanation or justification.
• XMPP was added because it has an article, and web search showed some associated people use Liberapay.
• I have not spent the time to consider appropriate list inclusion criteria, but I wiki-searched one Changaco-deleted item, FreeTube, and it also appears in List_of_software_using_Electron, so inclusion criteria are not "obvious".
• External links to project sites or Liberapay or both: Bensin set a pattern, There are arguments for either or both. Again, I haven't spent the time to consider.
• Notability: Unless there are other reliable sources, such as French citations, to be added, there is some doubt whether this article would survive WP:RFD. A long list of non-Liberapay external links confuses this assessment. This is a reason I have not spent time on other issues above.
• For the record, my edit comments and messages at User_talk:Changaco were clear enough: I disagreed with the reversion by Changaco, and the burden of justifying the changes is on the Conflicted editor. FYI, There is no WP:OWNER of the article.

-- Yae4 (talk) 12:45, 17 February 2023 (UTC)

The reason for linking to each project's/organization's entry on Liberapay is to back the claim that they have an account there. Liberapay in turn links to the respective Github repos as a verification of that accounts authenticity. I see no point in linking from this Wikipedia article to the respective project's/organization's web pages because if one wants to know more about them then a reader is expected to visit the Wikipedia articles about them. As for the selection of entries to the list, I reviewed projects and organizations in order of "most popular" on Liberapay's web page and then included those that I at the moment believed I could motivate to be notable here. I may have missed entries that I am unfamiliar with. Feel free to expand the list with notable projects. --Bensin (talk) 12:29, 18 February 2023 (UTC)

Thank you for explaining how you picked the projects you added to the list, but we still don't know why you decided to expand the list in the first place. (I'm not saying it was wrong to do so, I just think it would help if you revealed your reason.) Changaco (talk) 14:02, 18 February 2023 (UTC)

The reason for why any wikipedian updates an article is usually that they want to improve it. The reason in this case, expanding the list, was to give readers of this Wikipedia article a quick overview of some notable projects that use Liberapay. --Bensin (talk) 16:44, 18 February 2023 (UTC)

I will restore my changes one by one, so that Yae4 can no longer use the excuse of disagreeing with some of them to revert all of them. Changaco (talk) 15:05, 18 February 2023 (UTC)

I object to your repeated statements similar to this. See WP:GOODFAITH particularly section WP:AOBF. -- Yae4 (talk) 15:22, 18 February 2023 (UTC)

Okay, putting that aside, it's reasonable to remove the entries without an article. Giving readers "a quick overview of some notable projects that use Liberapay" is precisely accomplished by not including non-notable entities. We realy want a quick overview here, not an exhaustive listing of everyone and everything using Liberapay. —Alalch E. 17:24, 18 February 2023 (UTC)

@Changaco: If you are the founder of Liberapay (as you stated here) I suggest you don't edit this article directly but rather propose changes here on the talk page. This because there is a conflict of interest. Per that guideline "COI editors are strongly discouraged from editing affected articles directly, and can propose changes on article talk pages instead." and that "Editors with a COI are sometimes unaware of whether or how much it has influenced their editing." There are many other article on Wikipedia to which you can contribute without this being an issue. --Bensin (talk) 19:23, 18 February 2023 (UTC)

@Bensin: I concur. They were also informed at their user Talk page and have ignored it. -- Yae4 (talk) 19:45, 18 February 2023 (UTC)

MakeUseOf citation and summary, if any

MakeUseOf specifically was discussed at WP:RSN once.[1] Comments on the owners, Valnet, have been raised a few times. The MUO discussion was thin (3 participants) but the highest rating was Marginal, and mine was Unreliable. I feel it should be avoided. -- Yae4 (talk) 19:41, 20 February 2023 (UTC)

Sources for the list of notable users

@Alalch E. in response to Special:Diff/1140511769: the connection of a GitHub account to a Liberapay account doesn't provide stronger confirmation than a link from the project's website or source code to the Liberapay profile.

In the context of a Wikipedia article, I think linking to Liberapay profiles as proof incorrectly assumes that the reader already trusts in Liberapay's legitimacy and in its ability to ensure the legitimacy of the profiles on its platform.

Also, I maintain that linking to lots of Liberapay profiles makes this article look more biased in favor of Liberapay. On a project's own website, Liberapay is often only one of multiple proposed ways to donate.

That said, I could see the value in linking to both a project's website and its Liberapay profile, using the format “As of February 2023, the "Donate" page of GIMP's website includes a link to the "GIMP" account on Liberapay.”

Ping @Bensin.

--Changaco (talk) 16:38, 21 February 2023 (UTC)

@Changaco:Thanks for the ping. I reverted you saying that I'm ambivalent about this, but I understand your reasoning and actually I tend more toward agreeing with you... this is such an ultra-obscure dispute that it veers on the absurd. Both options of providing verification are acceptable, but it honestly seems normal not to flood the article with self-sourced links. As you say this is to prevent an impression of low credibility of the article imparted on a random reader. As someone with an external connection to the subject it's understandable that you want your entity's Wikipedia article to look credible, but I also want the article to look credible even if on this superficial layer of human perceptions. Therefore I don't see an incompatibility between your paid editor status and the interests of the project with regard to either option. I am against implementing both simultaneously as that would almost be Wikipedia:Citation overkill. The connection of a GitHub account to a Liberapay account doesn't provide stronger confirmation than a link from the project's website, but it provides about the same level of confirmation. All of this said: I have a request for you. Entertain the thought that the current state is not really that bad. Maybe you're blowing it out of proportion, even if your core idea is valid. But it might be such a marginal problem that it isn't worth protracting the dispute. I don't think that it diminishes the article's credibility significantly, especially after the citations have been bundled. Maybe the best way out of this is simply to give up. Kind regards—Alalch E. 16:57, 21 February 2023 (UTC)

​​​ Taking a step back, we are supposed to prefer secondary, independent, reliable sources for citations. If no secondary, independent sources can be found that say X, Y, and Z projects use Liberapay, then maybe we should drop the list of notable customers. I haven't looked yet, but do the American Express, Paypal, or Patreon articles have a list of their notable customers, with only self-published, primary source citations? I doubt it. Do they even have lists of notable customers? Hmm -- Yae4 (talk) 20:58, 21 February 2023 (UTC)

@Yae4: It does makes sense to remove the list. Maybe it enhances readers' understanding of the topic a little bit, but its inclusion is still mostly WP:INDISCRIMINATE... despite the entries being notable entities—one could almost say "so what if they're notable, is the information that a crowdfunding platform has customers with Wikipedia articles itself worthy of note?" An average reader presumes that a noteworthy entity like Liberapay has "many" customers; some of them, statistically, are almost guaranteed to be "important". Maybe others will have more thoughts on what the purpose of this list could be. And, no, naturally, other articles such as the ones you listed do not have such lists. —Alalch E. 17:09, 22 February 2023 (UTC)

IMHO article is in bad shape

I saw this at ANI and AFD where I weighed in with "weak keep". Looking at the article, while it does not have anything blatantly promotional or non-neutral, this article is very weak on independent sourcing and the kind of coverage that would be of interest to readers. Instead it is full of stuff that Liberapay would like to say about itself. Possible over-involvement by declared-COI Changaco was raised at ANI. What this article needs is to find 1 or 2 more substantial coverages of this topic by independent sources and start summarizing what those sources say. Some really good "involvement" would be to look for an include some independent substantial coverage of the topic. Sincerely North8000 (talk) 21:25, 21 February 2023 (UTC)