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Examples of Jess Wade's more outrageous abuses of Wikipedia as an advertising/promotional platform

Posted: Fri May 14, 2021 9:45 am
by Jake Is A Sellout
Due to the nature of her biographies, and her basic reason for being a Wikipedia editor, it's safe to say all of Jess Wade's work on Wikipedia is promotional, to one degree or another.

Her biographies are largely if not sometimes exclusively sourced to primary or non-independent sources. And her basic reason for writing the biographies, is to bring exposure to people she believes have been wrongfully overlooked by the traditional science media.

For these two reasons alone, it's perhaps unsurprising that you never see a negative fact included in a Jess Wade authored biography. Other than, of course, the times when Jess Wade's idiocy means the person she has written about becomes associated with a Wikipedia controversy.

I make no claim that she is doing this deliberately, much less for money, but if you know a bit about how Jess Wade does her Wikipedia editing, you sometimes wonder. She has the perfect cover now. Just slip an advert or two in there. Either a whole biography, or an aspect of one. Who would notice?

Her preference for communicating over private channels (which tbf may really only be so that she can avoid being criticised for how dumb she often is), and her habit of taking requests directly from subjects over said channels, does leave her open to accusations of nefarious intent. She is naturally, too dumb, and too full of herself, to see the danger.

But general stupidity is, as always with Wade, still the most likely example of why she sometimes doesn't seem to show any awareness at all, spectacularly so, of the Wikipedia rules about not using the site for promotion or advertising.

Re: Examples of Jess Wade's more outrageous abuses of Wikipedia as an advertising/promotional platform

Posted: Fri May 14, 2021 10:15 am
by Jake Is A Sellout
11 May 2021

Sara Sawyer

You'll be pleased to know, in these times of ours, that this woman has, according to Wikipedia.......
developed a fast, cheap and easy COVID-19 screening test
Woo hoo!

You may be less pleased to realise that the source for that claim, is a press release from the University of Colorado Boulder. Which is, of course, the employer of Sawyer, and in whose lab this test was developed.

You will hopefully be even less impressed to realise that if there were any lingering doubts as to the potential for this to be seen as abuse of Wikipedia for commercial purposes, you will note from that same press release that....
The research team, with support from Venture Partners at CU Boulder, has created a spinoff company, Darwin Biosciences, to commercialize the test. 
We still can't be certain that Wade isn't just being a compete idiot here, but it doesn't look good for her, that in the sentence immediately before that sentence about the test, she had noted......
Sawyer co-founded the bioscience company Darwin Biosciences in 2020.
......but if you hadn't done what I did and actually checked the sources, you'd have never even noticed the connection between these two factoids. Was that deliberate?

What was pretty funny here, was that it was the press release, not Wade, that actually did note this test does have one drawback - it is "slightly less sensitive" than the presumably slower, more expensive and more difficult alternatives. But you're going to be so pleased that they have a good reason why this isn't a problem.

According to the makers of this faster, cheaper, easier test, it's not sensitivity that matters, its turnaround. And of course.....
Those who test positive could quarantine themselves as they await confirmatory testing, Sawyer said.
Isn't it brilliant, that Wikipedia can be used to get these public health messages out there? Don't you feel so much better now, knowing that UC Boulder has your back?

I'm not suggesting anybody these claims aren't true. I'm merely pointing out that it hasn't seemingly even occurred to Wade, that this is exactly the sort of situation where Wikipedia's preference for independent sourcing, would be useful.

Not slavishly repeating the claims of people with a vested interest in making those claims, is what separates the encyclopedias from the marketeers.