Talk:Editorial guidelines

Downside of alternative products being out of scope

The risk that companies will astroturf the wiki with product recommendations is a very real concern. I wonder if there's a balance though that can prevent astroturfing while keeping consumers informed. The very first thing a consumer will think when reading any of these anti-consumer stories is "alright well how can I avoid this?". It's easy in some cases. If I search "repairable laptop" or "repairable phone" then I get earnest & valuable results. If I search "3d printer without cloud services", then all I get are articles, videos, and Reddit posts about the controversy of the 3D printer manufacturer who is further leaning into cloud services & none of the 3D printers without cloud integration that I know of as a hobbyist 3D printer. Astroturfing is also a huge issue outside of the wiki: it's routine for even reviewing websites & journalist websites that were once reputable to have "10 best X" guides that are just full of product placement from the highest bidder. Even as a power user, I have sometimes spent weeks tracking down reputable alternatives for hardware / software, carefully avoiding obscure ads that would trick the layman, let alone how difficult it would be for the average consumer. The wiki mission is to provide consumers "information they need to recognize and fight back against new forms of exploitation", but if all we do is give examples of anti-consumer behavior without the information necessary to locate alternatives that do respect their rights as consumers, are we truly providing them the information they need to fight back against consumer exploitation?

I don't think it will be easy, but I wonder if it's viable to rectify this in at least a narrow facet by relying on a small group of known, trusted (in the same way as moderators) domain experts to curate peer-reviewed alternatives with extensive & reproducible/verifiable testing (e.g. sniffing traffic to make sure a "LAN-only" device isn't phoning home). And probably not on specific company pages, but on broader "Laptops", "Mobile Phones", "3D printers", pages. User:DrewW (talk) 07:33, 19 January 2025 (UTC)