Is Wikipedia for Sale?

http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/is-wikipedia-for-sale

by ohjeez • 13 years ago

143 45 13 years ago

motherboard.vice.com

mjn3• 13 years ago

One mitigating factor (though not as mitigating as I'd like) is that PR fluff, at least of the direct-editing variety (versus placing positive media articles that then get cited in Wikipedia) tends to be most successful on the articles people read least. If a country hires a PR firm to insert propaganda into an article on an ongoing international conflict, it's much more likely to get removed or modified, vs. if an obscure company hires a PR firm to fluff its Wikipedia article. Likewise a major company like Microsoft or Google will have a harder time fluffing its article than the obscure company would, because more people are watching and editing the Microsoft/Google pages. One area where it comes up a lot is that a bunch of academics' articles are total fluff written by the university communications department, but also, nobody reads or cares about those articles.

There are admittedly areas where that isn't true, articles with many readers but relatively little editor interest. Some tourist destinations are like that: lots of people may google for them, but there often isn't very much to write about them in good, cited sources. So they get relatively little legitimate editing, and lots of travel spam. I personally make it a point to systematically go through the pages on Greek islands and island villages once a year or so to clear out the hotel/car-rental/etc. spam.

ilamont• 13 years ago

The fact that companies, politicians, and other interests are paying PR people to edit or create articles shouldn't come as a surprise. Take a look at almost any living famous person's profile, and chances are you'll see a large amount of spin and fluff. And let's not forget the 2012 PR scandal involving a trustee of the Wikimedia Foundation UK and a Wikipedian In Residence who were "allegedly editing Wikipedia pages and facilitating front-page placement for their pay-for-play, publicity-seeking clients."(1)

PR also makes it into Wikipedia through sanctioned channels -- namely mass media citations which are considered "reliable sources", even though the content of the citation comes from a press release or helpful PR person.

This brings up an issue related to Wikipedia's policy that requires substantial third-party coverage for new articles. It is a flawed test for the importance of a subject.

Press coverage tends toward the sensational, visual, beautiful, controversial, current, language-specific, and easily explained. If a topic doesn't meet those criteria, it probably won't be covered by the press -- unless the topic in question has some well-connected PR firm or publicist pushing for it.

Another issue with press coverage is "established" media is contracting. There aren't as many editors assigning stories, or reporters crafting unbiased profiles of companies, organizations, topics and people. This has an significant, indirect impact on the types of topics that can be sourced according to Wikipedia's official rules.

1. http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57514677-93/corruption-in-w...

mjn3• 13 years ago

This brings up an issue related to Wikipedia's policy that requires substantial third-party coverage for new articles. It is a flawed test for the importance of a subject.

I don't think it's best interpreted as a test for the importance of a subject, although I'll admit that some Wikipedians do view it that way, and some policy pages (especially older ones) seem to do so as well. To me the more defensible line is just that it's a test of whether there exist sufficient sources for an article with its information properly cited to be written at all. If there are halfway decent third-party sources, one can be written, of some kind of level of quality, transitively dependent on the quality of those sources. If there are no decent third-party sources at all, then there is no basis for writing an article, since Wikipedia articles are supposed to be verifiable, i.e. everything they claim should be cited to something other than Wikipedia itself (and not the personal knowledge of the Wikipedian who wrote the article, either).

I wrote a longish essay arguing this in some more detail, that the 'verifiability' guideline has basically swallowed the 'notability' guideline in practice. But this leaves a gap of things that are clearly notable, but lack good sources about them. In that case Wikipedia is stuck between not covering a notable subject (bad), or covering it in an article that isn't properly cited (also bad). http://www.kmjn.org/notes/wikipedia_notability_verifiability...

The reverse case, where a not-really-notable subject is covered because there are sources, I feel is less bad. If the external world is writing about a subject, then imo it's fine that Wikipedia summarizes what they have said about it. At the very least, many such things (like celebrity missing-child cases and vaporware tech companies and whatnot) are meta-notable for the media attention.

swalling3• 13 years ago

"Take a look at almost any living famous person's profile and chances are you'll see a large amount of spin and fluff."

Citation needed.

According to recent traffic reports,[1] some of the most popular biographies of living people recently are as follows:

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorde (449,871 views) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malala_Yousafzai (362,657 views) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miley_Cyrus (342,994 views)

Other popular bios include Barack Obama and Ted Cruz. Obviously popularity of these swings heavily toward recent news items in most cases.

Now, I wouldn't argue against the assertion that fans of these celebrities have written in some amazing fluff in these articles. But you'd really claim that these articles have been spun by PR people? Looking at the history and the content, I seriously doubt it.

Now, if you don't care for how Wikipedia's reliance on third party sources bends content... well, there's not much anyone can do to help you. That's a problem of the media environment Wikipedia exists in, and you haven't really proposed a viable alternative to relying on secondary source material. The way we correct for bias in sources is to use more sources, and be selective about ones we use, taking in to account the fact that some are highly unreliable.

In the end, if you have a problem with how Wikipedia relies on certain sources or what it says on certain articles, there's an easy solution: edit the damn thing. I don't particularly care about the Miley Cyrus article, but if I did, I'd be doing something about it. Wikipedia's best defense against fluff, spin, and PR influence is for smart people (like Hacker News denizens) to participate.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2...

DanBC• 13 years ago

edit the damn thing.

TokenAdult makes a useful post to this thread about some of the problems of editing Wikipedia.

People pushing a POV really want that pov to appear, but other people just don't have the persistence to keep slogging through it.

HarryHirsch• 13 years ago

It it were just that then Wikipedia would be fine. I mean, this is how the trade press has operated since time immemorial. Companies issue press releases, and the trade journals publish stuff.

But Wikipedia has a serious problem with "competing interests". One high-profile occasion was when a Wikipedia admin with much clout was employed by some New Religious Movement and then proceeded to edit in favour of his employer. Another was when a BP representative edited the article on his own company. Also: Gibraltarpedia and Monmouthpedia. On all three occasions a substantial fraction of Wikipedia editors found nothing wrong with this.

Science found out why you can't have this when medical researchers were funded by the tobacco industry and proceeded to publish their findings without being open where they got their money from. Wikipedia needs to wake up, but that isn't going to happen anytime soon.

alecdbrooks2• 13 years ago

I enjoyed the article for the interesting story and its description of how PR manipulation of Wikipedia works, but its speculation on how the problem is getting worse was entirely unsubstantiated.

It's plausible enough that efforts by Wiki PR and similar firms are growing, but the article didn't offer any evidence or attribute claims like "In a few years, a significant percentage of Wikipedia’s content could be spam." Given that Wiki PR seems to have had little success getting articles reinstated, it may be that the problem will be held at bay now that Wikipedia contributors have been alerted.

th3iedkid• 13 years ago

one evidence was from a contributor who quit.Being volunteers not everyone likes to be only cleaning someone's mess.Besides scale of Wikipedia might grow quite big for the 10,000 odd admins to manage and who know how seepage might happen!Also Wiki-PR was one, who knows how many more are left!

alecdbrooks2• 13 years ago

Also Wiki-PR was one, who knows how many more are left!

That's exactly my point. From the article, we don't know if there are enough companies doing this to pose a serious threat to Wikipedia, yet it suggests there is.

tokenadult2• 13 years ago

My experience as a Wikipedian suggests that Wikipedia's administrators need to be much more alert than they have been to the possibility that the Wikipedians motivated by money (or by ideological bias) will stay with the project and persist in making edits contrary to Wikipedia policy. They edit more articles, and edit in greater numbers, than most admins guess or notice. And the point-of-view-pushing editors often inject so much wikidrama into discussions about how to improve articles that they drive away the participation of conscientious editors who know reliable sources about the article topics.

A current example is the article on Rupert Sheldrake,[1] which has recently been subjected to vigorous edit-warring, perhaps as part of a publicity campaign by followers of Sheldrake. (I just saw a new book by Sheldrake at a library yesterday, and perhaps that book's publication set the timing for the editing push.) But there are examples like this all over Wikipedia, and, again, I think most casual users of Wikipedia massively underestimate the percentage of articles that are edited mostly in the interest of pushing a point of view for commercial or ideological reasons.

The article kindly submitted here says, "Anyone can edit Wikipedia, but only a carefully vetted few are promoted to admin status on the site." And that is laughable. Describing the current group of Wikipedia as "a carefully vetted few" does violence to the English language. Nothing has ever been careful about the process for checking the background of administrator candidates or choosing which candidates become administrators. There are some very, very, very good administrators on Wikipedia (just as there are many very helpful everyday volunteer editors), but there are other administrators who are power trips to maintain conduct contrary to Wikipedia policies for building a good, free online encyclopedia. The Vice article submitted here does, at least, link to an Atlantic article[2] reporting that Wikipedia's rate of bringing new administrators on board is slowing. At least some of the administrators have been caught taking payoffs for editing articles to publicize the persons making the payoffs, so it will take more than just the current administrators being more alert to fix this problem on Wikipedia.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rupert_Sheldrake

[2] http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/07/3-char...

kops3• 13 years ago

I look at wikipedia as a cafe where intellectuals come and chat.

Do I want to continue listening to this chatter? Hell Yes. Nothing else comes even close in terms accessibility.

Will I stake my life on the information taken from wikipedia? Absolutely not. I wouldn't even cite it as a reference anywhere.

tokenadult2• 13 years ago

If intellectuals were the only people chatting on Wikipedia, I would like Wikipedia even better than I like Hacker News.

agent00f2• 13 years ago

There are generally two types of "editors" on wiki. The talent who contribute content, and the bureaucrats who do administration. Some of first type are intellectuals, and most all the latter are anything but.

Much of the internal conflict within wiki exist because the power rests with the bureaucrats but they often lack the domain expertise to appreciate much less write the material people come to the site for. So whenever there's contention over content, it quickly turns into contention over people, and it's not hard to figure out who wins in such a conflict.

twelvechairs• 13 years ago

I now check for (archived) talk pages and deleted articles on any article I'm looking at seriously. I trust that wikipedia users will raise major issues. I don't trust that the admins do a good job of sorting it out. perhaps they should restructure to make this kind of use easier and more normal rather than claim the (ever changing) main article as definitive

ta_24278• 13 years ago

My experience as a Wikipedian:

- provide content until an admin revert said content without explanation.

- try to engage discussion with said admin and get referred to a wp policy that actually states this admin was wrong.

- point the admin to his error and engage in wikipedia conflict resolution.

- said admin sneakily changes said policy to confirm his views, and unleash a small army of followers to intervene to support him in conflict resolution and revert my edits. get banned

- circumvent ban to protest, get banned for circumventing the ban. repeat until other admins take notices and discuss my case in secret channels.

- find out that this has happened before quite a few times, escalate to head of wikipedia. get dismissed.

- do as others did before, replace a specific high profile page with your story, revert the replace. now your story is there in wikipedia history for future investigators to find.

- never contribute anything to wikipedia ever again, use wikipedia as a better than google search engine for official websites until duckduckgo.

agent00f2• 13 years ago

This mirrors my own experience on Wiki, which dragged on for months after admins were caught removing content for internal political purposes and alienating tens of thousands (according to objective metric) who used those pages. Conflict resolution there is centered almost entirely on people-drama and almost never on content or _anything_ of substance which is rather the point of an encyclopedia. This is plainly evident from reading any of their notice/resolution boards which are often little but favor-currying.

Wiki-lawyering (citing policies in purposefully cryptic and usually erroneous ways) is rampant, and all these problems exists because admins aren't appointed due to domain expertise (or any sort of expertise for that matter) but being in the good graces of other admins. This conflicts with most wiki content editors, who are often domain experts rather than bureaucrats/politicians. I ended up being banned for doing a reasonably popular reddit AMA about all this, and apparently violating the rule to never talk about wiki administrating outside of wiki.

In sum, the system only works because talented and intelligent people want to create encyclopedic material, and there generally aren't enough admins to stymy this.

grecy• 13 years ago

That was my experience too.

I now run my own niche wiki, and it's shocking the number of people that come across it and say

"Oh man, I tried to contribute to wikipedia and ended up having all my stuff reverted and I got yelled and I kicked out. I'm never touching wikis again."

I personally think Wikipedia is giving open wikis a bad name, and I go out of my way to tell people my wiki is nothing like wikipedia in that regard.

Hello71• 13 years ago

- circumvent ban to protest, get banned for circumventing the ban. repeat until other admins take notices and discuss my case in secret channels.

translation: be a dick

- find out that this has happened before quite a few times, escalate to head of wikipedia. get dismissed.

be a dick

- do as others did before, replace a specific high profile page with your story, revert the replace. now your story is there in wikipedia history for future investigators to find.

be a massive dick

- never contribute anything to wikipedia ever again, use wikipedia as a better than google search engine for official websites until duckduckgo.

be 5 years old

megablast• 13 years ago

The best thing you can do is write this up, with details. Put it on the net.

belorn3• 13 years ago

said admin sneakily changes said policy to confirm his views

How can actions be sneaky when the history tab is just right there. If the policy got changed without discussion, revert it and open up a new subject on the talk page. If no one comments in a few days, then reach out to people through rfc or the village.

This is true for most community projects. Send a push request to the kernel and get denied by a gatekeeper? Talk to the community. Got a policy issue with debian? Talk to the community. Wikipedia is a community project, plain and simple. You got to interact with the community if you want to fix something.

circumvent ban to protest, get banned for circumventing the ban.

Well yes. you do indeed get banned for circumventing a ban. If I get banned on HN, any circumvention of the ban will result in me get more banned. Same goes for any community, website with logins, and any social groups for that matter.

Wikipedia has a system for lifting bans. If that doesn't work, send a email to the foundation. If that too doesn't work, then ... blog about it. at some point, either the community agree with you or it don't.

rodgerd• 13 years ago

I think most casual users of Wikipedia massively underestimate the percentage of articles that are edited mostly in the interest of pushing a point of view for commercial or ideological reasons.

Yup. I read a dicsussion recently around an article about Piers Anthony's obsession with pedophilia in his fiction, and a number of people were surprised none of the controversy around e.g. his scenes with 5 year olds havign sex with adults was mantioned on Wikipedia. It's buried behind a couple of layers of Talk pages of course, likewise the whitewashing of Eric Raymond's.

Wikipedia is easy for obsessive rule-lawyers to show the information they want to show.

belorn3• 13 years ago

Like with any such claims, I opened up a tor-browser and looked if the claim can be supported by sources. Demanding sources, is the one rule that Wikipedia can never drop, in the same way that HN can't drop rules against spam. If HN became a cesspool of spam, HN would die. If Wikipedia dropped the requirement for sources, it would die.

Checking the wikipedia talk page of Piers Anthony, not a single editor is brining a source to the discussion. A google search gave a hasty reference in a respectable article (http://www.teleread.com/ebooks/amazon-defends-pulls-self-pub...), a newspaper columnists article (http://litreactor.com/columns/themes-of-pedophilia-in-the-wo...), and a bunch unverifiable blog posts.

So... its a fair chance to include such statement if someone used those sources to support such edit. Without any sources however, any such edit should not be on wikipedia. If you want to complain about whitewashing, please leave out discussions where a bunch of opinionated people are simply voicing their opinions but can't be bothered to do a simple google search.

debacle• 13 years ago

What's so bad about Eric Raymond?

belorn3• 13 years ago

Wikipedia should indeed be more alert to paid editing. Its commonly discussed in the village, Jim's talk page and other places (blogs, podcasts and so on). So far no definitive decision has been reached, and for good and bad, paid edits are evaluated on the basis of content rather than the motives behind the edit.

However, the admin process is not exactly an easy one ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:RFA_Guide). Added that administrators are viewed under harsher light regarding civility (they can and do get banned for actions that non-admins don't), and the refresh rate of new administrators is indeed slow.

At least some of the administrators have been caught taking payoffs for editing articles to publicize the persons making the payoffs.

Did those administrators retain their administrator status? If so, then the community is working as intended. Just because HN successfully ban people for spamming on hacker news, it doesn't make HN a failed community. Why would wikipedia have failed because they too managed to ban people acting in contrast to the project?

tommorris2• 13 years ago

I'm an admin. My RfA went swimmingly (97 supports, 1 oppose, 3 neutrals). But even though it went well, it was still nerve-wracking. Much more nerve-wracking than any job interview I've ever had. A week-long process where everyone is looking for examples of when you've fucked up and asking questions to try and trip you up.

I can understand why people are reluctant to run for adminship.

avty• 13 years ago

Wikipedia is already morally sold to PR interests.

yuvipanda• 13 years ago

Can you expand on why/how?

spanishcow• 13 years ago

The problem is as old as mass media. The solution is the same. Make it illegal for a company pass advertisments as casual forum comments, wikipedia articles and generally forbid misleding the general public to believe that actual advertisments are part of other natural interactions. (This doesn't means that this practices will stop but that them can be punished)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advertorial#Legal_issues

GhotiFish2• 13 years ago

That is a very good idea. I would love to see astroturfing be punishable.

glesica• 13 years ago

Why not just make the terms of service say something like "you agree not to edit the encyclopedia for money, and you agree not to pay anyone else to do so, etc." and then start suing people? As a bonus, no one could claim ignorance once the lawsuits started flying, everyone in the PR industry would know about it. The courts seem intent on giving more and more credence to ToS, might as well use that for something good.

swalling3• 13 years ago

There are related terms in the current Terms of Use, namely that you may not edit "With the intent to deceive, posting content that is false or inaccurate" and that also disallowed is "Attempting to impersonate another user or individual, misrepresenting your affiliation with any individual or entity, or using the username of another user with the intent to deceive;"[1]

So in other words, deliberate falsehoods or manipulation by PR people or paid agents that hide their affiliation with a company is already a ToU violation.

1. https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Terms_of_Use

mjn3• 13 years ago

That's true, although I think it would cause a huge controversy to sue someone over it (rather than just banning them). It implicates all sorts of questions that are already controversial in the free-culture community, like to what extent ToS should be legally enforceable as contracts. Even worse if the editor is from outside the U.S., and controversy over extraterritorial application of U.S. law gets implicated.

guynamedloren• 13 years ago

This is why I think a GitHub-style model is more suitable for certain open, collaborative information - it's simply less prone to abuse. The editing and submission process is significantly more structured than a wiki, which prevents attacks like this.

tommorris2• 13 years ago

Wikipedia has "pending changes" which is a bit like a pull request type model: you make edit and it sits in a queue for a reviewer to approve.

It's running on some pages on English Wikipedia. I'd love to see it rolled out to a lot more pages. On some language versions of Wikipedia, it's running on all pages: Polish, for instance.

nl• 13 years ago

I'd love to tackle this problem using "Big Data" techniques.

It's pretty clear from this story and from things like the Morning277 sockpuppet investigation[1] that the manual style of investigation to so time consuming and slow that it limits the ability of Wikipedia to fix problems like this. While tools like CheckUser[2] help, it seems likely that a lot more of the "legwork" associated with the investigation could also be automated.

At the core, much of the work is network analysis, and that is something computers are better at than humans.

[1] http://www.dailydot.com/lifestyle/wikipedia-sockpuppet-inves...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:CheckUser

swalling3• 13 years ago

Wikimedia also provides several sources of data and infrastructure for hosting potential tools like this, if you'd like to take it on. In addition to public data streams like RecentChanges and public API access, we provide hosting infrastructure in the form of Labs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikimedia_Labs). Not to mention the fact that anyone can write and submit a MediaWiki extension that could get deployed to Wikipedia itself.

One related piece of infrastructure is the automated tagging of edits. There are already several tags automatically applied to edits with a suspected conflict of interest regarding linking or autobiographies (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Tags).

ilovecookies• 13 years ago

Funny that no-one mentioned the fact that the page had a brazilian flag. Musicians has the right by law to veto biographies and personal information written about them in brazil, this also applies to brazilian webpages. It could be understandable that these people would make out a big chunk of the customers for a company as wiki-pr hence the page's Portuguese translation.

sgentle• 13 years ago

I'm surprised that Wikipedia hasn't found a way to integrate and regulate paid PR people. It's naive to think they're going to go away just because it'd be better if they did. Why not work with them instead?

PR people could publicly register themselves as such and, in exchange for extra scrutiny, have a chance to prove themselves as ethical and willing to follow the rules. These people would then build a reputation as very valuable "white hats", willing to help people and companies with their Wikipedia page without compromising the integrity of the encyclopedia.

They wouldn't be able to guarantee "we'll make sure you look good on Wikipedia", but then nobody can really guarantee that anyway. Instead, they could offer to ensure the page is as unbiased as possible, help protect it from vandalism, and generally improve its quality and detail.

This could lead to a large and very motivated base of editors with a significant personal and financial incentive to do the right thing (or lose their white hat status) and sabotage the financial incentives that currently motivate the black hat firms.

Is Wikipedia for Sale?

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