Wikipedia editors, locked in battle with PR firm, delete 250 accounts

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/10/wikipedia-editors-locked-in-battle-with-pr-firm-delete-250-accounts/

by Jtsummers • 13 years ago

238 110 13 years ago

arstechnica.com

jedanbik• 13 years ago

Couldn't help but laugh when I saw the Wiki-PR affiliates page: https://www.wiki-pr.com/affiliates/

OUR AFFILIATES MAKE BIG MONEY.

<...>

Just leave us your name.

CJefferson• 13 years ago

I would be extremely surprised if (quoting from article) it is only "as many as several hundred" accounts are being used by people paid to edit Wikipedia. I know at least a dozen people who have a wikipedia account just to edit articles to make where they work look good (I suppose it is not their full time job, but it is the only reason they edit wikipedia).

jff3• 13 years ago

Is it unethical for, say, a company's "media guy" to update Wikipedia if his company releases a major new project? "On October 1, 2013, Initech released version 2.0 of its flagship product IniIDE Pro(tm)" I think there's a line to draw between adding some pertinent information to keep the page from being outdated, vs. fighting to keep all negative information off the page.

phdp2• 13 years ago

If it's really newsworthy, wouldn't someone else not related to the company do that?

chris_wot13• 13 years ago

Borderline really. There are clear conflict of Internet guidelines for the project, whilst that isn't an egregious example, I would counsel anyone working for a company to avoid editing any articles related to their company. The PR mess you might cause (even for innocent edits) could well outweigh any gains you may have achieved.

The best thing is to participate on talk pages. Even there, be careful not to respond to inflammatory comments or trolls.

dm22• 13 years ago

It's fine to add information.

It's not ok to remove negative information.

What about listing a company under the product or category page or placing subtle advertisements on the page? An example would be Nest adding links to their wikipedia to the Thermostat wikipedia page. Is that ethical? Is it legal? Is it against wikipedias Terms of Use?

sbov• 13 years ago

Depending upon how far the PR firm goes to circumvent their block, couldn't they be brought up on hacking charges? Could the companies that hire them be found culpable too?

rhizome6• 13 years ago

couldn't they be brought up on hacking charges

Which ones?

DanBC4• 13 years ago

They've been told not to edit wikipedia. They're continuing to edit wikipedia.

That seems pretty clearly like accessing a computer system without the owner's permission, which feels like it should be a standard bit of law.

dragonwriter4• 13 years ago

18 USC Sec. 1030(a)(4), presuming, of course, that the positive public exposure that they are selling to their clients is "anything of value", which the fact that they are selling it to their clients for money pretty clearly indicates it is.

warfangle2• 13 years ago

The ones which made it a felony to violate a website's terms of use. AKA: the same ones that the US Attorney threatened Aaron Swartz with.

pseudonym• 13 years ago

I sure hope not. As much as I'd love to see something happen to these guys, the precedent that would result would be as far-reaching as it would be terrible.

parennoob• 13 years ago

Their list of services https://www.wiki-pr.com/services/ looks like a corporate shill's sick mockery of Wikipedia's community standards.

I hope every single one of their spurious sockpuppet accounts get deleted.

pvnick• 13 years ago

In addition, here is their leadership team (https://www.wiki-pr.com/leadership/):

"DARIUS FISHER

Co-Founder, Chief Operations Officer

Darius co-founded Wiki-PR in 2010 after working alongside a crisis communication consultant in San Francisco. As the crisis unfolded, Darius' clients got libeled online. Darius recognized the importance of presenting his clients fairly, accurately, and professionally on Wikipedia. He has since built Wiki-PR into the largest Wikipedia public relations firm. Darius graduated with a degree in Economics from Vanderbilt University.

JORDAN FRENCH

Co-Founder, Chief Executive Officer

Jordan leads Wiki-PR from its headquarters in Austin, Texas. He heads Wiki-PR's Page Management and Crisis Editing teams. Jordan is formerly an attorney and an engineer. Jordan is licensed to practice law in New York and Massachusetts. He earned his law degree from Washington University in St. Louis and his engineering degree from Vanderbilt.

STEVE NEIL

Chief Financial Officer

Prior to joining Wiki-PR, Steve served as the CFO of Diamond Foods, maker of Kettle Brand potato chips and Pop Secret popcorn. Steve has over 30 years experience managing operations, logistics, and finances for publicly traded companies. Steve acquired his bachelors degree from UC Santa Barbara and his MBA from UCLA.

ADAM MASONBRINK

Vice President of Sales

Adam manages sales and business development from Wiki-PR's office in San Francisco, California. Prior to working with Wiki-PR, Adam held senior sales roles at Google, Intuit, and several Bay Area startups. Adam graduated from University of Kansas with a degree in business communications and entrepreneurship."

Hopefully this kind of blatantly unethical behavior follows them around a bit. I don't wish the end of a career upon anybody, but maybe a few doors end up closing for some of these folks that would have otherwise been open.

at-fates-hands• 13 years ago

> Darius' clients got libeled online. Darius recognized the importance of presenting his clients fairly, accurately, and professionally on Wikipedia.

Yes, because when I have a client who gets libeled online, the first thing I need to do is create an honest Wikipedia page.

Seriously, WTF?

It's too bad they've suckered so many people into thinking they could control their online brand through Wikipedia.

Nicholas_C2• 13 years ago

The 50+ year old CFO looks strangely out of place next to the 20/30 something founders.

evacuationdrill2• 13 years ago

None of their pages load for me.

Google cache of that page (text only): http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:tDxefPp...

Full Google cache (wouldn't load for me): http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:tDxefPp...

evacuationdrill2• 13 years ago

Replying to myself: the site loads normally now.

swalling• 13 years ago

Related post previously on the front page: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6580333

DanBC4• 13 years ago

These paid editing services are obviously lousy and harmful to Wikipedia and it's great that they've gone.

How well did average wikipedians deal with the editors and their clients? Was anyone turned into a useful editor? Or were more people left frustrated and baffled by the WP process?

Nicholas_C2• 13 years ago

"I'm much more worried about what happens when an unethical outfit manages to start getting major clients and start controlling articles that our average reader assumes are not written by corporate flaks."

Or worse, if Wikipedia's trustworthiness is tarnished beyond repair. I remember when I was in high school 5 or 6 years back Wikipedia was kind of seen as a joke by my peers. Now it's taken as near fact. Although I think skepticism of anything read on the Internet or elsewhere is healthy, I would hate to see it revert to the first state because of greedy "PR" firms.

mjn4• 13 years ago

A hope that's admittedly probably wildly optimistic is that Wikipedia could help people get better at critically evaluating sources, since everyone knows you are not "supposed" to take it completely uncritically on the basis of the publisher's authority. If you get some familiarity with it gets reasonably easy to spot which articles have something strange about them. Sometimes it's the writing style, sometimes the tone that clearly sounds like advocacy or PR copy rather than encyclopedia copy, sometimes the absence of or particular choice of references, etc. I tend to also start with strong prior skepticism depending on the area, e.g. articles on present-day companies, but not ones big enough to attract a lot of real editors (unlike Google, Microsoft, etc., which do) are inherently suspect for paid editing, while articles on mathematics, whatever other problems they might have, typically don't ring my "might be a PR shill" warning bell.

Can be useful even outside of Wikipedia! Distinguishing between trade-nonfiction books honestly trying to cover a subject, versus trade-nonfiction books that are thinly veiled ads for a piece of technology (or the author's management/diet/etc. consulting gig), has some similarities.

eru• 13 years ago

Articles on math and physics might just be plain wrong, though. (Especially the `entropy' article, since every armchair physicist wants to contribute.)

makomk• 13 years ago

That might not be such a bad thing. Wikipedia isn't exactly trustworthy even without paid editing by PR folks; the Wikipedia pages of journalists who criticise them tend to turn into hatchet jobs for instance.

tokenadult• 13 years ago

I hope, as a Wikipedian since April 2010, that this is the beginning of a thorough change of culture on Wikipedia in the interest of making Wikipedia more of a genuine free online encyclopedia[1] and less of a publicity platform for everyone who doesn't want to pay honest cash money for a paid advertisement. There is currently a proposal discussed among Wikipedians for a tighter policy against paid editing,[2] and as long as the new policy, whatever it ends up being, makes for less promotional content on Wikipedia, I'm all for it.

People who want to help Wikipedia improve as unpaid volunteers have a number of channels for doing that. One thing that would help Wikipedia's goal of better content quality[3] is adding more reliable sources to articles. I try to help that process by compiling source lists in user space that any Wikipedian can use for updating articles.[4] It's a long slog to fight the rot on Wikipedia. Reading Wikipedia takes a sharp eye for propaganda and advertising in disguise.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Here_to_build_an_enc...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Paid_editing_po...

[3] https://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Plan/Movement_...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia#Accuracy_of_content

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:WeijiBaikeBianji/Intellig...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:WeijiBaikeBianji/Anthropo...

snowwrestler3• 13 years ago

I hope that Wikipedia's culture someday acknowledges that money is not the only corrupting influence in a society.

Some of the most egregious examples of biased editing I've seen on Wikipedia were almost certainly not paid for; they were the result of deeply held personal beliefs about politics and religion.

Inaccurate or blatantly false edits of this type are easy to get into Wikipedia articles because politics and religion have thousands of highly biased third party "news" sources, so almost any ridiculous claim can be supported with a citation.

raganwald2• 13 years ago

This should be fixed the old-fashioned way: By cutting off teh flow of money at the source. When clients are caught directly or indirectly using sock-puppetry and astroturfing on Wikipedia, banners should be added to the affected pages naming and shaming the clients.

"This page has been locked by Wikipedia in response to deceptive practices paid for by Engulf and Devour to circumvent our community standards and mislead readers."

If you want this to stop, you have to give the clients a disincentive. That will drive the good clients out and these firms will be left with erectile dysfunction flim-flam as their market.

candybar• 13 years ago

This goes into libel territory - Wikipedia presumably doesn't have the resources or authority to investigate and fully ascertain who paid for what.

asperous3• 13 years ago

That's why it's important to have a 3rd party publish the rumor first, then they can cite that and pass the literary libel liability laterally.

chris_wot13• 13 years ago

Except that would violate their policy of presenting information in as neutral manner as possible. It's also hard to see where this would stop: banners for Exxon stating they ruin the environment, a banner on the NSA article stating they violate civil rights?

Ma8ee2• 13 years ago

As long as it is the truth and no relevant facts are left out, it is still neutral.

There is this strange notion in the US today that "neutral" means "doesn't upset or offend anyone". Or that neutral means "both sides get equal weights". If some corporation pays for getting their articles edited, then it is still a neutral fact that that was what they did, even if it upsets someone at the corporation that the truth comes out.

Amadou• 13 years ago

Great idea, as long as there is some mechanism to deal with joe-jobs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe-job

raganwald2• 13 years ago

Of course you have to have a mechanism. Running an online business of any kind, but most especially with user-generated content, requires an unending investment in forensics. It's no different for Wikipedia than it is for eBay or even Hacker News.

Most of these companies would cease and desist after one politely worded but firm letter.

If they were the victim in the case, they would probably provide money and/or resources to track down a rogue PR firm, an unethical competitor, disgruntled ex-employee, or miscellaneous vigilante whack-jobber.

I don't think we need to get hysterical like some responders and assume that every corporation is out to do black bag jobs on each other. If they can spend a few bucks and get some easy astro-turfing, they will. If the penalties are such that it's not worth the bother, they won't.

ilamont• 13 years ago

Here's another idea: Remove questionable Wikipedia entries from the first page of search results. Could this be done algorithmically, or through the use of noindex attached to some trigger on Wikipedia's end?

hansjorg• 13 years ago

Not all PR efforts are aimed at increasing visibility.

mjn4• 13 years ago

Occasionally it does make its way back into their article, but ideally in the same way anything else does: as a factual description of something that happened, cited to third-party sources. For example here's one [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marty_Meehan#Wikipedia_editing

It's not supposed to be retaliation, though, so there's sometimes pushback from Wikipedians somewhat self-consciously worried that mentioning the Wikipedia controversy in the Wikipedia article is biasing towards too-meta an article. Ideally it should only be included if, in some hypothetical universe, a similar controversy not about Wikipedia (e.g. about Britannica payola) would also merit coverage in Wikipedia. But that hypothetical is sometimes difficult to answer.

[1] More or less randomly selected from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedia_controversies

lambda• 13 years ago

The question is whether the Wikipedia snowjob is itself notable enough to warrant inclusion in Wikipedia.

Often some random internet debate or meme is not judged to be noteworthy enough for inclusion. Should someone hiring a PR firm to update their Wikipedia article count? I mean, if misleading PR is a topic that is generally discussed in the media about a firm that's one thing, but if fairly ordinary corporate PR efforts that just so happened to violate Wikipedia's neutrality policy, I'm not sure that that's all that notable amongst the many other things a company has done.

btilly2• 13 years ago

Occasionally it does make its way back into their article, but ideally in the same way anything else does: as a factual description of something that happened, cited to third-party sources.

That one gets fun.

I occasionally look at my sisters' Wikipedia pages and laugh at the mistakes which I know about, which I can't fix because what is already there cites third party sources which were wrong, and I don't know of third party sources that have correct information.

If I really cared I could get it fixed. (Just ask my sisters to make an unambiguous statement somewhere that I can quote.) But in the meantime I get a chuckle out of things like Wikipedia thinking that I don't exist...

vdaniuk• 13 years ago

Good goals, bad strategy. One simple thing will happen: company X competitors will astroturf Wikipedia posing as agents of company X. Company X gets punished and retaliates. After short period of time many pages include warnings that respective companies tried to manipulate the articles. And the cycle starts again.

math0ne• 13 years ago

How would you prove the company paid for the services? How would you stop other companies form paying people to get the tag on competing companies pages?

benologist• 13 years ago

Loads of articles are flagged as advertisements, questionable notability, conflicts of interest etc and all that happens is the page sits there with the notice for years and nobody cares.

I think they should team up with Google and Apple and really hurt companies that shill, spam and link farm - app and search rankings. Then they should put a price on their heads.

dboat• 13 years ago

Unfortunately this approach could be used by unscrupulous businesses to permanently tarnish the reputation of their competition. I can agree with the sentiment, but you've got to be a bit cautious with these sorts of heavy-handed punishments.

wdr1• 13 years ago

This should be fixed the old-fashioned way: By cutting off teh flow of money at the source. When clients are caught directly or indirectly using sock-puppetry and astroturfing on Wikipedia, banners should be added to the affected pages naming and shaming the clients.

So, you're saying instead I would just hire these firms to edit the pages of my competitors?

iand• 13 years ago

You misunderstand. If you did that then your name would appear on the competitors pages as the funder of edits to that page.

belorn• 13 years ago

No need to. Block, remove and move on is the common way. It works.

I don't see much difference in people trying to use Wikipedia to post spam, or people trying to use HN to post spam. Both is spam, both should get deleted, both should ban the users from posting more, and both do so. Having a large banner ontop of spam posts here that says "company X is trying to spam HN, get them!!!" would not actually improve my HN experience.

mercurial• 13 years ago

This should be fixed the old-fashioned way

Tar and feathers?

JumpCrisscross• 13 years ago

Why not start with the simpler option of a cease-and-desist letter? Sounds like there should be a legal mechanism for a U.S. website wanting a U.S. company to stop editing its user-generated content.

logicallee2• 13 years ago

I've always thought Wikipedia is like the true prophecy of Isaac Asimov (encyclopedia galactica) - but not even old Isaac could have predicted this!!

dragonwriter4• 13 years ago

IMO, Wikipedia has more in common with Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (the fictional book featured in the series of the same title, not the work of fiction in which it featured) than Asimov's Encyclopedia Galactica.

logicallee2• 13 years ago

My point still applies :) Could you imagine PR companies warring to get their 'native content' into the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (the book featured in the series)? Now that would have been prescient.

rrrene• 13 years ago

The main problem here seems to be: Why must every company on earth have its own Wikipedia page?

That said, I can see why e.g. Microsoft, the East India Trading Company and BMW should be recognized in an encyclopedia. And there are examples of products (lines) that could/should be mentioned in a vast online encyclopedia as well (e.g. Windows, BMW 3 series) because they influenced industries/trends/zeitgeist and/or lifes.

But why, for the love of god, should every consultancy, contractor, forrester and his second cousin have an entry on this site?

EDIT: typo

adamdavis• 13 years ago

What good are any of our acts if they aren't recorded for others to see? /s

logn• 13 years ago

Because wikipedia long ago decided that 'notable' had a fairly low bar. There's really no going back now and personally I very much like the abundance of articles, even on relatively minor people/companies/events. The storage/serving costs for these articles is negligible, but the value to our society (and maybe especially future ones) will be enormous.

Ras_• 13 years ago

Some language versions have higher requirements for notability. It's hard to set a clear cutoff point for example in sports, entertainment and companies. When does something become wiki-notable? Everyone has their own admins, deletion policies and arbitration mechanisms, which have and will influence content.

Statistics show clearly that some have opted to include as many stubs as possible via the use of bots (for example Swedish wikipedia). Tens of thousands almost worthless stubs (like all US townships and communities) could be machine-added at any time, but most wikis have steered clear of this kind of doping. German wikipedia is quite the opposite in regards to pictures. They don't allow any fair use / citation pictures, which leads to de.wiki articles having considerably less photos than other languages.

guelo• 13 years ago

Why doesn't Wikipedia sue this company and their clients?

ChrisNorstrom2• 13 years ago

Why are we passing this opportunity up?!?!?!

Oh Jesus Christ, common now we're a community of entrepreneurs & hackers, someone just create a new startup that's wikipedia for people.

PeoplePedia.com is taken but here, but I've got http://www.infopag.es so it's perfect for something like InfoPag.es/ChrisNorstrom.

If someone wants to join in reply to this comment. So basically I'm envisioning a wiki for people. However, there's 2 routes I can go down:

a) Anyone can create a page on a person and anyone can edit and add onto or delete content from that page. (lots of growth, but lots of potential for abuse)

b) People must register to create a page on themselves, anyone can edit that page and add onto or delete content but the registered owner must approve the edits.

Which sounds better?

chris_wot13• 13 years ago

Neither. Both sound like recipes for disaster, and impossible to administer. In all seriousness, it's taken close to a decade for Wikipedia to develop policies, guidelines, enforcements and practices to deal with abuses and get decent information into articles about people.

Anyone who thinks it's easy to allow anyone to edit articles about people hasn't tried to do it before, or are just plum crazy!

ChrisNorstrom2• 13 years ago

You've only further encouraged me. I'll start work on it this weekend.

mung• 13 years ago

Thought off the top of my head so it's not developed or thought through, but wouldn't Wikipedia do well to find a way of somehow connecting itself in with academia? It might gain better resources to knowledge and people and more credibility as a result. And make it more difficult to "just get access" to editing a page.

malandrew• 13 years ago

Since these companies (or at WikiPR) are refunding the money when things don't work out they should just hire these PR companies directly via friends and family and watch those accounts that are editing the pages they paid to edit. Once they catch the people, they ban the accounts, revert the changes and then demand their refund. It's a basic honeypot.

GhotiFish• 13 years ago

based on experiences by previous clients, they would not refund the money.

Wikipedia editors, locked in battle with PR firm, delete 250 accounts

Related Stories