

Is Wikipedia for Sale? - ohjeez
http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/is-wikipedia-for-sale

======
tokenadult
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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rupert_Sheldrake)

[2]
[http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/07/3-char...](http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/07/3-charts-
that-show-how-wikipedia-is-running-out-of-admins/259829/)

~~~
ta_24278
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.

~~~
Hello71
> \- 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

~~~
GhotiFish
that is a legitimate counterpoint.

though in a dickish format, to be sure.

------
ilamont
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...](http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57514677-93/corruption-in-wikiland-
paid-pr-scandal-erupts-at-wikipedia/)

~~~
swalling
"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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorde)
(449,871 views) \-
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malala_Yousafzai](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malala_Yousafzai)
(362,657 views) \-
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miley_Cyrus](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...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2013-10-16/Traffic_report)

~~~
DanBC
> 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.

------
mjn
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.

------
nl
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...](http://www.dailydot.com/lifestyle/wikipedia-sockpuppet-
investigation-largest-network-history-wiki-pr/)

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

~~~
swalling
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](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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Tags)).

------
glesica
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.

~~~
swalling
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](https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Terms_of_Use)

~~~
mjn
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.

------
alecdbrooks
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
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!

~~~
alecdbrooks
>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.

------
spanishcow
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](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advertorial#Legal_issues)

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

------
sgentle
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.

------
ilovecookies
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.

------
guynamedloren
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.

~~~
tommorris
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.

------
avty
Wikipedia is already morally sold to PR interests.

~~~
yuvipanda
Can you expand on why/how?

