
Corruption in Wikiland? Paid PR scandal erupts at Wikipedia - zalew
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57514677-93/corruption-in-wikiland-paid-pr-scandal-erupts-at-wikipedia/
======
kijin
> _Wikipedia and alleged conflicts of interest are not known to be handled
> with practicality - or clarity._

In a large organization/community, bad apples are unavoidable. What matters is
how the organization/community deals with such cases as they come along. If
what the article says about this rogue trustee is true, then he needs to be
fired, and fired hard, to send a message to the rest of the organization and
its many international branches.

I can understand why Wikipedia _the project_ generally does not want to make
top-down changes, but Wikimedia _the foundation_ needs strong leadership in
order to avoid corruption among its ranks. With great power comes great
responsibility, and it cannot be denied that Wiki[pm]edia has gained great
power in today's world, whether intended or not. There must be rules. Those
rules must be written down and enforced consistently. Yes, that will lead to
bureaucracy, but bureaucracy tends to become necessary when your organization
reaches a certain level of complexity.

I'm not sure who (if anyone) is in charge of granting and revoking "Residence"
status, but that person needs to be dealt with, too, and swiftly, and harshly,
if the allegations have merit. "Paid PR" is a vague concept, but openly
advertising profit-motivated wiki-editing services is clearly unacceptable by
the cultural standards of Wikipedia. If the community can demonstrate that it
can enforce discipline even upon its most highly esteemed members, there is no
reason to suppose that this incident will be a net loss for Wiki[pm]edia in
the long term.

Fortunately, it shouldn't be too difficult to find out who made which edits.

~~~
bjourne
But that is fixing the symptom, not curing the disease. Throwing out the guy
that manipulates Wikipedia for personal gains stops him, but not any of his
peers that are also subverting the project. It is very unlikely that not a lot
of governments and corporations have realized how hugely important Wikipedia
has become. Therefore I don't think this guy was alone. In the future, people
astro turfing Wikipedia will be more careful to avoid being caught but they
wont at all disappear.

~~~
sageikosa
Curing the disease on a "not-for profit" enterprise requires not just rules
and regulations, but someone responsible for oversight. In effect, more
bureaucracy.

Money can only corrupt an organization whose purpose is not to make money.

~~~
anamax
> Money can only corrupt an organization whose purpose is not to make money.

Money can corrupt any organization. However, lots of things can corrupt any
organization.

Money is actually the least worst motivation for corruption. True believers
are far worse.

------
matznerd
There are crazy politics involved in editing Wikipedia articles and it really
does take a lot of skill to know how to edit, format, and properly cite an
article so that your changes do not get reversed or article deleted. The
editors have tons of internal politics and personal reasons for removing
articles. You really need someone who knows how to navigate the waters to get
things done. People imagine that anyone can add or create articles, and while
that's true on the surface, if you aren't a part of the community, it isn't
really true.

~~~
belorn
All communities require skill of an user who wish to make a new contribution.

Suggest an article to hacker news. If the title does not pass spell check, is
inconsistent, or is of unreasonable length, it will be rejected by the
community. An title out of "style" will not be as successful as one in style
with the community.

Suggest a patch to an open source project. If the code is not bug free,
documented, and readable, it will be rejected.

Report a software bug. Writing a bug report that will be taken serious is
almost an art.

Suggest a answer/question to stackexhange board. If the text is not readable,
spam free, or on topic, it will be rejected.

Each community has a unique set of requirements for new contributions. It
often takes different skill sets to successful contribute in a meaningful way.
Most if not all communities suggest new users to first read and observe before
making new contribution. Many forums makes this specific point in FAQ's and
user guides.

Wikipedia's requirement on new article is harsh, but I would still put them as
less harsh than adding a patch to a open source program or writing a bug
report.

~~~
acheron
Maybe communities like to think of themselves that way, and if it were really
just based on "skill" that would be less of an issue. But in reality these
things are more often based on who you know. In most open source projects, no
matter how good my patch (or bug report) is, if I'm not friends with a
maintainer it will be ignored or rejected. Same for Wikipedia. The quality and
skill of the actual contribution is practically irrelevant, it's mainly about
the pissing matches with other "editors": if you have time to babysit the page
and undo reverts, and then navigate their hierarchy and appease the right
people before you get banned. Most people won't bother: they will add some
information they know, see it get reverted, and never try again.

~~~
im3w1l
This runs contrary to my experience. Could you back this up?

------
ilamont
I don't think it's a big secret that certain Wikipedia entries -- particularly
those for well-known people, companies, products, and institutions -- are
manipulated by SEO and PR teams to get better ranking or link off to favored
sources, or sanitized to remove uncomfortable information.

Maybe it's time for Google to address the SEO problem from its end. If front-
page SERPs are no longer guaranteed, the incentive to engage in these
activities will be reduced.

~~~
rsync
What it's time for is site operators to stop consuming SEO "services". It's
disingenuous, parasitic crap - and always has been.

It is a classic case of Jaron Laniers prediction that we will dumb ourselves
down until the computers "pass" the turing test. You are giving up your
choices and distinctions as a human being when you decide NOT to write what
you want to write, but rather, write what the computer wants you to write.

------
tptacek
Here's what seems to have happened.

Wikipedia (that is, site parked at the domain name "wikipedia.org") is
operated by a 501(c)(3) nonprofit called Wikimedia. Wikimedia pays ~$4MM/yr to
its employees in salary; most (or at least a plurality) of those employees are
tech.

Wikimedia has a chapter in the UK (Wikimedia UK, or WMUK). WMUK is at least
partly funded by "global" Wikimedia.

Both Wikimedia and WMUK are managed by boards of trustees, who select
foundation executives, help manage fundraising, write mission statements, and
that kind of stuff. I don't know if either WMUK or Wikimedia compensates
trustees (but trustees do have a voice in compensation for foundation staff).

A trustee at WMUK, Roger Bamkin, is embroiled in a conflict-of-interest
scandal. What seems to have happened is this:

Bamkin created a project, QRPEDIA, which acts as a sort of QR-based Bit.ly for
Wikipedia articles. This is a good thing. What it does is allow people to
create QR codes that can be displayed on buildings and landmarks which, when
snapped with a scanner, will take you to the associated Wikipedia page. This
is as close to a good use for QR codes as I've ever heard, because the
ugliness of the QR code here is offset by the value of a symbol pointing out
that you're looking at a landmark. Good for Roger Bamkin.

After conceiving of and executing QRPEDIA, Bamkin and a partner set out on a
project to plaster QRPEDIA codes all over the UK county town of Monmouth, and
in the process create a "Monmouthpedia". I'm not sure if either Bamkin or his
associates were compensated for this project; as I understand it, the
rationale for the project was to demonstrate the potential for QRPEDIA.

Now here's where it gets sketchy. Bamkin gets involved with the government of
Gibraltar (you know, at the tip of Spain) to repeat the Monmouthpedia. Bamkin,
acting as a consultant to Gibraltar, creates a project plan to train residents
of the area to contribute to Wikipedia and navigate the rules & policies of
the site. Moreover, Bamkin arranges to nominate tens of articles about
Gibraltar to the Wikipedia "DYK" section, which occupies a spot on the
Wikipedia front page.

And he's apparently done this for cash.

In the ensuing, ferocious, immediate hooplah surrounding the discovery of this
transgression, it's discovered that Max Klein, another Wikipedia veteran
(remember, anybody in the world can be a "veteran"; just spend a couple years
donking around editing the site) is running a consultancy advertising a
service to help commercial clients get better coverage on Wikipedia.

In addition to any other roles they might have served with WM/WP, Klein and
Bamkin have also held roles as "Wikipedians in Residents"†. Residencies are
grant-style sponsorships offered either by Wikimedia or by institutions to
compensate editors for improving the encyclopedia.

The thing you want to understand about residencies is that they are not like
trusteeships or adminships or any other status symbol on Wikipedia; they're
grants, usually offered by organizations outside of Wikimedia. For instance,
Klein's paid residency was sponsored by the Online Computer Library Center, a
nonprofit unaffiliated with Wikimedia. Wikimedia status surely does contribute
to selection for residency, but the final say in who gets the residency is the
sponsor's.

 _Anyways_.

There are a couple things that strike me in this drama.

1\. Wikimedia owns an excruciatingly valuable piece of the Internet. Wikipedia
articles occupy the top of many extremely valuable Google SERPs. Wikimedia
itself raises mid-8-figures funding yearly without appearing to break a sweat.
The opportunity for corruption inside Wikimedia is obvious and large.

2\. The big story we have about corruption today has little to do with
Wikimedia global. An elected trustee built a model for compensated improvement
of the encyclopedia that went beyond the pale. It's not good, but it also
doesn't appear to be tolerated. But this is nothing like corruption scandals
at other charities; "corruption at nonprofits" tends to involve the nonprofit
spending contributor dollars to hire cronies as consultants.

3\. Violet Blue did not discover this drama. One assumes she was tipped
(Wikidrama being what it is). Either way: I've probably done as much
"reporting" on the incident as she did at this point. That's because Wikipedia
itself _EXPLODED_ when contributors competing for DYK spots noticed what was
happening. This, to me, looks like the system "working".

4\. Take any other large charity --- say, the American Red Cross --- and try
to get a handle on their organizational politics and day-to-day drama. Does
any other 501(c) in the US of comparable size operate with anything resembling
the transparency (for better or worse) than Wikimedia does? I'm not saying
Wikimedia is "fully transparent". They clearly aren't and probably never will
be. But neither are many other charities. I don't know what the ACLU or PIH
does with its contributions or staffing or internal promotion plans or
conflict of interest guidelines and am happy to support them anyways.

† _Here you start hearing the term "GLAM", which stands for Galleries,
Libraries, Archives, and Museums. GLAM is the Wikipedia project for doing
outreach and joint projects with, well, GLAMs. GLAM is important to this story
in part because it is, at least in the meager scale of Wikipedia --- remember,
even the highest-status Wikipedians tend not to be, uh, globally competitive
earners --- lucrative; libraries and museums tend to sponsor residencies._

------
oelmekki
EDIT : nevermind, wrong assumption, see replies.

I'm not sure there's a problem here. The article seems to imply the guy
actually edited wikipedia home page to promote his client.

For what I understand of how "did you know" section works, it's not the case :
it's automatically collecting recent additions
([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Recent_additions/2012...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Recent_additions/2012/August)).

It means that, worst case scenario, he only wrote a lot of new pages about
Gibraltar. That's still an issue if those page are advertisement-like (which I
did not checked if they are), but certainly not the same thing as spamming
home page on purpose.

Also, he may as well have respected neutrality guidelines when writing those
articles (even if it's a hard task, if you earn money from the person you're
writing about).

The real problem is mostly : does others people have read those articles and
checked them ? It's the good old wikipedia problem : only pages that attracts
a lot of editors can be considered balanced enough, with or without PR, with
or without money.

~~~
twelvechairs
> For what I understand of how "did you know" section works, it's not the case
> : it's automatically collecting recent additions

This is incorrect. New articles for 'did you know' have to be nominated, and
go through a (somewhat opaque) review, approval and queue process - see
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Did_you_know#The_DYK_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Did_you_know#The_DYK_process)

~~~
makomk
What's more, if you follow the actual on-Wikipedia discussion of this, the
person in question had been using his position on the English Wikipedia to
push Gibraltar-related DYK entries through the review and approval process.
See
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Did_you_know#Pot...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Did_you_know#Potential_abuse_of_DYK)

------
rhizome
Not a problem. Find them and kick them out. The system works.

~~~
jacques_chester
The deeper problem is that such people are needed at all. Wikipedia is an
example of revolution within the form[1] -- the concept of an openly editable
wiki was silently replaced by an Editoriate who spend a lot of time on
impenetrable internal politics.

All the knobs and dials for the open wiki are still there. But the actual day
to day operation of the machinery has long since been completely inverted.

[1] The top link on Google for "revolution within the form" links to what
appears to be a neo-nazi wiki. I don't even know what to say about that.

~~~
_delirium
Have you tried adding an article recently? I haven't had any trouble with my
additions in a while. Some years ago there was a lot of deletionism, since
there were still people like Larry Sanger around who thought Wikipedia should
be a smaller, more traditional encyclopedia. In the past few years I've been
occasionally writing articles on a variety of things, and nobody's complained,
as long as they're well-referenced. I wouldn't say I'm a very active editor,
either; probably 2-3 articles a year, so it doesn't require doing it
constantly. I pick a topic (most recently, a Greek archaeological site), find
3-4 good references in, in this case, archaeological journals or monographs,
write an article, submit it, and that's that. I haven't found a need to get
approval from an Archaeology Cabal or anything. People sometimes come by and
fiddle with the article's formatting to make it fit some kind of standard
(adding infoboxes, etc.), but I haven't had unfriendly reactions.

The articles do have to be well-referenced, of course, since an article that
doesn't cite good sources isn't very reliable. It also helps to pick things
where you don't have a conflict of interest. Many of my fellow academics who
run into trouble did so when they tried to write an article _about themselves_
, or their research group, or one of their own projects (or worse, some kind
of holy war they're involved in).

~~~
jacques_chester
I haven't. I gave up because the experience was too much of a pain.

And that's part of my point: first impressions are the ones that last.

~~~
_delirium
Fair enough, but I while I think there are plenty of things that could be
improved about Wikipedia, imo it's hard to improve much without accurately
understanding how it works. In these kinds of discussions I find a lot of
opinions based on third- or fourth-hand information people have heard
somewhere about Wikipedia, which isn't the best basis from which to work.

------
rdzgtdsv
He did nothing wrong.

Mentions of Gibraltar were reviewed by third parties and not received special
treatment.

See voting at
[http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Template_talk:Did_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Template_talk:Did_you_know&oldid=513494545)
.

I've had my articles on main page DYK a few times, and of course I was
interested in topics of those articles.

------
monsterix
Great reporting from Ms. Violet Blue. Have seen her grow from starting an
interesting sex education blog with classy radio podcasts to reporting now on
quality and integrity of open web properties. Kudos on that!

Unfortunately paid PR (or corruption in top media properties), both in
institutions of profit and non-profit, is a problem since time-immemorial.
Containing corruption is one of the hardest problem to solve, and could become
one of the main reasons to push people into believing machines more than
people next-door.

Hope Wikimedia corrects this soon.

[Edited for spellings]

~~~
tptacek
Strong disagree. Typically misleading article from Violet Blue aims more at
stirring up controversy (and pageviews) than on reporting the boring specifics
and context. Minimal (maybe no) original reporting. No quotes from sources.
The primary sources --- available and searchable on the Internet --- are more
informative.

The very fact that you're left with the notion that WM has a "corruption
problem" that needs to be corrected soon is evidence of the low quality of
this article. WM may very well have a corruption problem, but Violet Blue
hasn't reported it; just innuendo.

