[Wikimedia-l] Wikipedia And Paid Edits: Companies Pay Top Dollar To Firms Willing To 'Fix' Their Entries

http://www.ibtimes.com/wikipedia-paid-edits-companies-pay-top-dollar-firms-willing-fix-their-entries-1449172

Wikipedia is facing an onslaught of editors paid by private interests
to edit and create articles, while its volunteer ranks are dwindling.
Can it successfully handle these special interests while retaining its
reliability? Roxanne Palmer / © The International Business Times

At least once a day, most of us end up reading a Wikipedia entry --
whether it's to learn about a new medication, a favorite band or an
interesting new start-up. The ubiquitous megasite is the sixth most
frequently visited website on the planet, and it received over 20
billion page views last month from people around the world who rely on
it for accurate information.

Did you ever wonder if you're getting the whole truth, warts and all?
Who's writing and editing these entries?

The site, which is devoid of advertising and free of charge to
readers, relies on tens of thousands of volunteer editors to maintain
its entries. The number of active editors is falling, down almost 40
percent from 2007, from 51,000 to 31,000, which gives existing editors
even more clout over an increasing number of entries on innumerable
subjects around the world. Most of them believe in the mission of
founder Jimmy Wales, which is to provide unbiased, accurate
information.

And then there is Mike Wood. The 37-year-old Wikipedia editor is paid
by companies and individuals to create and maintain articles that
present them in the best light. Sometimes, he is even asked to remove
negative information from a client's page. Wood likens himself to an
attorney in court, advising a client on what course of action they can
and cannot take. He charges as little as $50 for a small Wikipedia
edit, up to $2,000 for the creation of a new article. Wood says that
Wikipedia is his main source of income, and he makes more editing for
hire on his site, LegalMorning.com, than from any other work he has
pursued.

Wood is just one of an army of paid editors who are busy tweaking
Wikipedia entries to serve their clients' interests. The ability of
corporations to edit their own Wikipedia pages, or hire someone to do
it for them, has called into question a core Wikipedia policy: that
articles be written from a neutral point of view. It also means the
world's most-used repository of human knowledge is not always the most
reliable.

Co-founder Wales once wrote that "it would be a serious blow to the
credibility of Wikipedia if it came to be generally accepted that
people are taking on clients to write on their behalf." A recent
investigation by Wikipedia's existing editors has uncovered hundreds
of accounts on the site linked to a single public relations firm. The
investigation has the Internet wondering; just how much of Wikipedia
is run by editors-for-hire?

One firm, calling itself Wiki-PR, claims it has edited or created
articles for over 12,000 paying clients. Wikipedia's Signpost, an
online resource written and edited by the site's editors, discovered a
tweet from Wiki-PR VP of Sales Adam Masonbrink that announced
high-profile clients like media giant Viacom and travel deal site
Priceline.com as clients.

The Wikimedia Foundation, which runs Wikipedia, released a statement
in October saying it understood that unpaid editors are expressing
"shock and dismay" and that it would continue to monitor the
situation. While the scale of Wiki-PR's actions alone may be
surprising, the sheer scope of organizations and individuals willing
to Wiki-for-hire illustrates how much of a quandary the online
behemoth faces.

For every firm like Wiki-PR and others like MyWikiPro and Wikiexperts,
there are thousands of freelancers available on sites like Freelancer
and Elance willing to do work on Wikipedia. These freelance editors
charge as low as $15 for a simple edit, while firms like Wiki-PR tend
to charge higher rates to create an article and monitor it as time
goes on, promising to protect against its deletion or other
"vandalism".

Wales wrote in 2009 that "the idea that we should ever accept paid
advocates directly editing Wikipedia is not ever going to be ok.
Consider this to be policy as of right now." However, proposals to
create a policy to ban paid-editing, as well as a less-influential
guideline, have both failed to win enough support to be officially
recognized by the Wikipedia community.

Wales then seemed to either soften his stance or recognize the
inevitability of firms like Wiki-PR last year, saying that while he
was "opposed to allowing paid advocates to edit in article space at
all… [but] extremely supportive of them being given other helpful
paths to assist us in our efforts to be comprehensive, accurate and
authoritative."

One unofficial guideline on Wikipedia is oft-referred to as Wales'
"bright-line rule," which he summarized: "If you are a paid advocate,
you should disclose your conflict of interest and never edit article
space directly." A "conflict of interest", or COI, guideline was
developed which prohibited "paid advocacy" and editing to promote
one's "own interests, including your business or financial interests."

The biggest problem with Wikipedia policies is that they are difficult
for editors and administrators to enforce. It took years for
Wikipedians to catch up with one of the most prolific accounts,
username Morning277. The account created or worked on 6,000 articles
dating back to 2008. Morning277 mostly edited biographies of living
persons or entries on companies that Wikipedians say were promotional
in nature, and hundreds of entries have been removed outright in the
wake of the investigation, and accounts thought to related to Morning
277 have been banned.

Morning277 was eventually uncovered when one Wikipedia editor looked
into an article for a not-particularly notable security software
company nominated for deletion, called CyberSafe. In an interview with
the Daily Dot, the editor said that most of the citations in the
article did not refer to CyberSafe directly but instead to general
articles about cybersecurity. Editors also noticed that many of the
accounts defending the company from deletion looked as though they
were newly created -- or had only edited a few articles completely
unrelated to cybersecurity -- and thus their interest in the small
company seemed questionable.

Wikipedia defines these accounts, created primarily for the sake of
weighing a vote or promoting an opinion in another account's favor, as
"sockpuppets." The use of sockpuppets is antithetical to the
democratic nature of Wikipedia, which often utilizes a group vote to
make decisions about article deletion and site policy.

If a single entity like Wiki-PR can deceive the community with a
number of voices and thus sway consensus in their favor, how can any
decision be trusted?

Wiki-PR's CEO Jordan French told IBTimes that Wikipedia's
investigation actually concluded that Morning277 was not using
sockpuppets.

"Rather, we were and are paid editors paying other editors -- which is
not against the rules," French said. "Far from puppets of any type,
editors that we pay ultimately have control over what they publish or
edit on Wikipedia."

And French is right: Wiki-PR's ranks of paid editors voicing their
opinions is not considered sockpuppetry, in the technical sense.
Instead, it is known as meatpuppetry, a dubious distinction that
places it outside the realm of action of the site's sockpuppet
investigators. Nonetheless, Morning277 has been banned from Wikipedia
for policy violations.

According to companies Wiki-PR approached as clients, the firm
utilizes questionable tactics to serve its clients. These include
sending unsolicited emails to potential clients to get their business,
and then planting articles online for firms that lack the necessary
press coverage to justify an entry.

Some complained that the firm did little to take care of articles
nominated for deletion, and failed to communicate regularly when
issues arose.

Wiki-PR's actions are considered "black hat" or malicious by Wikipedia
since its editors do not disclose their status as paid employees
(sometimes indirectly) for the subjects of the entries that they work
on. French defends the company's actions, saying that Wikipedia
editors who reveal they are paid are placing "a big target on (their)
back."

"Other editors presume that you're up to something mischievous and
refuse the edits. That's okay, and that's their right," French wrote
in an email. "However, most of the time our proposed edits remove
blatant factual inaccuracies, unsupported statements, and libel that
destroys brands and reputations."

French argues that negative information on a company's Wikipedia page
might "bias the public" against a minor gaffe or one-time mistake.

"We are able to move swiftly and effectively to make those Wikipedia
pages more accurate," French adds, claiming Wiki-PR avoids edits "that
conflict with the best interests of the encyclopedia."

French says that the firm also employs Admins, Wikipedia's
high-ranking administrative officers. Admins are capable of locking
pages from editing, deleting them outright as well as banning users
and IP addresses from Wikipedia entirely. The site has 1,424
administrators in total -- French calls his an "invaluable resource."

Wiki-PR is in talks with the Wikimedia Foundation to address
complaints and the ban on the firms accounts, French says, adding that
business is on the uptick since his firm started appearing in the
press.

How Firms Get Paid To Work On Wikipedia

IBTimes contacted one firm for their services, under the guise of a
company looking to create a Wikipedia entry that had not been featured
in the press. The firm said that there was not enough press coverage
to warrant notability and an article that would avoid being flagged by
editors.

However, in the same email, the firm stated that they would be able to
create electronic press kits for distribution to websites to increase
our chances of appearing in online articles.

Not that it's always that easy to fix a client's Wikipedia page. "If
it is well-sourced, then it is unlikely that it can be removed (and I
will not even try)," Mike Wood wrote in an email. "The best that can
be done is to reword any information that is heavily weighted against
the client."

If there is negative information about clients, Wood says he advises
them to stay off Wikipedia, lest their entry become a "sounding board"
for critics. He tries to give unfavorable information "the weight it
deserves in the context of the article," he says, and has so many
potential clients that he can pick and choose which ones he takes.

"That is the difference between a 'paid' editor and a 'professional'
editor," Wood said. "This allows me to be up front with everyone and
tell them what I can and cannot do. This is professional."

Wood says that the ranks of unpaid volunteers are what keeps Wikipedia
running, but many have "run afoul," and feel as though they own the
site. New rules and guidelines imposed by Wikipedians are what drives
companies to seek him out, Wood says.

Those firms that employed Wiki-PR said that that they were able to get
five to seven articles articles published online. Wikipedians claim
the firm used self-publishing news sites like Yahoo! Voices and CNN
iReport, while misleadingly referring to those sources in the
article's citations merely as CNN or Yahoo!.

The Wikimedia Foundation, which runs Wikipedia and related projects,
issued a statement in October regarding Wiki-PR and the practice of
paid editors working on the site. It reads in part:

Being deceptive in your editing by using sockpuppets or
misrepresenting your affiliation with a company is against Wikipedia
policy and is prohibited by our Terms of Use. We urge companies to
conduct themselves ethically, to be transparent about what they're
doing on Wikipedia, and to adhere to all site policies and practices.
The Wikimedia Foundation is closely monitoring this ongoing
investigation and we are currently assessing all the options at our
disposal. We will have more to say in the coming weeks.

When it comes to Wikipedia and ethics, there are few high-profile
figures to set a positive example. Co-founder Wales was once caught
editing his own Wikipedia biography to remove any reference to fellow
co-founder Larry Sanger. Wales also famously used Wikipedia to break
up with Fox News' Rachel Marsden in lieu of a Dear Jane letter. The
affair began after Wales says he was addressing "complaints about
[Marsden's] bio," leading to claims that Wikipedia's founder was
trading edits for sex.

Powerful interests of all sorts have taken notice of Wikipedia's high
rank in Google results, and the site's zero-cost and easily editable
format. This includes one Congressional computer-user who changed
Edward Snowden's entry from "dissident" to "traitor."

One Washington, D.C.-based attorney is suing anonymous Wikipedia
editors for posting false and "defamatory" language about her.
Attorney Susan L. Burke had worked on a case where Iraqi citizens
accused military contractor Blackwater Worldwide of war crimes. The
Iraq case was settled in 2010, and Burke is now suing Wikipedia
editors, whom she believes may have been working for Blackwater when
simultaneously editing false information into her entry.

Wikipedia Prankster Chimes In

The ease with which Wikipedia entries can be manipulated was
highlighted by Nimrod Kämer -- journalist, satirist and host of The
Guardian's "Thinkfluencer" blog - who gained notoriety for a prank
that involved "blackmailing" celebrities at Paris Fashion Week,
offering to fix incorrect information on their Wikipedia entries for a
fee.

The kicker was that Kämer himself had made the changes, which included
removing Donald Faison's screen credit for "Clueless" and changing
Kanye West's entry to note the rapper was involved in the murder of
the Notorious B.I.G. West even expressed interest in hiring Kamer,
because he "knew how to work Wikipedia."

Does Kämer still edit Wikipedia entries? "All the time," he tells
IBTimes, noting he does not actually edit Wikipedia for money.
Following his farcical series of videos, which includes his celebrity
interactions along with a fake TED talk on getting paid to edit
Wikipedia, Kämer was contacted by companies looking to edit their
Wikipedia entries.

Kämer has a few tips for potential paid editors: Since Wikipedia is
ever-changing, with articles deleted and edits made or undone by
editors, no results are guaranteed. "Paid editors", it would appear,
don't really have to do anything at all.

"It's the perfect business model, really." Kämer says that promising
"100 percent effort" to clients expecting actual results is key –
guaranteeing efforts does not mean you actually have to follow through
with them.

"Theoretically, you can tell them, 'Oh I've done everything you asked
for, but it was deleted before you could've checked,'" Kämer says,
adding that "they might check the history, but nobody checks the
history. They just care about what the article looks like right now."

Another trick? Write articles on non-English Wikipedia pages, like the
French and German editions of the site.

"Nobody cares about what's going on there. Just paste random 'Google
Translate' stuff," Kämer explains, offering that potential paid
editors can "just guess the buttons. It's pretty easy. You just need
to know what [button] is save."

What is the best tip for Wikipedia users looking to make sure their
edits stick? Include a few typos for a long-lasting effect.

"This is a must, because the editors have the urge to correct your
typos, and by doing cement your edits," Kämer said. "They find it so
hard to delete a typo rather than fixing a typo, because the urge to
correct is so strong."

Kämer says his favorite thing to add to on a Wikipedia page is the
"See Also" section.

"Usually everything should be verifiable and notable, but that's not
the case with 'See Also'. They never look for citations there." Kämer
directs me to the Wikipedia entry for London's upscale BLEACH Salon,
where he has added a dubious connection between the place and the
"Barbershop"-esque 2004 comedy "Nora's Hair Salon."

Due to his antics, Kämer has had his Wikipedia entry deleted, and was
forced to "invent" a middle name to avoid being removed from the site
again.

"I'm still afraid of having my entry deleted, like when they find my
middle name," he says, noting that since Wales lives in London, Kämer
might need to use the Guardian as a pretense to having the Wikipedia
co-founder do some work on his page.

"People have told me that if he makes the slightest edit, whatever
he's done is kept forever."

This story has been corrected to remove overt references linking the
Wikipedia account morning277 and Wiki-PR.

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