Perhaps I’m just getting old and weary and the scales are falling from my eyes, but the number of assholes in the world who are willing to destroy some valuable resource or community for a small benefit to themselves seems to be increasing, and also increasing their efforts and their effectiveness.
Getting an article created for you or your business is not some mysterious black box. Every article on Wikipedia has to follow WP:NOTE (notability guidelines)[1]. In short, it just means you have to have multiple sources directly about the subject, and these sources are independent from the subject of the article, and the sources are WP:RELIABLE (e.g., from a reputable source like a well known news publisher).<p>The only reason these guidelines exist is because all articles need to have references. No references, no article. The vast majority of deleted articles don't have any references. If you have just a couple references, that article is likely to float around in some gray area for a long time. There are articles on the site only a couple sentences long, but they have notable references, so they can't easily be deleted.<p>People mistakenly think that paying off an administrator is a golden ticket to getting on the site. They misunderstand that the majority of governance on the site is done in public, and often doesn't involve administrators at all. For example, I've been involved in a couple requests for article deletion (sometimes as the person requesting the deletion, sometimes not). In all my experiences, no administrator was involved in the debate. If there are good reasons to delete an article, a bribed administrator will simply be outvoted by the public.<p>^1: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability</a><p>^2: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources</a>
Wikipedia as an institution, their insider-only ways, byzantine guidelines and more all incentivize this kind of abuse. There's a pessimistic comment on this page observing, "The world is just chock full of assholes..". Wikipedia editors are not exempt here.<p>Wikipedia shouldn't be so difficult to edit or highly politicized. There was a time when IP editors made the majority of contributions. Today correcting a typo might trigger a full-time editor to defend his turf. Even asking questions about an uncited assertion on a talk page can be labeled as disruptive.<p>I feel bad for the victims of the scam. It can be hard to edit or correct basic facts. Most business owners don't have time to specialize in Wikipedia lawfare. I have no sympathy for the WMF or the hard-core believers who wrote this expose'. Their policies created opportunities for these scammers to exploit.<p>The fact that they wrote this without an ounce of self-reflection or awareness of the problems is more troubling than the scam itself. Scams will come and go, but we've been stuck with Wikipedia as Google's and therefore the Internet's arbiter of "truthiness" for too long.
It's great to see an article about spam where the spammers are losing and their customers are victims.<p>I used to spend a lot of time working on the Wikipedia conflict of interest notice board, [WP:COIN]. Hate mail. One lawsuit.<p>Here's my essay on that.[1]<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Hints_on_dealing_with_conflict_of_interest_problems" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Hints_on_dealing_wit...</a>
Although Wikipedia admins are generally pretty diligent about vanity articles about firms or individuals, anecdotally, I think people have a lot more luck astroturfing within legitimate articles. There are so many niche articles about some general concept with a weird section plugging an obscure product toward the end.
> Thanks to the community, paid editing firms rarely succeed in influencing the actual content on Wikipedia. There are paid editing firms that we are aware of with a 0% success rate.<p>That kind of sounds like bragging that they detect 100% of the paid editing they detect.
For a brief period I considered becoming a private detective. A friend of mine knew I was looking to practice and sent me a photo on Wikipedia that was faked. It claimed to be of private military contractors in an outfit called GK Sierra in one country, but they were actually US soldiers in a different country.<p>I spent a while digging into this company and a couple of related companies. They had edited themselves into Wikipedia articles in small ways over the years, and gotten themselves included in click bait lists of military contractors. They made a half-assed effort to cover this up by
changing their Wikipedia user name, but that just creates a different record that was still searchable. There was a Wikipedia article mentioning a rumor they worked for Mossad, but I suspected they were also the source for that rumor. They claimed they worked for the CIA, and they had a real contracting number with the DoD. But I didn't find any evidence these contracts were real, and when I sent a FOIA to the CIA they said the information either didn't exist or was classified.<p>The weirdest thing I noticed was that it had bled into the culture to some extent. People who wanted to give themselves an edgy camo aesthetic would find these click bait articles and vandalized Wikipedia pages and not realize it was a sham - or realized and were doing it ironically, how is one to tell. I saw an admin of some forum who took it as a handle. I saw someone present a military-themed outfit in GTA named after it.<p>Eventually I got to the point where I was gathering more and more evidence and none of it was making any sense, and I realized I was never going to make real headway without finding a way to interview these people. I could see pieces of what they were doing, but as far as why they were doing it, that information just didn't seem to be written down on the Internet. The prospect of flying across the country to try and track down someone who was doing things I couldn't understand wasn't appealing, so I just let it go.<p>As a disclaimer, I'm working off of memory here, some of the details may be wrong.<p>---<p>Looking back at their deleted Wikipedia page on the Wayback machine, it's all so outlandish that I have to imagine it was an elaborate prank. It's a lot more paperwork than most pranks involve, but I just can't imagine that whoever put this together intended anyone to believe it. Maybe they wanted to see if they could do enough legend building that the Wikipedia mods would have some doubt and keep up the page for a ridiculous hoax? If I was practicing a skill, maybe they were too? Impossible to say.
>The volunteer community is extremely diligent about finding and deleting any promotional material that marketing companies try to post on Wikipedia.<p>I think it's much more common for me to see articles that do the opposite. They take some article, find some negative news article and write about them in the Wikipedia article. Especially for small communities where there are no notable publications except for major drama, it pretty much means that the Wikipedia article is going to highlight the negative side of the community even if that isn't actually representative of what the community is actually about.
I, in my naivete, after reading the title, thought wikipedia had started paying long-term editors for their work. Apparently not.
I guess $250MM isn't enough to pay the people that maintain the website.
I don't doubt this kind of scam is happening. But I think it stretches credibility to say that there aren't many more people successfully paying to make Wikipedia articles more to their liking.
Nation-state actors on Wikipedia which hide behind the byzantine rules and regulations on the site are a far worse problem, imho. I think Wikipedia is still the best tool for information on the net, if the user approaches it with a critical mind, check sources (which a frightening number of times say the exact opposite of what was included in the article!), and check Talk and revision history pages. But, I would bet that most people do not approach Wikipedia in this manner. Furthermore, Wikipedia is used to train LLMs, and the problem compounds via citogenesis.<p>If you spend time editing Wikipedia a decent amount, you will see the same groups of moderators and actors which rapidly alter certain types of articles to fit particular metanarratvies. Anyone who points this out will get revdel'd, which means that non-admins can't even see what happened. revdelling is supposed to be reserved for doxing and serious matters, but when you see it abused with your own eyes by the same users working in tandem with mods (I am talking within 3-4 minutes of a controversial post going live), then I guarantee you will never look at Wikipedia the same way again. There are obvious nation-state actors acting out in the open, running automated software (dozens of edits across pages within minutes) without an authorized bot, and they are allied with particular circles of mods who are on the same payroll. If any other user attempts even a mere fraction of a percentage of the biased and violative TOS activity in which they engage, you will get revdel'd and/or have your account banhammered.
Wikipedia is a treasure. Free to use, no cookie banner, fast, and no account required. It is refreshing compared to the rest of the internet that trends towards maximum extraction.
I don't understand why some people like to criticize the reputation of wikipedia.<p>Wikipedia is not perfect, but their process is quite mature and robust.<p>I even read people saying wikipedia is politicized.