Wikipedia Scandal: High Profile Users Allegedly Involved In Paid-Editing

Posted by Soulskill on Tuesday September 18, 2012 @04:18PM from the citation-needed dept.

An anonymous reader writes "A new Wikipedia scandal: two high profile users, one of them board member of Wikimedia UK seem to have been caught doing edits for personal profit. It was also discovered that they ran an SEO business related to Wikipedia. Quoting: 'Roger Bamkin, trustee of the Wikimedia Foundation UK, whose LinkedIn page describes him as a high-return-earning PR consultant, appeared to be using Wikipedia's main page "Did You Know" feature and the resources of Wikipedia's GLAM WikiProject (Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums) initiative to pimp his client's project. Bamkin's current client is the country of Gibraltar.'"

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Remember DMOZ? by Anonymous Coward · 2012-09-18 16:30 · Score: 5, Interesting

If you remember DMOZ, the community edited links directory, that died a death because they didn't tackle paid interests.
I'd edit a category to remove keyword stuffing, and kill links to sites that were simply keyword stuffed pages with lots of links to another site. Obvious SEO stuff. As soon as I did that, a senior editor would drop buy, re-instate the links, and in coordination, the spammy gateway page would be replaced by a plausible site. After 2-3 months, the site would revert back to the spammy gateway page again.
Of course the senior editors were linked to those sites, and that's why there was such close co-ordination, but there was nothing you could do about it. DMOZ did nothing to fix it, and people just stopped caring, it went away.