Slashdot Mirror
Wikipedia Scandal: High Profile Users Allegedly Involved In Paid-Editing
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.'"
This is why most of the articles get written. Wikipedia is essentially SEO linkbait.
This is really, really good news. Because if anyone of the CIA or something like that would have been involved, corpses would have been found in local creeks. So now that everything is fine, we can all go to rest, knowing everything is all right.
PS: Please everyone please send me your cellphone number. Thanks!
"It's too bad that stupidity isn't painful." - Anton LaVey
From Jimmy Whales, the biggest WikiWhore of them all: "I'm shocked, SHOCKED, I TELL YOU"
Sure Jimmy, sure.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
First, I am very grateful for Wikipedia and would rather not imagine the world without it, even though one need only look back a decade to do so. As a fine and powerful, but fallible tool, it is like the scent of carrion to conniving circling buzzards -- and circling they be! Ahh, yes, the skies are clear you say; where are these buzzards?. Well, Chicken Little has been thoroughly plucked and I'm not following suit. Instead, I'll drop this link (this one too), say a few things, specifically that I suspect there is a problem, and hope this /. article will motivate some capable Slashers to do a little digging and telling, if they will.
The first link directs to a Wired article on Virgil Griffith, a CalTech grad student who did a little forensic prodding, tracing the IPs of certain chivalrous Wikipedia editors. While such agencies and corporations as the CIA and Microsoft have been observed doodling gleefully about, a plenitude of other interesting sources have too. Certainly the CIA and Microsoft are welcome to make appropriate edits to Wikipedia; however, what qualifies as "appropriate" could probably use a good public review.
The second link is simply damned interesting, IMO.
Warning: Rant Begins Here:
It beggars the mind of a bumbling patriot like myself to conceive jingo-seraphim such as Petraeus diverting their genial hoof garments hither domestic. And surely fables of Mocking Birds are no true tales of conniving buzzards. After all, elaborate psychological conditioning could never compete with the unhindered purity of the American phenotype shining so brightly amongst a world lightless without. No, it is not intentional manipulation that deserves credit for the strength of our glorious consumer might. It is far more likely the intrinsic virtue of any decent ape-in-transition to be just as we are, or worse to be fair. Critical-thinking is a disease which must be mitigated by central intervention, by those who know best. For the masses would be lost in an endless banquet of sodomy and cannibalism without the guidance of Malthusian oversight to cull them. Without such counsel, humanity would grovel in the sorry wake of cretins like Tesla, reeling through horrid century after century of wanton growth, like a wicked and vibrant cancer that cannot be controlled, spreading beyond the sweaty grasp of central planning and anthropoid politics. There is a stark and deep Universe beyond the smoke and mirrors of our terrestrial slave'osphere. The iron hand that presses your shoulder every time you gaze into that forbidden abyss of the anti-ape, it only strives to protect you. Baby, it's cold out there.
Forward! -- Emperor Norton, 2012
seriously? taking money to do WP edits == pedophilia?