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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.'"
Gibralta is a region just north of Africa that is under British rule and all the inhabitants are perfectly happy with this state of affairs
It's not the fault of WP. As long as they toss him out, they've done the right thing and all's well.
If they act like the Catholic Church and protect the abusers, that's another matter.
Tom Geller
Articles like those get a lot of elementary school students messing with them, which is why they are often semi-protected.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
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.
Why would you trust anybody who(voluntarily no less) describes themselves as an 'SEO Consultant?
Surely such people would be as laboriously excluded from polite company as their abominable creations are from search indices and email queues?
Being human. That's the problem. I don't know of any other animal that cheats, lies, steals, and deceives like we do. Whatever happened to just plain ol killing?! Oh...never mind.
My dog is pretty good at stealing - she'll take a steak off the table when I leave the room. When she hears me coming back, she'll scurry over to her bed and lie there innocently, which I guess is her way of lying about it. And she has never once admitted to getting into the trash while I'm at work, even if the trash is still stuck to her head. She think she is a good liar but she doesn't know when she's been caught red-handed.
If she ever catches a squirrel in the back yard, I think she'll prove herself to be a killer as well.
GLAM wasn't created by normal Wikipedia editors. It was something the foundation made up to draw in people who don't really give a shit about open source type ideals.
It's not really a surprise that it would end this way.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
So who wants to write the Wikipedia article on this scandal?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
I use Wiki nominally so i don't care about this situation. I am personally not surprised about this because when it (the site) first popped up years ago i thought to myself "what's to keep someone who's pissed off at you putting up whatever they want about you?".
Think about it.
I did, and updated the article about you accordingly.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Identify the cretins, remove them, shame them publicly and move on. Does not invalidate Wikipedia or its approach at all.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Why would someone who has no vested interest in the page do any work on improving it?
Have a look at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altruism
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Bitches. You can't trust em.
Gibraltar is not a country, it is a British overseas territory.
I did that to win a fake argument and poke fun with someone once. This was a while ago when Wikipedia was newish and I was messing with someone who I know claimed that everything on Wikipedia was 100% correct. He was learning about networking and I tried to convince him that the E in cat5e stood for elevated, it was the cables you used to run above the ceiling tiles. He insisted I was wrong and demanded I checked the Wikipedia entry. I had a friend change the entry while we were arguing about it and not only did he edit it to say that cat 5e stood for the "elephant- because it never forgets" standard, but added that anyone listening to (his first name) would be wrong in any explanation by default.
You should have seen the look on his face when he looked it up to prove me wrong seconds later in front of 4 or 5 of us. Priceless.
larger animal often 'toy' with smaller until they die. eg: Cats.
"Well I planned to eat it, but ooooooooh, string! STring! String!"
We live, as we dream -- alone....
It's incredible how so many corrupt, self-absorbed people can make such a nice thing as Wikipedia.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
There is no such thing as "Wikimedia Foundation UK". There is "Wikimedia UK" (officially "Wiki UK limited"). The Wikimedia Foundation is a US-based organization that runs the servers that host Wikipedia and handles the associated administrative and financial matters. Wikimedia UK is just a local users' organization, also known as a "chapter".
By writing "Wikimedia Foundation UK", the article writer seemed to imply that Roger Bamkin was a powerful person regarding the management of Wikipedia / Wikimedia sites. This is not the case.
Actually Jimmy takes no salary from the Wikimedia Foundation and doesn't even ask for expenses to be covered. He could have easily exploited Wikipedia's popularity to become a billionaire, but chose not to. Instead he just gets to be the butt of stupid jokes like this one from people who have no idea what they're talking about.
he's found a better way than salary.
"The way Mr. Wales makes a living is by getting $50,000 to $70,000 per speaking engagement when he goes and lectures about Wikipedia.[6][7][8][9]."
he's burning through 21k/month from money ultimately derived from the bizniz, not bad.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Useful links:
The wiki page where the complaint was first raised:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Did_you_know#Potential_abuse_of_DYK
Jimmy Wales talk page where the argument is happeninng now:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Jimbo_Wales
Discussions on Wikipedia critics forum:
http://wikipediocracy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=914
http://wikipediocracy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=926
I think it is incredibly slimy when Jimmy Wales' personal user talk page is made into a policy discussion forum.... as if Jimmy Wales has any real authority on Wikipedia any more. His talk page tends to be the last bastion of the trolls who aren't getting their way in other places and think that somehow Wales will bless their viewpoint and take action on something.
My experience when Jimmy Wales actually does something is that it is usually violating existing policies and often acts first and explains later... if ever. There are enough Wales fanbois to follow behind that the policies often change to rationalize the actions. Rarely the community pushes back, especially on English Wikipedia itself. The non-English projects seem to avoid that kind of cult-like following, so I think it is something unique to mostly en.wikipedia. On the other hand, when he weighs in on a controversial topic in the regular community forums by talking first and mostly leaving the actual implementation of the idea to others, his input is usually much more appreciated and considerably less damaging.
Back when Jimmy Wales actually owned the server farm running Wikipedia and the developers running that server farm were on his personal payroll, it might have made some sense to give him a little bit of extra authority on getting things done. That hasn't been the case for many years yet somehow the notion that he is "in charge" persists.
Wikipedia airs their dirty laundry in public because of the collaborative nature of the project and general transparency of the discussion forums. Most other similar organizations do this kind of discipline much more in private and certainly not while "deliberations" are going on to decide upon a course of action or even to consider if the issue is relevant and should be addressed.
If that makes the whole process seem like a house of disorder, that is by design. Committees are rarely neat and tidy.
Sure, I had a low view of Mr Wales, but I gained a lot of respect when he played such a major role in the SOPA blackout. If it weren't for him, and the bold step of blacking out Wikipedia, I'm not sure the blackout would have even been an event.