Slashdot Mirror
The Rise of Paid Wikipedia Consulting
jfruh writes "Roger Bamkin is a director at Wikimedia UK; he also is on retainer for the government of the British territory of Gibraltar, and has nominated and approved Gibraltar-related articles for the "Did You Know" box on the Wikipedia front page. Maximilian Klein runs a business called UntrikiWiki, and advertises his services by saying "A positive Wikipedia article is invaluable SEO." Are such users violating the spirit of what Wikipedia is about? Or should we trust that the wisdom of crowds will offset obvious shilling?"
http://news.slashdot.org/story/12/09/19/0414235/wikipedia-scandal-high-profile-users-allegedly-involved-in-paid-editing
That depends on if he has clients agree to a budget that includes bribes for other editors, admins, and additional sockpuppets and massive numbers of IP addresses, to ensure that the "consensus" of any editing discussion is in favor of the client.
These services are called "perception management" and they operate under public relations and other marketing labels. This kind of thing has been going on for Centuries, hell the original name of Greenland was a "perception management" name given to attract settlers (Greenland has far more Ice than Iceland). Why is this portrayed as a new kind of thing?
Name any public website you can think of, Amazon, Twitter, Slashdot, Wikipedia or any other. There are companies that monitor those websites and respond to with accounts that are saved just for those purposes. These accounts can be rented out by thousands or tens of thousands. It's dishonest and it is something that websites have had to battle for years.
Articles about exposing professional shills have appeared and been covered extensively on the Atlantic, Wired, Slashdot, and a number of other sites I can think of in recent memory.
I think the more interesting technology piece on this would be to cover how websites go about detecting and burying shill accounts. It's really just a form of spam, and the war on shill accounts will likely mirror the war on spam in every regard. It's just something you have to watch out for.
Possibly used to apply to Wikipedia 6 or 7 years ago. Then its rise in popularity caused trolling and political shilling to become more attractive, libel lawsuits for living person biographies to become a danger, and an increasing obsession with "notability" (ie. having spawned at least one internet meme) to develop. Preventing the former and enforcing the latter required a tight and locked down command structure. Any moderately popular article is locked to anonymous edits now.
That means Wikipedia is no longer dependent on the wisdom of crowds, but the incorruptibility of its management and directorial staff.
Whoops.