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?"
That this is the first time in history you have been able to pay to have the 'history books' 'doctored'?
Ultimately somebody is going to edit the article to add the real story. The business model is as good as saying "We'll give you a good starting article".
I have been paid to write articles and pitch them to many magazines just to create published sources that are then used to force wikipedia articles in a certain direction with sources. Specifically, I wrote about Quantum Fiction (which has a crazy misogynist edit history) and my article is getting published in a real magazine, at the end of this week. As soon as it appears, it will be used to further the edit war on the Quantum Fiction page.
http://news.slashdot.org/story/12/09/19/0414235/wikipedia-scandal-high-profile-users-allegedly-involved-in-paid-editing
I vote these people should be drawn and quartered. Same with the vandals.
There's a difference between "promoting the good" and "hiding the bad".
You want to edit your country's (or corporation's, or religion's, or even your own personal) article to add sections about the lovely lakes, the wonderful telephone system, the many interesting furry animals, including the majestic moose, go right ahead. Obviously, you can't just make shit up (fact: Tuvalu is the world leader in nuclear fusion research[citation needed]), but there's nothing wrong with adding facts to the article. And yes, if you go completely overboard with it, writing a novel's worth of praise for the architecture, the geological features, the thriving and innovative independent film industry, it's going to get trimmed down even if it's completely unbiased (more so if it is).
But if you try to hide the undesirable things that are true, you can fuck right the hell off. If there's something about you that you don't want people to know, you probably shouldn't be doing it (doesn't apply *as* much to personal articles - it still applies in many cases, but not in many others). If you don't want people to find out about your ruthless secret police, or your massive sex trafficking biz, or your widespread pollution, you should try stopping those things rather than pay someone to edit Wikipedia to hide those facts. Because not only will editing Wikipedia *not* *work* (people will revert it right back), but it will add "tried to hide the truth from the Internet" to your list of crimes. Which is a pretty shameful, both in "you did something bad" and in "you did something bad that was petty and ultimately meaningless" - it makes you both evil, and a pretty low class of evil at that.
Are such users violating the spirit of what Wikipedia is about? Or should we trust that the wisdom of crowds will offset obvious shilling?
Both. Wikipedia is not a paid content service, paid content is a clear violation. The wisdom of the crowds is now, has always been, and will always be a critical line of defense against disinformation. The conflict between well-informed citizens and those who would distort information has been going on for millennia. There's a whole lot of fancy new weapons in the game, but it's the same game.
Here's one of the most fundamental rules of dynamically unstable systems with lots of new weapons: Arm yourself or be subjugated. If you believe in truth, justice, and The American Way(*), detecting and outing shills is a fine way to serve your fellow man. Say what you will of human nature -- maybe we're all for sale, but the bad guys can't afford to buy us all. The not-paid-off people massively outnumber the shills. And if they do find a way to buy us all off, we can totally throw a rager with the money.
* in the starry-eyed Superman sense, not necessarily the current observed sense
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
And? Larry Wall makes most of his money from his books - does that make Perl just some big scheme so he can sell books?
Neil Gaiman charges in the range of $50K to speak - not because he wants to make a lot of money (he donates much of it to charity), but because there's a very limited supply of him and a very high demand for him to speak.
And moreover, what effect do Wales's talks have on Wikipedia? Perhaps some indirect one, in that he could drive people either towards or away from Wikipedia, but he'd be doing that whether he gets paid for it or not.
The question here is whether being paid to edit Wikipedia by an entity with a vested interest in creating bias is ethical. My own stance (detailed below, in "Difference between adding and subtracting") is "sometimes", but I recognize that some will argue either "always" or "never". But the question is definitely not "is making money based off your personal experiences wrt Wikipedia ethical".
Wikipedia: for editors with no life and paid shills. I'll stick to Encyclopedia Britannica thank you very much.
Because Britannica has more content than the world's largest encyclopedia and you can be certain nobody is paying them, right?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Size_comparisons
But someone may need a large list of fictional animals with pictures and descriptions for a lesson in biological taxonomy!
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
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.
Because Britannica has more content than the world's largest encyclopedia and you can be certain nobody is paying them, right?
They've stopped selling copies of Encyclopedia Britannica now so you are probably right, nobody is paying them!
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Political parties have been paying consultants to write and maintain positive Wikipedia entries on their minor politicians for years. [citation needed]
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.
"Wikimedia UK would like to announce that Roger Bamkin has stepped down as a Trustee."