How PR Subverts Wikipedia

Daniel_Stuckey writes "We all know that Wikipedia can be subverted—it’s an inevitability of an open platform that some people will seek to abuse it, whether to gain some advantage or just for a laugh. Fortunately, the Wikipedia community has strong mechanisms in place to deal with this, from the famous cry of [citation needed] to the rigorous checks and standards put in place by its hierarchy of editors and admins. In recent months though, Insiders have encountered something altogether more worrying: a concerted attack on the very fabric of Wikipedia by PR companies that have subverted the online encyclopedia's editing hierarchy to alter articles on a massive scale—perhaps tens of thousands of them. Wikipedia is the world's most popular source of cultural, historical, and scientific knowledge—if their fears are correct, its all-important credibility could be on the line... Adam Masonbrink, a founder and Vice-President of Sales at Wiki-PR, boasts of new clients including Priceline and Viacom. Viacom didn't respond ... but Priceline — a NASDAQ listed firm with over 5,000 employees and William Shatner as their official spokesman — did. Sadly, Priceline didn't choose to respond to us via Captain Kirk; instead Leslie Cafferty, vice president of corporate communications and public relations, admitted, 'We are using them to help us get all of our brands a presence because I don't have the resources internally to otherwise manage.'"

Comments

Internet democracy

[girlintraining]

If the internet organized itself with a sort of government and had votes and such on laws and such governing it, this wouldn't be a problem. The problem is that the internet needs representation, but all it has is our shitty bricks and mortar governments, and organizations like ICANT (cough, giggle), running the show.

We used to deal with shit like this with things like the Usenet Death Penalty. We simply boot the companies off the internet. Suddenly, ethics and morality abounded. Nope... you can't blame the PR companies for this: You have to blame our fucktard governments (all of them, equally) for being utterly and completely incompetent.

We should hold an Internet Congress, elect some people, and start cleaning shit like this up, instead of waiting until the heat death of the universe for the governments of the world to advance in maturity past the age of five.

Re:Internet democracy

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, let's have a Congress of elected representatives who can sit down as reasonable men and women and make collective decisions on important policy issues! Kind of like the model of...

Oh wait.

Re:Internet democracy

[Garridan]

See, Wikipedia started like that, too. But very soon, our Internet Congress would be populated by corporate fucktards, and not long afterwards, anybody with a clue would be outnumbered and banned from the internet. Also, any mechanism that you create to ban folks from the internet will be used for governments for censorship. Great intention you've got, but that road leads straight to hell.

Re:Internet democracy

[Anonymous Coward]

This is a terrible idea! You just read an article about PR firms editing articles about science & history. Facts are the least democratic things of all!

Do you want people to vote on science? How many people think Relativity is just E=mc^2? They ignore all the import aspects about it. If there wasn't a maximum speed (speed of light), then kinetic energy (KE=mv^2) would go to infinity and create unlimited energy.

Do you want people to vote on History? Well, they did, and the Holocaust only killed Jews. The other 5 million killed for handicaps, homosexuality, and others don't count. There were even 3 more genocides in the 20th century alone: Pol Pot's Cambodia (the educated), Serbia (muslims), & Rwanda.

I don't want popular opinion to warp reality anymore!

Re:Internet democracy

[koan]

I will blame anyone obscuring the truth.

Re:Internet democracy

[Joining Yet Again]

OK I giggled a bit.

Wikipedia: verifiability, not truth; consensus, not truth; time available to engage in edit wars, not truth. objectivist power-mongering, not truth.

OK, it's a fair introduction to some non-contentious subjects... although even e.g. where it's supposed to be good, like mathematics, I'd much rather go to Mathworld or a topic-specific repository (e.g. the MacTutor history of mathematics archive) for something written by people who are both knowledgeable and able to write... so, to refine my point, it's a fair introduction to trivia where a series-specific Wikia hasn't already been created.

But what's really going for it is that it appears at the top of search engine results. And most people aren't using the Internet for anything important, which means anything resembling an answer is good enough.

Re:Internet democracy

[koan]

How do you get banned from the Internet? It's literally impossible at this point in time.
Of course if you have a Facebook account (and I wager you do) you're helping "them" to create exactly what you just said, a bannable Internet.

So STFU.

Re:Internet democracy

[koan]

And why is it you only hear about the Jews hmmm?

Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm

Re:Internet democracy

[Garridan]

Context is important, friend. RTFP and STFU yourself.

Re:Internet democracy

[Penguinisto]

Well, maybe...

The old UDP system wasn't as badassed as proclaimed. It was fairly quickly subverted by simple dint of getting another ISP account.

Netcop me over something that offended you in USENET? Hah - fuck you, I'm back on in less than two hours courtesy of an AOL floppy, some other uni's server which left their dial-in lines wide open (and lookie here - anon logins!), or one of a zillion other means of getting in. Seriously - it wasn't all it was cracked up to be, and get even less powerful as ISPs started popping up out of the woodwork. By 1999, even the little rural corner of Arkansas I lived in gave me a choice of at least 10 different ISPs (be they local and otherwise), not counting the UofA alumni accounts, the local government dial-ins (which also had a fun little generic login for awhile) and etc.

Now - fast forward to today. In the age of free wifi damned near everywhere, 3/4/whatever-G mobile devices, and IP assignments that are almost as disposable as toilet paper squares?

Yeah, good luck with that. Can't even call it by MAC addy, and until/unless an RFC is universally implemented that will simultaneous destroy any hope of privacy, you're kinda fucked...

Sorry 'mano, but we've been hearing/hashing similar arguments since the days when Uni/.mil/BBS dominated things.

Re:Internet democracy

[s13g3]

No, the answer is not for a bunch of people to elect another bunch of people via popularity contest to exercise power over everybody else, especially including the people who didn't want the people who got elected in the first place.

The better answer would be for people like yourself to, instead of throwing their hands in the air and blaming everybody but themselves for the problem, to actually get involved in efforts to combat those doing wrong, such as taking part in Wikipedia's anti-vandalism process, as opposed to just crying about evil corporations, etc.

Remember, governments aren't interested in people, they're interested in furthering themselves and their own authority. No matter the intentions they start with, democracies evolve into tyrannies nearly without fail: Plato pretty well nailed it with the Five Regimes. It's one thing when participation in a body with a government is voluntary, but when you propose to place everyone under your "protection", whether they want it or not, you're a mob with mafioso leanings at best.

If this is an issue of genuine concern to the Wikimedia Foundation and their leadership, they can alter their policies to combat it. I don't propose to know how best or even if they should do so, but they have the ability to respond as they see fit, and there are undoubtedly options they could pursue if the threat is great enough. Let them and their governing body choose whether to subject themselves to some other governing body or shielding organization, if they wish to abrogate their own control and responsibility, but to suggest everybody should be de facto subject to another group of people making decisions for nearly everyone else based on principles they may not share is how you get the mess we have with most of the world governments today.

Re:Internet democracy

[Sique]

Don't mess two different things up. There is reality, and there are our measurements, our convictions and our accounts of what reality is. Just because you almost never get the last ones to match doesn't mean there was no reality. Yes. There is reality. No. We will never know it completely.

Re:Internet democracy

[Eunuchswear]

Genocide != mass murder.
.

Re:Internet democracy

[epyT-R]

No, all that would do is create a single, easy target for the subverters, since the power would be concentrated there. The best system is the one we have now, where everyone has the option to put up a site containing the content they wish, which lets the viewers decide what to think. The current system at least forces them to push their propaganda one site at a time, rather than lobbying their desires via this 'government.' This limits their reach to their own domains, and 'social' media accounts, and anyone who believes what they read on social and company sites is a fool anyway. There's no helping them. As far as wiki goes, it's full of bullshit in 'controversial' subject matter, but it's usually pretty easy to figure out what's bullshit and what isn't via the language and fact checks. It just requires some thought on the part of the reader. PR subversion is pretty obvious, so I'd rather have freedom and do the PR/propaganda filtering myself than let some blue ribbon panel decide what I can read/post.

Usually the people who suggest regulation to battle minor annoyances just want the opportunity to push their own brand of morality/reality on the rest of us. I don't know if that's your intention or not, but it is something to think about. Even if you don't intend this, someone else will use such an organization if it exists.

Re:Internet democracy

[girlintraining]

Now, you may or may not believe the miracles in the Bible, but historically and archaeologically it's a VERY accurate book.

God creates light and separates light from darkness, on day one. But he doesn't create the sun and the stars (things that produce light) until the fourth day. He also created plants on the third day, perhaps unaware of them needing a source of light. Then there was that whole business about creating a woman from a rib, a Jewish zombie. The earth took six days to create, not 13.7 billion years. Pi equals 3.

Shall I go on, or does the stupid burn enough? No, the bible isn't historically accurate... it's a story about some dude who had been dead for five hundred years, and most of the material says it came from him. Now I don' t know about you, but think about the most famous thing to happen in the past fifty years. Now imagine what they're going to say about it 500 years from now. Do you think it'll still be perfectly accurate... if the only thing to go on is word of mouth?

You're an idiot. Sit down. Shut up. And the moderator who upmodded you should be found, dragged from his keyboard, and publicly beaten.

Re: Internet democracy

[lgw]

That's pretty much half the posts on /. these days -"the government has been corrupted by companies: we need more government!"

Re:Internet democracy

[foobar bazbot]

<a href="example.com">...</a>
<a href="http://example.com">...</a>
See the difference?

Fucking slashdot changed my links from wikipedia to slashdot.

Are you complaining because /. lacks a <DWIM> tag, along with the strong AI that implies?
Or because someone failed to teach you about absolute and relative URLs?

Either way, it seems a little unreasonable to blame /. for it.

(Now the tablet UI, I'm with you all the way blaming /. for that abomination. If you have the ability, changing to a desktop user-agent string will get around it -- but there's NO reason we should have to do that.)

Surprise!

[For a Free Internet]

Capitalism! Freedom of the press belongs to he who owns one!

This problem will only be solved after the workers have expropriated the bourgeoisie and established their proletarian dictatorship!

Never Kirk

[Anonymous Coward]

Shatner's persona of The Negotiator is not Captain Kirk, and Priceline have never used Kirk as a spokesman.

does it do that?

[Anonymous Coward]

Fortunately, the Wikipedia community has strong mechanisms in place to deal with this, from the famous cry of [citation needed] to the rigorous checks and standards put in place by its hierarchy of editors and admins.

[citation needed]

Re:does it do that?

[Eunuchswear]

Fortunately, the Wikipedia community has strong mechanisms in place to deal with this, from the famous cry of [citation needed] to the rigorous checks and standards put in place by its hierarchy of editors and admins.

[citation needed]

From the article:

Other clients are more outspoken, and less happy. Emad Rahim, Dean of the College of Business and Management at Colorado Technical University, recruited Wiki-PR earlier this year. [...]

Rahim paid Wiki-PR $1,500 over two installments to create a page for him on the site. [...]

At first he was happy with the result, but within two weeks the page had come to the attention of other Wikipedia editors. [...]. On July 17, Rahim emailed the firm after noticing that his page had been marked for deletion for not being notable enough. CEO Michael French replied, “You're covered by Page Management. Not to worry. Thank you for your patience with the encyclopedic process.”

A few days later the page was deleted, and Rahim contacted French again. “You're in the queue for reuploading. We'll be live in five to eight business days,” was the entirety of French’s response. “What will prevent them from rejecting it again?” the academic asked. “It wasn't rejected. It was approved and went live,” French responded, adding: “Your page was vandalized.”

When the page was finally created again, it contained only one sentence. Rather than apologizing, French told Rahim to raise his media profile, and connected the academic to Scarsdale media, who offered 30 days of "media relations efforts" for another $800.

“They promised me results that they had no control over.“ At just 30 words long, Rahim’s profile cost him the equivalent of $50 per word.

Sounds like Wikipedia was doing its job and "Wiki-PR" are a bunch of useless scamwers.

Same as it ever was

[tutufan]

Not sure that this is really new. The page for C++, for example, is regularly scrubbed of any critical material. At the moment, there is just one negative sentence, indicating that "C++ is sometimes compared unfavorably to [some other languages]". Whether that is an unbiased and appropriately detailed statement of the totality of current objective C++ criticism is left as an exercise for the reader.

Re:Same as it ever was

[K. S. Kyosuke]

The removal of C++ criticism on Wikipedia has been criticized on Wikipedia already. ;-)

[citation needed] doesn't help

[MLCT]

There is no point placing any stock in [citation needed]; these are PR companies. If someone challenges what they are adding to wikipedia with citation requests they will issue a press release, get questionable "newspapers" (i.e. trade papers, promotional puff periodicals etc.) to pick up the press release (normally it is verbatim) and then back slam that on the wikipedia text as a citation. A lovely circular piece of work that ensures the promotion continues.

One way to minimise their PR efforts is to create significant Streisand effects on their work. But some PR companies are so desperate that they would probably even be delighted with that.

Re:[citation needed] doesn't help

[evilviper]

The other extreme is true, too... Any random moron can slap [citation needed] and dozens of other tags into an article. It takes almost no effort, and there are no consequences for the idiot doing it without putting in any effort of being completely misinformed. Meanwhile, tracking down citations is obviously significant work in the best of cases. So some high quality articles have [citation needed] or [dubious] tags all over the place, left there for years. While some horribly slanted articles with only a few bad sources have no obvious indication of any problems.

Just one of many problems WP isn't dealing with.

Re:[citation needed] doesn't help

[Trepidity]

One way to minimise their PR efforts is to create significant Streisand effects on their work. But some PR companies are so desperate that they would probably even be delighted with that.

Part of the reason there isn't much of a Streisand effect here usually is that in the common case, honestly nobody cares about these articles. A PR company writes an obvious fluff piece about some obscure internet portal or logistics company or for-profit university. If someone on Wikipedia catches it, they might try to tone it down or even delete it. But most of the time: 1) nobody even sees these articles; and 2) it's barely really worth the effort.

If a PR company tries to fluff up a politician's article who's engaged in a high-profile race, or some energy-industry PR people edit an article relating to climate change, or the Turkish government hires a PR firm to edit the page on the Armenian genocide, then people will notice and care. But nobody reads the thousands of articles on obscure companies. The minus side is that they're usually crap articles, but the plus side is that they are relatively uninfluential crap: all they tell you is that some small company exists and thinks it's great, and they get a handful of views from Google. Usually they are not even really linked from other parts of Wikipedia: when the PR companies try to insert spammy links from other articles that people do read, that's when these fluff articles are caught.

Re:[citation needed] doesn't help

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

> One way to minimise their PR efforts is to create significant Streisand effects on their work.

Perhaps this is why they are changing 10s of thousands of pages recently -- to tire out the other editors.

Bad, bad stuff

[Pharmboy]

What these companies do is serially violate Wikipedia policies while padding with fluff or outright lies. I'm not against paid editing itself, and a few people do it without problems, but the more known companies have methods they use are purely deceptive and they cause a great deal of expense and problems because of the thousands of sockpuppets they create, and the hit and run methods. They are not doing this in an open and honest way, whatsoever.

Trust me. If I know anything, this I know, and I know it first hand from actually working the SPI cases.

Barefaced corruption of Wikipedia

[Anonymous Coward]

https://www.wiki-pr.com/services/

The most outrageous part of this is that Wiki-PR claims to have Wikipedia admins on their staff, not just normal editors. There is one, and only one response to this - find out who they are and remove their admin status immediately.

Als, some excerpts, as this stuff has to be seen to be believed:

"We respect the community and its rules against promoting and advertising." - Claims the advertising agency whose following services completely revolve around image management and promotion of corporate interests.

"Don't get caught in a PR debacle by editing your own page." - As if having an advertising firm editing it for you through a network of paid-for eds/admins looks any less corrupt and underhanded.

"We've built technology to manage your page 24 hours a day, 365 days a year." - Blatantly working against the Wikipedia rule against asserting page ownership.

"That means you need not worry about anyone tarnishing your image - be it personal, political, or corporate." - Possibly the worst admission, goodbye balanced articles, goodbye controversy sections, hello censorship and whitewashed articles.

Though the abuse of an open platform for informing the public is to be expected, what is surprising is how blatantly these people are advertising their corruption of Wikipedia.

Re:Barefaced corruption of Wikipedia

[MtHuurne]

Seems reasonable to think that they could server both the interests of their client while still being kept in check by the community. Having some Wikipedia admins on staff would actually make a lot of sense. At least it's better than not having any, and finding out the stuff you're creating and editing has violated some rules after the fact.

The rules are not secret; you don't need anyone on the inside to comply with the rules. It might help to have one or more experienced editors on staff, but admins is just asking for conflicts of interest.

As for the page management and preventing people from tarnishing a client's image, that alone doesn't imply page ownership.

The passages the GP quoted use "your page" and even "your own page", which does suggest ownership. Neutral would be "the page about you".

There's nothing wrong with removing mud slinging from an article when it isn't true or backed up with facts and references. Now if they are claiming to keep a page clean from all negative information, even if it's true, then there are problems.

Their page says "you need not worry about anyone tarnishing your image"; this either oversells their service or they don't care whether negative information is true or false.

I can understand that a company/celebrity is concerned about their image and having a third party between them and Wikipedia to spot and resolve problems is not a bad idea in itself. However, this PR firm's advertising suggests they are entirely on the side of their client rather than trying to find a balance.

We marketers ruin everything

[j0el]

As a long time marketer I can assure you that we ruin everything. email spam, ugly banner ads, interstitials, SEO manipulation, retargeting, on and on. We do it because it works. Even paid twitter followers work. Robocalls work. Blatant sex works (works really well). When Congress gets involved all that happens is we have to pay lobbyists to make sure we can get around any laws or regulations. When we find ways to make you aware of our clients or their products, when we find ways to make you like us, when we find ways to make you engage with us, even if the response is a very low percent, we will do it.

Stop me before I annoy you again.

Re:We marketers ruin everything

[PPH]

Blatant sex works (works really well).

I am skeptical. Convince me.

Laugh

[koan]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiki-PR
"this article may meet Wikipedia's criteria for speedy deletion"

Lets all make an effort to not only keep the Wiki-PR article, but to include any *FACTS* we find that show what Adam is up to.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflict-of-interest_editing_on_Wikipedia
You really need to see who it is trying to get the articles changed, some of the biggest criminals around.

Adam "anything for a dollar" Masonbrink
“We write it. We manage it. You never worry about Wikipedia again.“
Really?
What were they worried about the truth?

So Adam wants to cash in on subverting one of greatest assets on the Inet.
Show him how you feel about that.

Re:Laugh

[FuzzNugget]

So Adam wants to cash in on subverting one of greatest assets on the Inet.

So, in other words, an asset subverted by an asshat.

readable

[koan]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2013-10-09/News_and_notes

As one disgruntled Wiki-PR employee is reported as writing: "The warning flag was when I was told not to mention Elance or work for hire." Those who work for Wiki-PR have indeed gone to extensive lengths to hide their activities on Wikipedia. This has included altering their habitual behavioral patterns, frequently changing their IP addresses (apparently to avoid being caught by the "checkuser" tool), and bypassing the normal gatekeeping process by which editors police new submissions to the English Wikipedia. One practice appears to exploit a loophole by creating a new page as a user subpage before moving it into the mainspace, where Wikipedia's regular articles are located. This "bug" was actually first reported in 2007 with the prescient warning: "creating articles in userspace before moving them into mainspace seems to me a sneaky way of avoiding scrutiny from newpage patrollers." Checkuser has also been sidestepped through the company's use of remote and freelance employees, who can operate from a large number of IP ranges.

Agreed!

[sgt_doom]

I agree with this post entirely. I first noticed this several years back, when I was researching the background of faux historian (frequently appears on PBS's non-news hour), Michael Beschloss' wife,

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afsaneh_Mashayekhi_Beschloss

Note that nowhere in the entry does it mention that Mrs. Beschloss was a former employee of the Carlyle Group (which in point of fact she was).
I became suspicious about this and noticed an extraordinary number of former Carlyle Groupers had excised that from their background and history. Most peculiar . . . .

Re:Agreed!

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

L:ol, I re-read what you wrote and you are an idiot.

You are complaining that "a number of former Carlyle Groupers had excised that from their background and history." But the only one you cited, Beschloss, did not. How do I know that? I used the link on her view history page that says, Revision history search to search for the word "Carlyle" and it was never in the article to be excised.

So, in a story about PR firms screwing with wikipedia you post a bunch of stupid blather about your own personal issues and then hang it all on a lack of evidence. That's classic conspiracy-theory schizophrenia.

Re:How to get banned from the Internet:

[koan]

Explain to me how anyone will keep me (a individual) from using the Internet *today*, because it is *literally* impossible.

Wikipedia Signpost recent coverage

[davidwr]

Wiki-PR conducting "a concerted attack" on Wikipedia, October 16, 2013.

Extensive network of clandestine paid advocacy exposed, October 9, 2013.

Q&A on Public Relations and Wikipedia, September 25, 2013.

Automatic detection of "infiltrating" Wikipedia admins; Wiki, or 'pedia?, September 25, 2013.

Re:Embrace...

[Maury Markowitz]

> Wikipedia needs to embrace that companies want to get their products on a website with that much traffic

No we don't. It's one of the most successful web sites on the planet, and arguably the most successful example of collaboration in human history. Why would we possibly want to change that?

Re:How to get banned from the Internet:

[Anonymous Coward]

because it is *literally* impossible.

It is not literally impossible. Some people are forbidden by court order from accessing the internet, or any computers that are capable of it.

Short of that, it is practically impossible. But not literally.

Pushback

[Animats]

Wikipedia needs to embrace that companies want to get their products on a website with that much traffic

No we don't. It's one of the most successful web sites on the planet, and arguably the most successful example of collaboration in human history. Why would we possibly want to change that?

Exactly. It really annoys parts of Corporate America that they can't get their way on Wikipedia. That's a good thing.

I've encountered paid editing a few times. Carnival Cruises really, really wanted to make all the references to their various disasters (the Costa Concordia sinking, the Costa Allegra fire, the Carnivale Tropicale fire, the Carnival Splendor fire, the Carnival Triumph fire (ship adrift for four days), etc.) go away. Big editing battles. Finally the paid editors were kicked off.

There are a few individuals with promotional editors for their own bio articles. Michael Milken, the "Junk Bond King" who did time in a Federal pen, tried very hard to keep himself from being labelled as an ex-con. Nassim Nicholas Taleb has had people trying to keep the poor financial results of his hedge fund out of the article. Vivek Wadwa, who's heavily into self-promotion, put his grad students on pumping up his reputation, and seems to have an in with Jimbo Wales. It's an ongoing headache, but usually the good guys win.

Re:Pushback

[Tom]

It's an ongoing headache, but usually the good guys win.

[citation needed]

I've seen a couple ugly edit wars, and while that's just anecdotal evidence, I haven't seen the good guys winning very much.

Persistence wins, every time. And there are only two kinds of people with unbelievable persistence: The fanatical extremists who think the world will come to an end if their favorite conspiracy theory isn't included, and the people who don't care if you revert because they're paid by the hour for their edits.

Re:So how exactly is that bad?

[gronofer]

I'm not exactly sure what sort of Wiki manipulation they are talking about. If you check out an old version of the Priceline.com article it has a bit of corporate nonsense for Booking.com etc. However it looks like something that could have been done in less than an hour, and was easily deleted, so hardly justifies the fear of some kind uber-manipulating PR firm.

Re:How to get banned from the Internet:

[Runaway1956]

The wig improves internet reception?

Re:How to get banned from the Internet:

[TapeCutter]

A court order is a slap on the wrist, get caught breaking it and they will hammer you. Judges do not like to be disobeyed, it undermines their authority.