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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.'"
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]
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
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.
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!
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.
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.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
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.
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.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
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 . . . .
> 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?
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.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
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.
"Inveniemus Viam Aut Faciemus" 'We will find a way... Or we will make one!' --Hannibal of Carthage
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.