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Wikipedia Actively Battling PR Sockpuppets
Nerval's Lobster writes "Over the weekend we discussed news that PR firms have been selling their ability to modify Wikipedia entries to help clients clean up their image. Now, the Wikimedia Foundation's executive director has confirmed that Wikipedia editors are actively engaged in a wide-ranging battle against those PR firms. Over the past couple weeks, those editors have isolated several hundred user accounts linked to people 'paid to write articles on Wikipedia promoting organizations or products,' according to Sue Gardner. Those users' accounts violate Wikipedia's guidelines, 'including prohibitions against sockpuppetry and undisclosed conflicts of interest.' Some 250 suspicious user accounts have already been nuked. Correcting biased text is a thankless job for those Wikipedia editors — the literary-world equivalent of killing endless hordes of zombies approaching your protective fence. But that job gets even harder when a PR agency deploys dozens, or even hundreds of writers to systematically adjust clients' Wikipedia pages."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_is_an_MMORPG
Thank you!
A local newspaper owner runs ads for prostitutes in his magazine. He also has a site (backpage.com) that has been accused by a local DA of being a conduit for child prostitution. An edit was made last week talking about this.
Page in question.
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Dan_Pulcrano&action=history
Talk page with links to articles backing up the edit
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Dan_Pulcrano
Reliable sources
Change.org petition http://www.change.org/petitions/stop-providing-the-means-to-sell-girls-and-boys-for-sex
http://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2013/05/22/san-jose-weekly-paper-pressured-to-remove-escort-service-ads
http://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/Weekly-Paper-Under-Fire-Over-Adult-Ads.html
http://meyerweed.blogspot.com/2013/08/san-jose-inside-vs-integrity.html
http://www.protectsanjose.com/content/sjpoa-presdient-unland-responds-metro-editor
Skeezy.
Is there anything at all that advertising and marketing firms can't turn to shit? Anything?
I say name 'em and shame 'em. Where is a list of companies and people that have hired a PR firm to manage Wikipedia articles? Once I know, I'll never deal with them.
To show there is nothing new under the sun...ironically from the wikipedia entry "On January 24, 2007, Rick Jelliffe made claim on his blog that a Microsoft employee offered to pay him to make corrections in Wikipedia articles concerning Office Open XML" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Microsoft
If they are intentionally editing the site to delete factual information or add fake information. Couldn't the constitute vandalism which they operators of Wikipedia could sue them for? Especially since they are doing it "For Profit" so they can't say they did so erroneously or anything?
Watch them get hit with a steep judgement against them PER ATTEMPTED EDIT and you will see them put a stop to it fairly quit I would think.
In action
To speculate - I've noticed that articles on wikipedia fall into the three broad categories, unsurpisingly the same as those of nouns: 1) people, 2) places, 3) things.
3) "Things" articles are the 'simplest' to disentangle or find the truth of because "things" include works of art, mathematics, science and physical objects. It's easy to tell a lie when an article says that the hit song, "I feel good" is written by Mozart, or when an article claims gravity makes things fall up. These claims are relatively easy to test or refute. The problem with these types of articles is they may require some real expertise (especially philosophical and mathematical articles) to verify - but that is also their virtue
2) "Places" articles (which include 'historical events') become more difficult because often these places do not exist any more, or the events usually have already happened, usually a really long time ago. These articles suffer the classic problems of history multiplied by the power of the internet.
1) "People" articles. These articles are rife with arguments over what actions events in a person's life are significant, and what elements of those actions are significant. The words chosen to describe a person can make all the difference - he was a "Great Leader" or he was a "Good Leader" - which one best describes Hitler*?
So I would venture that this firm has targeted articles in categories 1 and 2, although I guess there maybe product articles in category 3 which could be gainfully modified.
Ah the truth of things. And the relative truth of places and people ;)
*you graciously forgive this overused example.
Some of the paid PR I've seen recently has been on biographies of living persons, especially rich ones. Lots of happy talk about their charitable work and affiliations gets put in. Stuff about their career failures, lawsuits, and criminal history gets taken out. This is tougher to fight, because Wikipedia has a "biography of living persons" policy which discourages negative comments for anything short of a felony conviction. (Even after a felony conviction, sometimes.)
On the product and business side, though, pushing back against paid editing usually works.
People are more concerned with whether or not they are to be caught and less with whether or not it's the right thing to do. These bits and pieces of character should be coming from parents and school and society at large. I got lots of that sense growing up. I teach those lessons to my sons. I think for most people, however, those lessons never made it in and they are people of lesser character because of it. It makes me sad. None of those people even care that they are of weak and/or poor character. They care little about what they do to society, to culture, to their neighbors or just about anything that doesn't have a direct impact on their lives. I could ask "why" all day long and never get an answer that could lead to a solution. But I think since the 80s and attitude changes such as "looking out for number one" have managed to shift things in a bad and irreversable way. Am I wrong? Does anyone else here see things wrong and try to correct them when they see them? Or do you, like so many others say "it's not my business" and move on? You live in this world. Make it better if you can.
We all know how StackOverflow works. You can always ask or answer a question, but other privileges are based on your reputation. Reputation is only gained by creating good questions and answers. It takes work to get a good reputation on StackOverflow.
I actually don't know what Wikimedia has in place, but it could implement a similar reputation based approach as StackOverflow. Of course the algorithm and mechanism would be different since Wikipedia is not a Q&A site.
To make things even harder, they could implement a reputation killer. For example: if user A improved the score of user B, then user B gets nuked because they are one of these PR firms, then user A should suffer a major reputation dive.
While I'm at it... Instead of Wikipedia begging for money once a year, they could implement a wikipedia.com site which has some light advertising. By default all users go to wikipedia.org, but for those who want can manually redirect to wikipedia.com. I would be glad to support such a system.
Stupidity in action
Pharmaceutical shills pushing dangerous "standard" medicines is a huge problem. I ran into an outside Vioxx lawyer with COI and a lot of "company loyalty". Pretty tough sledding to set it straight. Worse are the Quackwatch trolls. These contribute a lot to the bankrupting of America, and some unpleasant deaths.
Anyone who takes Wikipedia's word for anything without another source deserves whatever they get, and this is not due to the growth of sockpuppets. It's always been true. A teacher I know tells her students that to cite Wikipedia "is like telling me you saw it written on a bathroom wall at the bus depot."
For many controversial topics, sock-puppetry/soapboxing is a plague on the Internet, that prevents a lot of rational discourse about a pretty wide range of stuff; now that nations and corporations can't more directly dictate what we consume through TV, they spread as much FUD as possible across sensitive topics of interest, all over the Internet.
The purpose isn't to win anyone over, but to prevent/deter anyone from learning, and I think it is going to be a losing battle, where certain topics are permanently kept muddied, such that the public can not learn in sufficient numbers, to make some topics/insight become mainstream.
This might sound a bit dramatic, but there's a gigantic information war going on (arguably has always been going on, throughout the history of all politics), between the public and those who would like to control the information we consume (for whatever purpose - usually power/profit), and most of it takes place inside our heads: we are prevented/dissuaded from learning, and taught inaccurate knowledge, by people abusing our susceptibility to various bits of false-logic/fallacies.
The Internet has been one of the best hopes of transcending all of this, but I don't think it's going to work anymore, I think there will be too many shills and sockpuppets on the Internet before too long, who are subtle enough to pass as credible, and deceitful enough to get away with destroy discourse on a lot of important topics (and I think economics is the biggest testing ground of all there).
Who would have thought someone would use a freely editable site to spread misinformation?
Knowledge is power; knowledge shared is power lost.
Vandals are a plague, but *paid vandals* are much more difficult to deal with.
Paid vandals who make admin status are even worse again, of course, but I suppose that is a different subject.
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
Why not make it official? Let's say politician X doesn't like the article written about him. Let him add a section _under his own name_ where he says what the truth is according to himself. Obviously the reader would know that this part wouldn't be unbiased.
On the other hand, there was the case of a German politician where Wikipedia got the name wrong - and wouldn't accept his statement what the correct name is. So it would be really good if that person could add a paragraph saying "these Wikidiots got my name wrong, and here's the correct name..."
It seems to me that Wikipedia is more like a commune than a free market. Market based companies don't let competitors edit their "product" with no oversight.
Like all communes, they are victims of the delusion that all people will always work for the common good.
Free market capitalist systems recognize the fact that people want "stuff", and will act in their own interest, and arranges things such that acting in your own self-interest IS acting for the greater good. At the most basic level, the free market says:
To get stuff, get money.
To get money, build or do stuff for other people to buy.
Putting the two together:
To get what you want, take care of other people's needs.
That's the free market. "Everyone get together and work on a shared thing" is the commie way. It works only if a) there are no more than three people involved or b) the project is controlled at the top by a free market organization responsible to their customers (Red Hat) or a harsh dictator (Linus). If you exclude the free market it either fails (Soviet Union) or has a heartless dictator (Castro) or both (Cuba sucks, even with a dictator).
Should take note of what was changed and make a special notation that that company/entity wanted this exact detail changed.
I think it would be funny to see what was changed and what it was changed to. Call them out on it
Have gnu, will travel.
Communes can work on a larger scale than 3, but there are serious issues when you get above about 150 or so. That corresponds with research about the number of people that one person can know. When you get a situation where everyone doesn't know everyone, you start to get a breakdown in the trust that is essential for a commune to function. Even with a strong government, it isn't socially/economically stable anymore. And it's always hard to get the next generation to agree to the social contract, if they have other options.
One example:
http://www.hutterites.org/
They limit at about 15 families (they run to very large families) per commune.
Every employee of these PR firms should be thrown in jail.
Unlike Slashdot, Wikipedia does not permit PR people to post openly under their own names. The result is what anyone would have predicted, sock puppets. Wikipedia needs to follow Slashdot's example and permit us to post under out own names.
Great. Just great. Zombie apocalypse is a good metaphor. If everything I hear about the Wikipedia editors is even half true, they're more dangerous than the PR people to most articles. They'd be the guys guarding the zombie free compound and when you walk up waving saying "Thank God I made it to safety." they shoot you, possibly for no reason and just announce another zombie killed. There are reasons that the Wikipedia editors get no thanks and a lot of it has to do with them deleting everybodies additions in their own little private domains as well as any sort of zombie reports.
I kind of feel bad for Jimmy Wales...it seems like he's been in waaay over his head ever since I first read an interview....
He was the lesser tech of the two who started wikipedia, and he kind of screwed his partner a bit...
But...what major online company doesn't have a story like that in its history? Not an excuse but puts it in context...
Wikipedia is awesome. The internet would suck without it.
Wikipedia has never had ads or attempted to become a pay service in any way...in that way Jimmy Wales is a saint
I know Jimmy Wales seems like a cheesey step-dad used-car-salesman type but he's capable of learning and improving...
Credit him for keeping wikipedia open...
Thank you Dave Raggett
The effective solution is suing these PR firms, who directed their employees to do things inherently violating Wiki's terms of service and which can be found liable for civil damages in degrading the quality of Wiki's product, which is supposed to follow the terms of service.
If someone cracks into a system, they get charged with illegal use of computer resources. if someone violates the EULA for a website, they can be similarly charged.
I see no reason why these PR firms couldn't therefore be charged with similar violations in court.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
But to what extent is sex for hire legal in Canada, UK, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa, which are the other countries that read English Wikipedia?
This would be easy to combat. Setup an approval system in place before updates go live for a current events, products or companies.
*It's not what you can do for the Dark Side but what the Dark Side can do for you!*
for the pages that list classified programs?
Wikipedia: The Encyclopedia that anybody (whom we approve) can edit.
They refuse to privilege, in any way, expertise, so why should they engage in demotion of non-expertise?
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
Australia' crooked federal police force have been deleting wikipedia edits telling people how corrupt the AFP are. Can wikipedia please add these and ban the AFP censors?:
http://www.theage.com.au/national/afp-ignored-corruption-complaint-20100524-w81a.html
http://www.theage.com.au/national/afp-allegedly-shut-down-awb-case-prematurely-20120606-1zwz7.html
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/archive/business/afp-withheld-key-whistleblower-evidence-in-kessing-case/story-e6frg97x-1226117735249
http://www.lawyersweekly.com.au/news/afp-defends-record-on-foreign-bribery-1
http://kangaroocourtofaustralia.com/category/australian-federal-police/
http://www.abc.net.au/4corners/content/2008/s2402675.htm
"Policing a citizenâ(TM)s right to expression"
Should Duncan Kerr's concern about a pamphleteer in his electorate allow him to involve the Australian Federal Police, asks Richard Ackland.
While Justice Minister Duncan Kerr was in Sydney yesterday splashing around some federal funding on legal aid, back in his Hobart electorate of Denison things have not been entirely glossy and wonderful. Last Sunday and Monday he had Mr Mick Skrijel stamping over his borough spreading leaflets that said some beastly things about poor Dunky.
Skrijel will be familiar to readers of this column as the former South Australian fisherman who made allegations of drug trafficking and official protection. The NCA subsequently brought a drug cultivation charge against him. An inquiry into the NCAâ(TM)s conduct in this case found there was substantial evidence that the NCA fabricated the case against Skrijel in order to secure his conviction.
Kerr rejected the recommendation that a royal commission be held and has sent the matter to the Victorian Deputy Ombudsman for further investigation. Skrijel claims this is a totally inadequate response.
The material that Skrijel was distributing in Denison contained all those details, plus some flourishes that Kerr was trying to silence him. The Minister for Justice was on notice that Skrijel was going to publish this pamphlet because he had sent him a copy on January 30 and asked him to read it carefully and tell him where he was wrong.
The minister did not take up Mr Skrijelâ(TM)s generous offer. Instead on February 2 he wrote to Skrijelâ(TM)s lawyer in Melbourne, John Howie, of Howie and Maher, and said that the pamphlet was âoewildly defamatoryâ and urged that the legal implications of distributing such material be made clear to Mr Howieâ(TM)s client.
He also sent a letter to members of the media in Hobart, dated February 5, warning that he âoewould be obliged to take legal action if any of the false and defamatory material were to be repeated in the mediaâ.
That letter went to the Hobart branch manager of ABC radio, among others, on the same day that the ABC metropolitan radio host, Annie Warburton, was planning to interview Skrijel on her afternoon radio show. Before going to air she talked to a friend, Mr George Haddad, who is working with Kerrâ(TM)s campaign team in Denison. Haddad cautioned her about interviewing Skrijel because he was likely to say something defamatory about Kerr on air. Warburton then pulled the plug on the interview.
Kerr says he was concerned about his own safety and his office requested the AFP conduct an âoeassessmentâ of Skrijel. This is quaint since
How about we publish a Wiki page which names and shames said PR companies and their clients! That way we know exactly what products and services to avoid.
Call it sour grapes, if you want.
I have no idea why I was banned. I have not even been there in about six months. Just got a message that I posted too many "low quality questions." WTF?
I have no way to find out exactly what was wrong with the questions I posted. Nobody complained about the questions when they were posted. The questions were entirely honest. I was always polite, and respectful.
I think people should be banned when they post constant spam, or obscenities, or racist remarks, or something like that. Just because you post an honest question, and some smart-ass Nazi troll wants to act like a big shot by calling your question "low quality" is a poor reason to ban people, IMO.
There are episode by episode breakdowns of crappy TV shows but then you will get some interesting scientist who's entry is deleted for some reason such as relevance.
Then you get admins who "own" an article. So the new census will come out and someone will update the population of a city to reflect the new census and even cite the new census; but 5 minutes later the old numbers are back and the citation gone.
Then you get excellent articles filled with excellent information but some OCD twerp is threatening to delete it due to formatting issues.
Lastly you get the show off types. This is at its worst in mathematics. There is almost zero educational value in many of the mathematics related articles. The mathematics are perfect but instead of making things clear they use the most esoteric terminology/symbology. So 2+2=4 will become something like:
Using a Yungra transform you can compute that the Dirac set of {1, 1} when concatenated with the set Ramublablajan set {1,1} (each of which represents the empty set {0}) will have a resultant set of the Miller-Shiefler Series {1, 1, {0}, 1}.
An example of a complicated thing being made simple would be the article on RSA. The example math they use could be done using a pen and paper. Most Wiki Admins and editors would seem to despise this sort of simplicity and instead would probably rewrite the entire (excellent) article as a single formula that concisely sums up RSA. I personally prefer the sing-along version that is there now.
Oops, posted on wrong thread. Mea culpa.
Off topic indeed.
I'm here EdgeKeep Inc.
Wrong article, but it's quite easy to create an iTunes Store account without a credit card:
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT2534
Stop hating women, and the problem goes away. Easy.
So, PR firms are using wikipedia in a way not consistent with the terms of service? Isn't this a federal crime in the US? Or does that just apply to non-commercial users?
It only takes a few years after something wonderful is invented for somebody else to come along and make their livelihood by fucking up the wonderful new thing.
I would like to think these sockpuppet firms would get their asses sued into the ground somehow but I can't see that happening. In fact I think increasingly you cannot trust any opinion in any comments these days because there is so much of this shit going on everywhere.
The first mistake we made was in allowing commercial enterprises on the 'net :P
"The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid
A not-unrelated problem is the creation of individual entries for living "non-famous" people. Every time I turn around I find another puff bio on someone that looks like a rip-mix-burn from their LinkedIn page. Some of these are for people I know personally, and it leaves me shaking my head. I suppose I could edit the prose to bring supposed accomplishments down to size, etc., and that might be the right thing to do, but who wants to start a war?
There's no sense in being precise when you don't even know what you're talking about. -- John von Neumann
Strange, isn't it. So many people act (and vote) as if their kumbiya fantasy were reality. People act in their self interest, they buy stuff they want and do things they want to do. Ergo, government control of what people buy can never work. Yet, they keep trying. Today, they think the government can force you to buy overpriced health insurance instead of spending your money on what your family really needs, and that's going to work. Good luck with that. 50 years ago, they figured they could order you not to take a job, to let your house be foreclosed rather than work for less than $ridiculous_union_package. It keeps not working, because people take care of themselves and their families, but they keep trying it again, failing every time.
But when will they ban accounts associated with paid shills for Global Warming?
I actually had the feeling that "regulatory capture" was well under way over at wikipedia. Call in an "independent" moderator to arbitrate a dispute, and you're likely to get another droid. For all I know, these people sincerely don't see any problem with "marketing" (if they did, they might have to find a real job).
Where is the EFF when you need them? This _is_ a really big deal.
PR undermines the truth in every way. It is a battle that is more than worthy of a fight.
I actually advocate for women's rights. I advocate for men's rights too. I don't hate women. I don't think equal rights activism needs feminism or any other damn ideology. Anti-Feminism is not Anti-Women. I hate bullshit ideologies not because I'm a sexist, but because because I'm a Scientist: I need peer reviewed evidence, not emotional appeals.
Here's an example of what I was talking about: Storming Wikipedia
Additionally, I know black folks who initially hated me because I'm white. We're now good friends. They stopped hating white people, their problems didn't go away. I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid your a moron.