Slashdot Mirror
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!
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
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.
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.
it might be sleazy, but prostituion is a legal service - there's no reason why it shouldn't be advertised (with restrictions on appropriate style and location of advertising, of course).
presumably, his magazine is for adults and the readers know what it's about?
being accused of child prostitution is not the same thing as being guilty of it. if he's arrested, charged, and found guilty in court, then he should be sent to jail. if not, the accusation shouldn't be used as a stick to beat him with.
Dude, they reverted your posts because what you posted was flat-out wrong, not because they are shills. You stated that Dan Pulcrano owns backpage.com, but he doesn't own it, operate it, or have any direct control over what goes on it. His newspaper does business with it, but that is a far cry from what you actually posted.
The free market has determined that your organs are worth more than you as a whole.
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."
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..."
He also has a site (backpage.com)
Your edit was reverted because it was factually incorrect as demonstrated by your own links. Backpage.com is owned by Village Voice Media. Dan Pulcrano has no ownership interest in VVM or Backpage. It looks like Backpage pays for a link from the metroactive.com website but that's about the extent of it.
Wow in one post you showed us that you don't understand the free market, communes, or wikipedia.
well done.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Wait, what? Pornography is very much legal, but prostitution is illegal in all but one state: Nevada. Considering the GP is speaking of a man operating in California, he was acting illegally, assuming he is indeed guilty.
You're either confusing words or countries here. How the hell was this modded Informative in the first place?
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
There's an entire world outside the US.
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.
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.
I take it that you've never maintained any sort of wiki for more than a few minutes. I dare you to start your own wiki on any topic of your own choosing and try as you might to keep the cruft off of it. Use your own definition of cruft as well, but penis enlargment pill links thrown into the middle of a discussion of Princess Leia might easily fall into most typical definitions I can imagine. Going to a place like wikia.com is one way to start your own wiki, although other wiki hosting services are plentiful.
After awhile, you will find that random nonsense and pure junk is the rule rather than the exception, and for high profile wikis like Wikipedia really get some absurd junk. For those poor souls who make a hobby of diving into the sewer of recent changes and the new page patrol, it is just freaking amazing that they don't simply say "screw it" and reject everything.
There are reasons why the Wikipedia social structure is the way that it is. Admittedly it could certainly be improved and there are some real asshats and jerks that make putting edits onto Wikipedia sort of a pain in the behind. None the less, it is possible for anybody to edit Wikipedia and to get the edits to stick as generally permanent content. It just takes more than a few seconds to get that to happen.