Major Wikipedia Donors Caught Editing Their Own Articles

An anonymous reader writes "As reported before on Slashdot, one of the most terrible sins on Wikipedia is to edit articles for pay, or otherwise violate the 'neutral point of view' policy, per their co-founder Jimmy Wales. And yet, the Wikipedia-criticism website Wikipediocracy recently began a study showing that dozens of the Wikimedia Foundation's largest cash donors have violated that policy. Repeatedly, and wantonly. In short, they wrote articles about themselves or their companies, then gave the WMF big donations — and were not confronted about violating the NPOV policy." Do the proposed TOS changes address this? Note that they also found that many of the donors adequately documented their conflict of interest.

Comments

Re:Conflict

[martin-boundary]

Part of the conflict has nothing to do with being the most knowledgeable on the subject, but actually raising the subject in the first place. For example, some unknown startup might write its own entry as an advertising vehicle. Of course, they're the most knowledgeable about the subject - themselves - but the subject isn't notable in the first place. It's just a thinly veiled ad for the company.

Similarly, intelligent design is an uninteresting, unimportant subject compared with accepted science facts. Obviously, intelligent designers are the most knowledgeable about their own claims, but they shouldn't be contributing articles about themselves - that would just be adverts for their cause - making their cause seem bigger and more important than it is to attract new followers and stay in the news.

There's an argument to be made that new articles about a company should be *creatable* only by third parties without a connection to the subject, who can judje if creating a page is actually meaningful or desirable. Most companies, especially the unknown ones, would then never get an article. Only once an article about a company already exists does it make sense for that company to submit edits for facts.

Re:Where is the big problem?

[thekohser]

I guess you missed the part where it's shown that User:Jsdillon never disclosed his conflict of interest as the co-creator of Cards Against Humanity, when he created (then later edited) the Wikipedia article about Cards Against Humanity. So, this is neither manufactured nor astroturfed... but nice try, Jimbo.