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'Facebook, Axios And NBC Paid This Guy To Whitewash Wikipedia Pages' (huffpost.com)
The Huffington Post ran a bombshell report this week on one of a handful of people who have "figured out how to manipulate Wikipedia's supposedly neutral system to turn a profit." They're describing Ed Sussman, a former head of digital for Fast Company and Inc.com who's now paid to do damage control by relentlessly lobbying for changes to Wikipedia pages. "In just the past few years, companies including Axios, NBC, Nextdoor and Facebook's PR firm have all paid him to manipulate public perception using a tool most people would never think to check. And it almost always works."
Spin reports:
The benefit of hiring Sussman, aside from insulating talking heads from the humiliation of being found to have edited their own pages, is that he applies the exacting and annoying vigor of an attorney to Wikipedia's stringent editing rules. Further, because his opponents in these arguments are not opposing lawyers but instead Wikipedia's unpaid editors, he's really effective. From HuffPost:
"Sussman's main strategy for convincing editors to make the changes his clients want is to cite as many tangentially related rules as possible (he is, after all, a lawyer). When that doesn't work, though, his refusal to ever back down usually will. He often replies to nearly every single bit of pushback with walls of text arguing his case. Trying to get through even a fraction of it is exhausting, and because Wikipedia editors are unpaid, there's little motivation to continue dealing with Sussman's arguments. So he usually gets his way."
NBC and Axios confirmed that they hired Sussman, and an Axios spokesperson told HuffPost that the site "hired him to correct factual inaccuracies." The spokesperson added "pretty sure lots of people do this," which may or may not be true.
Sussman's web site argues he's addressing "inaccurate or misleading information...potentially creating severe business problems for its subject," bragging in his FAQ that when he's finished, "the article looks exactly the same" to an outsider -- and that his success rate is 100%.
"Sussman's main strategy for convincing editors to make the changes his clients want is to cite as many tangentially related rules as possible (he is, after all, a lawyer). When that doesn't work, though, his refusal to ever back down usually will. He often replies to nearly every single bit of pushback with walls of text arguing his case. Trying to get through even a fraction of it is exhausting, and because Wikipedia editors are unpaid, there's little motivation to continue dealing with Sussman's arguments. So he usually gets his way."
NBC and Axios confirmed that they hired Sussman, and an Axios spokesperson told HuffPost that the site "hired him to correct factual inaccuracies." The spokesperson added "pretty sure lots of people do this," which may or may not be true.
Sussman's web site argues he's addressing "inaccurate or misleading information...potentially creating severe business problems for its subject," bragging in his FAQ that when he's finished, "the article looks exactly the same" to an outsider -- and that his success rate is 100%.
People trust Wikipedia because they believe it to be untainted. That trust is what immediately makes it a target for corruption.
It doesn't matter if an information source is run by volunteers or paid staff; the payment method is not what guarantees neutrality.
In fact, nothing can guarantee neutrality. The instant anything is widely believed to be neutral, it becomes a target for corruption, and there is no final way to prevent that corruption from infecting the information.
Are you fucking serious? He's being paid by companies to whitewash. Wikipedia isn't neutral, but that doesn't make what he's doing in any way right. You pretending he is doesn't help anyone other than those companies. So I'm against him. And useful idiots like you.
Because our corporate overlords have our best interests at heart, and no one has ever earned a salary doing something nefarious.
It's been a stunningly obvious problem with wikipedia-- THE_TOY_WEB-- all along, but they've somehow managed to keep their heads in the sand for decades.
You would not "assume good faith" if there were ten dollars on the table, so there's no way you would try to work that way if you were doing anything at all of importance-- like, oh say, hypothetically, running information infrastructure crucicial for the functioning of a modern democratic industrial state.
The relevancy is challenged because there is a sizeable decentralized PR push to fluff the resumes of PoC and women in history. (I'm not sure why, it weakens the narrative that women were mostly broodmares consigned to childrearing.)
The challenges are especially based on notability standards because most black accomplishments are utterly irrelevant. Same with female accomplishments. The black or female equivalents to Von Neumann, Euler, Einstein, Newtown, Gauss, etc don't exist.
Most of the innovations that led to our industrial society is mostly based on the work of a few hundred white and jewish males.
That would be great if Wikipedia had any way to find out who was being paid to edit it. As far as I can see, they have no way to do that.
He's being paid by companies to whitewash.
You claim whitewash; do you have an example?
As I said before, I found the system entire corrupt and producing material factually wrong. So who are you to say the material this paid person is attempting to insert is not more correct? If I were a company paying him, all I would want is a factual account of what is really going on.
Indeed, you really need to read the article again because the way this guy wins is really by being correct, and explaining the ten thousand ways in which the edits he is making ARE correct. That is really why editors give up, because they cannot proof he is wrong and he can work the rules.
And useful idiots like you.
Problem with your statement; I'm the opposite of a useful idiot. I am a jaded man of experience who has seen the bar far worse wrongs the system is rife with. So I'm all for whatever small forces of correction try to push back against the howling void.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
True, but if you have no rules, you have no recourse when you do actually discover rule-breaking. If there was a rule against for-profit editors, then Wikipedia could now revert his changes legitimately.
Kind of like /. moderators flagging something "troll" or "flamebait" when you post something demonstrably true/factual, like a direct quote or a news article, that (I'm guessing) they disagree / disapprove of -- often it's something about our President.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
I know this is a troll, but off the top of my head: Marie Curie, Lise Meitner, and Grace Murray Hopper. There have been brilliant women in plenty of fields.
Making outrageous and generalizing claims about the entirety of Wikipedia.
Posting as AC.
Not providing a single reference for any of the claims.
There we have 3 red flags for bullshit posting on the internet. And at this point it's modded +4 Interesting of which are 30% Informative and 20% Insightful.