'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%.

Comments

I'm With Him

[SuperKendall]

In my limited interactions with Wikipedia editors, I would have to say that very probably this guy paid to correct mistakes, is way more likely to be accurate than the supposedly "neutral" Wikipedia editors.

So I applaud the tenacity of this guy to correct mistakes that editors probably made on purpose to begin with to slam or ridicule some target. Even if he was paid, he is doing God's work in doing some small part to drag Wikipedia back to real neutrality.

After all, all this guy can really effectively argue for is substantiated truth... I had a running fight with an entry on a wiki page just to add a movie reference, the editor refused to acknowledge that a movie existed even though it was sold on Amazon. I eventually gave up, not worth my ALSO unpaid time to fight with wiki editors who are supposedly unpaid but spend 100% of time on the system...

Bi deal, nothing new

[Anonymous Coward]

What's new? Microsoft has an entire department, 12 people last time I checked, which does one thing only - edit any Wikipedia page that hinders their image, even down to falsifying their own history. They've been doing this almost since Wikipedia started and the Wikipedia admins are fully aware of it. Wikipedia - the single greatest source of misinformation on the Internet.

Re:Disagree

[jwhyche]

The fact that it is the Huffington Post automatically means the article loses all credibility. As the article stated all the man is doing is correcting articles and it getting paid for it. If the articles are correct and can be proven to be so, why does Wikipedia care if he is paid or not?

Here is my suspicion. This individual "corrected" some article that the liberal writer of this article didn't like. Since the author couldn't change the truth, he has decided to start a smear campaign against the writer.