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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%.
...to post on Slashdot. Winning.
Well time to go roll back every article touched
One of the problems with Wikipedia is that when articles are written about black people, they seem to come under an inordinate amount of scrutiny, challenging the relevancy of the individual and their accomplishments. I have seen this too many times with Wikipedia articles.
Crowd sourced anything has proven to be worthless. Happy to see another internet mainstay get destroyed.
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...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
[Not worth logging in here.]
Because perceived reality is always relative and often contradicting yet both true from their pov, and usually it is not only impossible but even nonsensical to think of one absolute truth(TM).
Only small and pseudo-scientific minds who never *really* thought about the basics of existence haven't come to that conclusion.
It has nothing to do with SJWtards [INB4 OMGSJW], but is just a physical fact of life.
And because Wikipedia is centralized and only allows one single view. That of its admins.
Who happily delete everything that doesn't fit their or the currently dominant bias in the name of deleting obvious nonsense, insanity and trollig. (Which of course also does exist a lot, don't get me wrong.)
Those two things are fundamentally incompatible.
Eiter you have things in there that are ridiculous nonsense to you, or you have a totalitarian dictatorship.
Small minds. As I said.
This respond TL;DR and tell him to fuck off.
That shit is too realistic! Might make some kid go nutty...
https://i.4cdn.org/gif/1552779779505.webm
It seems like the sensible solution here is to ban for-profit editors (and revert their changes). Regardless of accuracy, profitability creates a significant motive to corrupt Wikipedia.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
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.
I've been sockpuppeting Wikipedia since 2002, and a proud banned user. The admins, bureaucrats, stewards and arbcon get sadder and more revert happy every year. It's a shame that there is no true open source encyclopedia, because people need one. We need a distributed system, where we don't need to worry about notability so any subject with sources can be covered and that multiple versions are allowed so you can't revert because there will always be an alternative version available. Respect for banned users, they influence wiki policy even though Wikipedia has a denial policy.
Seeking immoral money wherever, whenever.
Why are you people here so fucking retarded?
Can youbat least TRY to comprehend? Or have you given up, don't even get e.g. Revolver by Guy Richie, and rely on belief and following your ego triggers?
At least you're going down with your festering hole of pus of a country as we speak.
The real problem is not paid wikipedia articles. I reckon about 99% of what is published on the internet involves paying money to promote a certain biassed narrative.
The real problem is that people assume there is this thing called "unbiased information". People should be educated to never accept any narrative for granted and make up their own mind by analyzing the bias, applied to information from all sides.
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
Wikipedia claims it's an encyclopedia but all too often it strays into the domain of news reporting. Of course people & organisations with power, influence, resources at their disposal, & a public reputation to maintain are going to do everything that can to push back at news reporting that they don't like.
News reporting is the job of journalists, their specialist editors, & their (very necessary) lawyers, not anonymous volunteer academics, experts, & laypeople. If you want to find information about powerful people, corporations, etc., that they'd rather you didn't, check the work of trained, experienced, professional investigative journalists who have sufficient resources & support at their disposal to pursue intensive & sustained investigations. Investigative journalists' professional integrity & therefore livelihood depends on them defending their work against attacks from the powerful, unlike the essentially anonymous volunteer contributors to Wikipedia.
Clearly, Wikipedia doesn't have what it takes to do journalism to a reasonable standard & so they leave themselves vulnerable to the powerful when they try reporting news about them.
Debate is a form of harassment. Do not question my truth.
Does anyone believe that joke, really?
People invested enough to be a Wikipedia editor are invested for crying out loud.
They are not neutral: They are invested due to strong personal opinion and/or by greed.
If they write things you agree with then you think them neutral, writing something you disagree with reveals them to be political hacks, corporate shills, sock puppets or worse.
Wandering through Wikipedia, snopes, or Slashdot provides ample evidence of all of us thinking we wrote or read something neutral that many others thing is totally insane.
No brain, no pain.
Every time, Kendall you are the world's most deserving incel faggot. You're SO FUCKING BORING, you need to die. Kill yourself ASAP. You already have no life, just formalize it.
Hire a Jew.
User:BC1278
User's current talk page:
User contributions: last 500, article space only, hide minor edits
This way anyone paying an editor when discovered losses all their changes and edits. Maybe even counterpoints are highlighted for a period of time, say 5 years. Help the Streisand effect work. Don't see another way to stop this. Maybe paying editors but that wouldn't really prevent this. Perhaps a team that looks for these types of abuses. But the wiki folk have to know that this is the only real way they lose their organization.
"Those that start by burning books, will end by burning men."
This is a good example of limits to the system. $ for whatever ails ya.
Show us those edits. Show us.
I loathe mickeysoft but that's irrelevant, show me the edits on the history pages. Do it.
Biggest source of misinformation is people like you. Prove me wrong.
It seems like the sensible solution here is to ban for-profit editors (and revert their changes). Regardless of accuracy, profitability creates a significant motive to corrupt Wikipedia.
Solution to what? This guy is entirely above board and transparent with his actions. If you ban THAT, for a non-problem, you're going to be left with the underground paid editors, and you WILL have problems with those.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ce3gGBovUrM
It's been obvious this sort of thing, and its reverse, has been going on with Wikipoodle from the beginning. That is why a baby kitty dies every time somebody cites Wikipiddle as an authoritative source.
{o.o}
My partner mentioned someone in the GamerGate article's talk page employing similar tactics. I wouldn't be surprised if the Van Valkenberg family hired this Sussman fellow. They could certainly afford to.
... to make up a fake corporate "history". It's not whitewashing so much as total fabrication. /Everything/ you've ever been told about the founding, funding, and even age of Facebook is a lie. And plenty of other organizations.
This article is just a advertising for their services, but placed just as a information article. they are playing by the rules and yet passing their information anyway :)
Higuita