How PR Subverts Wikipedia 219
Daniel_Stuckey writes "We all know that Wikipedia can be subverted—it’s an inevitability of an open platform that some people will seek to abuse it, whether to gain some advantage or just for a laugh. Fortunately, the Wikipedia community has strong mechanisms in place to deal with this, from the famous cry of [citation needed] to the rigorous checks and standards put in place by its hierarchy of editors and admins. In recent months though, Insiders have encountered something altogether more worrying: a concerted attack on the very fabric of Wikipedia by PR companies that have subverted the online encyclopedia's editing hierarchy to alter articles on a massive scale—perhaps tens of thousands of them. Wikipedia is the world's most popular source of cultural, historical, and scientific knowledge—if their fears are correct, its all-important credibility could be on the line... Adam Masonbrink, a founder and Vice-President of Sales at Wiki-PR, boasts of new clients including Priceline and Viacom. Viacom didn't respond ... but Priceline — a NASDAQ listed firm with over 5,000 employees and William Shatner as their official spokesman — did. Sadly, Priceline didn't choose to respond to us via Captain Kirk; instead Leslie Cafferty, vice president of corporate communications and public relations, admitted, 'We are using them to help us get all of our brands a presence because I don't have the resources internally to otherwise manage.'"
Internet democracy (Score:2, Interesting)
If the internet organized itself with a sort of government and had votes and such on laws and such governing it, this wouldn't be a problem. The problem is that the internet needs representation, but all it has is our shitty bricks and mortar governments, and organizations like ICANT (cough, giggle), running the show.
We used to deal with shit like this with things like the Usenet Death Penalty. We simply boot the companies off the internet. Suddenly, ethics and morality abounded. Nope... you can't blame the PR companies for this: You have to blame our fucktard governments (all of them, equally) for being utterly and completely incompetent.
We should hold an Internet Congress, elect some people, and start cleaning shit like this up, instead of waiting until the heat death of the universe for the governments of the world to advance in maturity past the age of five.
Bad, bad stuff (Score:5, Interesting)
What these companies do is serially violate Wikipedia policies while padding with fluff or outright lies. I'm not against paid editing itself, and a few people do it without problems, but the more known companies have methods they use are purely deceptive and they cause a great deal of expense and problems because of the thousands of sockpuppets they create, and the hit and run methods. They are not doing this in an open and honest way, whatsoever.
Trust me. If I know anything, this I know, and I know it first hand from actually working the SPI cases.
Laugh (Score:5, Interesting)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiki-PR [wikipedia.org]
"this article may meet Wikipedia's criteria for speedy deletion"
Lets all make an effort to not only keep the Wiki-PR article, but to include any *FACTS* we find that show what Adam is up to.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflict-of-interest_editing_on_Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]
You really need to see who it is trying to get the articles changed, some of the biggest criminals around.
Adam "anything for a dollar" Masonbrink
“We write it. We manage it. You never worry about Wikipedia again.“
Really?
What were they worried about the truth?
So Adam wants to cash in on subverting one of greatest assets on the Inet.
Show him how you feel about that.
readable (Score:5, Interesting)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2013-10-09/News_and_notes [wikipedia.org]
As one disgruntled Wiki-PR employee is reported as writing: "The warning flag was when I was told not to mention Elance or work for hire." Those who work for Wiki-PR have indeed gone to extensive lengths to hide their activities on Wikipedia. This has included altering their habitual behavioral patterns, frequently changing their IP addresses (apparently to avoid being caught by the "checkuser" tool), and bypassing the normal gatekeeping process by which editors police new submissions to the English Wikipedia. One practice appears to exploit a loophole by creating a new page as a user subpage before moving it into the mainspace, where Wikipedia's regular articles are located. This "bug" was actually first reported in 2007 with the prescient warning: "creating articles in userspace before moving them into mainspace seems to me a sneaky way of avoiding scrutiny from newpage patrollers." Checkuser has also been sidestepped through the company's use of remote and freelance employees, who can operate from a large number of IP ranges.
Re:Internet democracy (Score:5, Interesting)
No, the answer is not for a bunch of people to elect another bunch of people via popularity contest to exercise power over everybody else, especially including the people who didn't want the people who got elected in the first place.
The better answer would be for people like yourself to, instead of throwing their hands in the air and blaming everybody but themselves for the problem, to actually get involved in efforts to combat those doing wrong, such as taking part in Wikipedia's anti-vandalism process, as opposed to just crying about evil corporations, etc.
Remember, governments aren't interested in people, they're interested in furthering themselves and their own authority. No matter the intentions they start with, democracies evolve into tyrannies nearly without fail: Plato pretty well nailed it with the Five Regimes [wikipedia.org]. It's one thing when participation in a body with a government is voluntary, but when you propose to place everyone under your "protection", whether they want it or not, you're a mob with mafioso leanings at best.
If this is an issue of genuine concern to the Wikimedia Foundation and their leadership, they can alter their policies to combat it. I don't propose to know how best or even if they should do so, but they have the ability to respond as they see fit, and there are undoubtedly options they could pursue if the threat is great enough. Let them and their governing body choose whether to subject themselves to some other governing body or shielding organization, if they wish to abrogate their own control and responsibility, but to suggest everybody should be de facto subject to another group of people making decisions for nearly everyone else based on principles they may not share is how you get the mess we have with most of the world governments today.
Re:Pushback (Score:4, Interesting)
It's an ongoing headache, but usually the good guys win.
[citation needed]
I've seen a couple ugly edit wars, and while that's just anecdotal evidence, I haven't seen the good guys winning very much.
Persistence wins, every time. And there are only two kinds of people with unbelievable persistence: The fanatical extremists who think the world will come to an end if their favorite conspiracy theory isn't included, and the people who don't care if you revert because they're paid by the hour for their edits.