Wikipedia Forcing Editors To Disclose If They're Paid 135
mpicpp sends word that the Wikimedia Foundation is updating its Terms of Use to keep track of editors who are paid for the changes they make. This follows last fall's discovery that a small industry had arisen around public relations firms running Wikipedia editing campaigns for paying clients. The Foundation now says, "If you are paid to edit, you will need to disclose your paid editing to comply with the new Terms of Use. You need to add your affiliation to your edit summary, user page, or talk page, to fairly disclose your perspective. ... Specific policies on individual Wikimedia projects, or relevant laws in your country (such as those prohibiting fraudulent advertising), may require further disclosure or prohibit paid advocacy editing altogether." They add, "undisclosed paid advocacy editing is a black hat practice that can threaten the trust of Wikimedia’s volunteers and readers."
Russian internet brigades (Score:5, Interesting)
And what about Russian or Chinese hordes of biased editors paid by their governments? They plague not only comment section of pretty much any mainstream news website, but also Wikipedia as well. Try for example the WWII [wikipedia.org] article -- it's so full of paeans of praise for the Soviet Union that someone who doesn't know better would take them for heroes who almost single-handedly liberated the world.
Re:They aren't the problem (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Oh, good (Score:5, Interesting)
You can't restrict this to just political party affiliation. Most 3 letter government agencies pay for edits under various programs, each as potentially nefarious as the former.
Try correcting something on the Sarin Gas page for example (I had this edit war personally) where someone from a Government IP address last year added a statement that "Assad and Syria were proven to have used Sarin on it's own population". The UN investigations have repeatedly shown that the FSA rebels have used chemical weapons against the populace, and the FSA has been caught smuggling materials from Turkey on several occasions. The UN has never ever concluded that Assad or the Syrian army has done any such thing.
After making a simple correction to "The US alleges" the edit war was on, and every day a new Government IP would have new edits attempting to make it appear factual that Assad had used Sarin on the Syrian population. Every day I would remove and correct information. I don't get paid to edit, so gave up after about a month. It was simply too much time to invest. This is one of many pages edited purely for propaganda purposes by the US Government (ARIN [whois] is free to use, so you can easily see what agency is making edits, even when anonymously).