Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2013-10-09/News and notes


 * "Let the largest Wikipedia research firm help you claim your top spot in Google search results. ... We build, manage, and translate Wikipedia pages for over 12,000 people and companies." (Wiki-PR's main page)

An investigation by the English Wikipedia community into suspicious edits and sockpuppet activity has led to astonishing revelations that Wiki-PR, a multi-million-dollar US-based company, has created, edited, or maintained several thousand Wikipedia articles for paying clients using a sophisticated array of concealed user accounts. They have managed to do so by violating several Wikipedia policies and guidelines, including those concerning conflict of interest in paid advocacy—when an individual accepts money to promote a person, organization, or product on Wikipedia—and sockpuppetry.



Wiki-PR was founded in February 2011, with a physical office at 1550 Bryant St, San Francisco; the office has since moved to Texas. According to the company's web pages, it employs around 25 in-house staff, most of them in sales, and contracts remote and freelance employees like [//www.elance.com/samples/wiki-pr-php-wordpress-mysql-/53723251/ Puneet S.], through separate online staffing companies such as oDesk and Elance that recruit remote workers. Wiki-PR's site includes an upbeat statement of its wish to hire potential writers, a desire repeated on Twitter by its VP of sales—biker and outdoors enthusiast Adam Masonbrink—who also wants to expand his team of sales reps. These contractors are not well paid, given the evidence in an [//en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Rybec&oldid=570540450#Email admission of the role played by one] and an anonymous $9-an-hour submission for the company on the job and career site Glassdoor.

Wiki-PR's website lists five services, including crisis editing (to help companies "navigate contentious situations" without having to "worry about being libeled on Wikipedia") and page translation (which advertises that they can translate articles into 270 languages, a number possibly based on an outdated version of the list of Wikipedias).

While the company claims that "a professional Wikipedia editor will consult you on Wikipedia standards to ensure your page stands up to the scrutiny of the Wikipedia community", the community has judged many of their article subjects to be non-notable, resulting in [//en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Long-term_abuse/Morning277&oldid=574339200#Sublimeharmony_sandbox_topics article deletion]. To increase their customer base the company has sent thousands of unsolicited emails, one of which was [//en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Administrators'_noticeboard/Incidents&oldid=514411671#Promotional_email_for_.22wiki-pr.com.22 revealed] on Wikipedia in September 2012:


 * Hi SiteTruth Team,
 * Shouldn't SiteTruth have a full-length, professional page on Wikipedia? Wiki-PR.com creates full-length, professional Wikipedia pages. We have software tools to manage your page in real-time.
 * Would you like more information? Please reply by email or provide your contact number. It will be worthwhile. A full-length, professionally written Wikipedia page will drive sales and inform your clients about what you do best.
 * Your competitors are getting on Wikipedia. Shouldn't you be on Wikipedia, too?

As one disgruntled Wiki-PR employee is reported as [//en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Rybec&oldid=570540450#Email 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 [//en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Long-term_abuse/Morning277&oldid=574339200#Habitual_behavior 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 "[//bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=12363 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.

Wikipedia's [//en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Long-term_abuse/Morning277&oldid=574339200 long-term abuse] file on Wiki-PR, named Morning277 after the first discovered account, shows that the company's employees have created and used a staggering 323 accounts, with another 84 suspected. Their clients are just as diverse: Wiki-PR's Adam Masonbrink announced on Twitter just weeks ago that the company's newest clients included Priceline.com and Viacom, while a source familiar with the Wikipedia investigation told the Signpost that two music bands—Imagine Dragons, of "Radioactive" fame, and Fictionist—have contracted with Wiki-PR to maintain their articles. Our source also claimed that the company has had at least one in-person meeting with the multinational retail corporation Walmart, though we must emphasize that there is no evidence to suggest that Walmart has already used Wiki-PR's services. Other companies, organizations, and people listed in the public file include US Federal Contractor Registration, Inflection, The Wikileaks Party, and Adeyemi Ajao; Silicon Valley companies, their senior employees, and small financial institutions also feature in the file.

When Wiki-PR was in its infancy in 2011, it charged clients around $500 to write a Wikipedia article; today, it charges around $2000 or more per article, depending on the size of the client, with a monthly fee of $99 if the customer wants Wiki-PR to police new edits to an article. The raw arithmetic suggests that this is, or could be, a highly profitable concern: using a degree of speculation, the Signpost calculates that 2000 clients with only one article each at current rates would yield $4M in revenue; similarly, if all clients took up the article-policing service, this would provide a revenue stream of about $200,000 a month. However, the same source close to the community investigation confirmed that upwards of 12,000 articles may be involved; the revenue stream could thus be considerably more than indicated by these calculations.

Wiki-PR did not respond to the Signpost's telephone enquiry.

Publicity
These allegations were first publicized by Simon Owens of the technology website Daily Dot, whose reporting and investigation were done entirely separate from the Signpost. Owens reported that various Wikipedia editors, including DocTree, Rybec, and Dennis Brown, were involved in "the battle to destroy Wikipedia's biggest sockpuppet army". Owens emailed a "few dozen" companies who had articles that were created under the sock accounts, and received four replies. All declined to be named directly but told him that "they hired a company called Wiki-PR to make pages for them".

The replies to the Daily Dot, although a small sample, expressed dissatisfaction and surprise at the service. One client told Owens that after they noticed their page was deleted, they emailed Wiki-PR, only to receive a response that was "obviously a lie". These deletions were blamed on notability and activist volunteer administrators; the clients claimed they were never aware that Wiki-PR was breaching Wikipedia's policies to create the articles. Problems with these articles were far from limited to notability&mdash;for example, references to external websites were frequently misleadingly labeled to obscure their true origins. Links to CNN's iReport and Yahoo's Voices, their citizen journalism arms, were in at least one case labeled to appear official "CNN" or "Yahoo" sites, revealed as fraudulent only when the targets were directly audited. According to Owens:

After being told of the Daily Dot's exposé of Wiki-PR, Jimmy Wales [//en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Jimbo_Wales&diff=576312397&oldid=576312058 responded] on his talk page, "Incredible. I've been hearing rumblings about this for a few days, and I'm very eager that we pursue this with maximum effect."

PR professionals weigh in
Historically, there has been a stormy relationship between PR professionals and Wikipedia editors, with Jimmy Wales being a vocal advocate for a "bright line" to forbid paid editing of Wikipedia. In this case there seems to be widespread agreement in professional PR ranks that Wiki-PR stepped over an ethical line.

In reaction to the Daily Dot piece, Phil Gomes, senior vice president for the public relations firm Edelman and founder of CREWE (Corporate Representatives for Ethical Wikipedia Engagement), expressed his dismay at Wiki-PR’s actions:

CREWE operates as a Facebook group consisting of PR professionals and Wikipedia editors who discuss critical issues concerning PR and the editing of Wikipedia articles. Gomes has been vocal in the past about avoiding Wiki-PR's strategies, stating that it is imperative the PR industry "demonstrate by cooperation and good behavior that it can work with the Wikipedia community instead of taking the quick, easy-fix route." He was a major contributor to the development of a freely licensed flowchart that teaches PR firms how to avoid direct editing of articles in favor of community engagement.



The prominent British PRs body, CIPR, gave strong guidance in this area in June 2012 when it published a Wikipedia Best Practices Guidance. This guide warns against clandestine editing by companies (see Signpost coverage): "There is another interpretation of public relations, commonly referred to as "spin". If this is your mode of operation then you are urged to steer clear of Wikipedia altogether in the performance of your job … You are reminded that 'dark arts' are the antithesis of best practice public relations. Intentional deceit and anonymous or incognito activities are breaches of professional codes of conduct."

While PR industry groups like CIPR have put considerable time and effort into developing such guidelines, they have proved to be no match for the desire to harvest big profits from this volunteer site.

Alex Konanykhin of WikiExperts.us rejects not only Jimmy Wales' zero-tolerance "bright-line rule", but does not reveal his relationships with clients on Wikipedia [//www.facebook.com/groups/crewe.group/permalink/433601990078387/?comment_id=433632063408713 because] "that would expose our clients to being unfairly targeted by anti-commerce jihadists." In recent days, he has been an unabashed defender of his firm's editing activities in the CREWE group.

Previous coverage of paid advocacy
Efforts at paid advocacy have been greatly frowned on by the Wikimedia community, but have received support from some editors. The Signpost has reported on the evolution of the phenomenon over the past seven years. The genesis of paid advocacy is usually traced to Gregory Kohs, who founded a company (MyWikiBiz) with the express purpose of creating and editing Wikipedia articles on behalf of paying corporations. As the Signpost reported in 2006, he offered to write articles for between US$49 and $99, assuming the company met his own eligibility guidelines, which were based on those of Wikipedia. Soon after, Kohs was [//en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests&oldid=72426667#MyWikiBiz brought] before the English Wikipedia's Arbitration Committee and blocked by Jimmy Wales, the site's co-founder.

The Signpost has covered issues such as Microsoft's attempt to monitor articles and "diploma mills" in 2007, the Nichalp/Zithan case in 2009, and a PR firm's edits ("The Bell Pottinger affair") in 2011. Paid advocacy received its most substantial treatment in 2012 with a series of interviews with paid editing supporters, a skeptic, and Jimmy Wales, the co-founder of Wikipedia. On the site itself, a full conflict of interest guideline was developed in response to the perceived threat of paid editing.

The Signpost's "In the media" writer, Jayen466, reports that the story has been picked up by the San Francisco Chronicle and the German internet portal gulli.com (gulli.com "Sleepers in Wikipedia: admins on the payroll?")—a tea-leaf-gazing feature that partly translates the Daily Dot coverage and partly provides commentary on what they describe as admins' temptation to make money from their position.

On the German Wikipedia, a major vote has been started as part of a paid €80,000 study on Wikimedia projects by Dirk Franke (Southpark), funded by the German chapter. Many editors of the German Wikipedia have opposed the request because Franke is being paid for it.


 * Tony1, Kevin Gorman, and Andrew Lih assisted in researching, writing, and editing this story.

In briefs

 * How much is Wikipedia worth?: An intriguing article on Smithsonian.com, based on a paper by Jonathan Band and Jonathan Gerafi, asks the provocative question of what Wikipedia would be worth in monetary terms. By looking "at what other sites that get similar traffic are worth, how much people would be willing to pay for Wikipedia if it weren’t free, and how much it would cost to replace the site", the researchers determined that Wikipedia is worth "tens of billions of dollars" while having a replacement cost of a bargain $6.6 billion.
 * Indian chapter governance issues: Last week we provided an update on the issue of three members of the executive committee (one of whom, Moksh Jujeja, newly elected in August, did not disclose to voters that he employed two sitting members). Former executive-committee member Anirudh Bhati posted a rejoinder on the chapter's mailing list, pointing out that one of the three—Karthik—had been an intern for Moksh Juneja's firm on only a small retainer. Bhati praised the volunteer contributions of all three men to the chapter and advised anyone with any doubts about the issue to contact them directly. This does leave unanswered whether stricter guidelines for future elections in India will be in place and enforced, including full disclosures of potential conflict of interest and adherence to the rules requiring the advance publication of voter lists.
 * Jimmy Wales and TED: Jimmy Wales, the co-founder of Wikipedia, was featured this week on The TED Radio Hour, part of an episode on "why we collaborate".
 * WMF report: The August 2013 report of the Wikimedia Foundation has been published on Meta.
 * GLAM newsletter: The newest edition of This Month in GLAM, the monthly newsletter reporting on interactions between the Wikimedia and galleries, libraries, archives, and museums communities, has been published.