Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2021-04-25/Disinformation report

If you believe the mainstream press, former US President Donald J. Trump has spread misinformation across the internet and in news outlets on a massive scale. According to The Washington Post he has "accumulated 30,573 untruths during his presidency — averaging about 21 erroneous claims a day." He has been banned from social media sites including Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube. Has Trump also spread misinformation or disinformation on Wikipedia? We don’t think that the former president himself has edited Wikipedia since it is much more difficult to edit Wikipedia than it is to tweet. This Signpost article examines whether Trump’s business empire, the Trump Organization, has employed paid editors to edit Wikipedia.

They apparently have. Editor Mmartinnyc disclosed his identity twice in 2011 on-Wiki, as Michael Martin, the Trump Organization’s Director of Digital Marketing.

According to his obituary published in December 2020, Martin started working at the Trump Organization in 1987 and later became Director of Digital Marketing, serving in that position until 2014 when he left the company.

The Signpost notes that evidence of paid editing using only Wikipedia edit histories can not actually “prove” an editor’s identity, even in cases where they disclose many personal details. Sometimes editors have tried to embarrass a targeted individual or company, a tactic known as a Joe jobbing. This caveat applies even when an editor directly declares that they are paid.

Mmartinnyc’s editing
Martin only made 45 edits to Wikipedia articles: 23 to Ivanka Trump, 11 to Donald Trump Jr., 10 to Eric Trump, and 1 to Donald Trump. 

An examination of the edits to Ivanka Trump shows that on December 7, 2011, his first day of editing the article, Martin removed some unflattering content and added promotional content such as "In addition to her work at The Trump Organization, Ivanka Trump is a principal of Ivanka Trump Fine Jewelry, which launched to great success in 2007 with a store on Mercer Street in New York City." These edits were reverted by an experienced Wikipedian within the hour, while labeling them "heavily copy-pasted POV copy[right]vio[lations]." in the edit summary.

The following day Martin tried and failed to reinstate many of his edits by edit-warring with three experienced editors. . Only then did Martin declare that he was a paid editor.

A week later he made his only edit to the Donald Trump article, replacing the name of the notorious Trump University with “Trump Entrepreneur Initiative.” His remaining 16 edits were less adventurous, 14 of them being marked as “minor”.

Conclusions
Mmartinnyc’s declaration that he is Michael Martin, at that time the digital marketing manager of the Trump Organization is quite convincing. If the declaration was part of a Joe job, it's one that didn't embarrass anybody for ten years, even though the head of the Trump Organization was the president of the United States for four of those years.