Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2024-02-13/Disinformation report

In the previous Signpost issue this column described Elite Wiki Writers, a company that scams their clients who only wish to have an article about themselves posted on Wikipedia. A transcript of an actual online sales pitch showed that their supposed Wikipedia paid editors were totally ignorant of Wikipedia rules. But are there other companies running similar scams? Could their representatives be even more ignorant of our rules?

A long-time Wikipedia editor and former board member of the Wikimedia Foundation, Doc James, ran into a possible case of such a company at about the same time as he read the previous article. There is currently an article about him on Wikipedia. While the prices and some of the methods appear quite different than those of Elite Wiki Writers, the general scam looks similar.

Dr. J, as we will call him for short, was approached on LinkedIn, by a person we'll call GoLI. Besides changing the participants' names in the following transcript of his interaction on LinkedIn, we've deleted several other details in order to comply with Wikipedia's rules on outing and reformatted the transcript text to better fit this space. Spelling and grammar have been left as originally posted.

The picture used in the person's LinkedIn profile was not theirs, and the person to whom it belonged reported his impostor to LinkedIn. We'll update this page if GoLI responds on Wikipedia.