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From the editors

Caught with their hands in the cookie jar, again

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By Bri
Our regular Editor-in-Chief, Smallbones, has been taking a well-deserved holiday around publishing time. Staffer Bri has filled in this month, and has approved the content of much of the December issue. Smallbones approved the content of this column.

In the latest addition to the long series of Conflict-of-interest editing on Wikipedia incidents, The Wall Street Journal has written an article showing how a public relations firm has operated for years "cleaning" articles for paying clients. We have covered this WSJ article briefly at In the media, and examine their claims more closely in a Special report provided by Newslinger.

The community has faced this issue before, as documented in the article Wiki-PR editing of Wikipedia. Several community discussions about paid editing were held, including the 2014 Terms of Service change which required paid editors to declare their status for proper community oversight of their contributions.

Wiki-PR and its successor companies are community banned. The Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) sent them a cease-and-desist letter in 2013,[1] yet the activity of Status Labs on English Wikipedia has continued; can we now consider those avenues to be ineffective? What is the WMF's next step?

This issue also has more reports of the use of Wiki pages as a battlefield for political viewpoints between UK newspapers. Other credible reports in the media this month are related to the biography for a US presidential candidate by one or more possibly connected people. Some of these details have been suppressed from our In the media report while under development, and we can't provide our readers as much information as we would have preferred. We wonder if the seemingly accelerating pace of these incidents will merit more changes in the future, by the community, the WMF, government regulators, or all three in concert.

In addition to the above, we have regular coverage of new content, readers' interests, on-Wiki discussions and debate, tech and research – as well as a touch of whimsy for a lighter side of the community. We hope you enjoy all of it and look forward to hearing back from you in the reader comments.


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I think the "easiest" solution to the problem (as it were) would be to adopt the position that standard discretionary sanctions may be used on any page know or suspected by the community, ARMCOM, or the WMF of being edited by public relations firms in order to effect a timely halt to this sort of disruptive, COI based editing. This would ensure that regardless of disclosure by COI based accounts the articles themselves would be subject to much stricter scrutiny by the community and the admin corps, which in turn may frustrate undisclosed paid editors enough to stall any long term attempt to white wash, grey wash, or otherwise "police" articles here by PR-firms. In this very specific case, I would also consider authorizing pending changes level 2 protection (if it were still around) or EC protection to further frustrate edits from the COI paid editing firms. I wold also like to see a master list of known articles worked on so we could direct efforts to that effect(perhaps a Freedom of Information Act request could help us on that front), or at a least, articles known to have paid editor based issues with PR-related undertones. TomStar81 (Talk) 14:39, 27 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]

The closest thing to a dump of known or suspected COI articles is provided periodically by MER-C at WT:WikiProject Spam. Periodic lists appear at WP:COIN. A list of PR companies and known accounts is at WP:PAIDLIST. Gathering data is difficult, and we are also constrained by our own outing policy – for instance, sockpuppet investigations are a one-way data flow – and to a lesser extent, our notification policies. ☆ Bri (talk) 15:06, 27 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]
    • "Anyone can edit Wikipedia" is the most basic "Wiki Way". We need to convince the Foundation that required registration does not prevent any good faith editor from contributing. It only stops bad faith editors from using Wikipedia improperly, and allows us a much simpler way to control inappropriate use like paid editing. John from Idegon (talk) 16:47, 27 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]
      • We may actually be moving in the opposite direction. WMF has proposed more anonymous editing – i.e. without even leaving an IP address trace. Read an open letter from Benjamin Mako Hill for a perspective on why this is a bad idea. My mind is not made up; depends on the mitigation part which is undefined AFAIK. It might even be compatible with User:Bri/Paid editing Chinese wall. ☆ Bri (talk) 17:26, 27 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]
        • IPs are less anonymous than user names true. But it is so easy to switch IPs. So if this change keeps a single person associated with a single account better than IPs currently do it might make our job easier. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 00:33, 4 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
          • Doesn't sound like that what WMF is contemplating is necessarily resistant to rolling IPs: "We intend to implement some method to make the generated usernames at least partially persistent, for example, by associating them with a cookie, the user's IP address, or both." ☆ Bri (talk) 07:30, 4 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
    • We already have discretionary sanctions for BLPs. MER-C 04:32, 28 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • More people stoping by AfD would help, as would a requirement that biographies cannot be deprodded without a proper rationale, or that such deprodding requires an established account. --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 17:01, 27 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • I remain unable to reliably distinguish between actual COI/paid editing and good faith editors writing in a similar fashion, unless the COI editor says something to make it evident. Good faith editors write in a promotional way because they see so much promotionalism in Wikipedia that they think in actual good faith that this is what we want, and because promotionalism is so generally the writing style in the world on many subjects. I have made errors by accusing good faith editors, and there is no way I or anyone can tell if something written on a WP talk page is honest. This would therefore be unsuitable for discretionary sanctions or any such action.
Registration might help, but I can see no reason why registration without also requiring identification would actually solve anything, and that would be a step I along with 90% of WPedians would never be willing to make. Similarly, I think the current view that outing is the worst of all possible sins to be exaggerated, but I know I'm in a small minority. And SP investigation are limited by the increasing weakness of checkuser information--it only really helps if the editor makes an error. Almost the only thing left, and as an inclusionist I hate to say it, is tightened inclusion requirements in the most susceptible fields. We might start with performers, but some fields of medicine are almost as bad. DGG ( talk ) 18:06, 27 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]
    • @DGG: it hardly matters anymore what measures are proposed. The WMF/senior community members say "don't bother us - there's nothing we can do about it." Really? Nothing? @Doc James: used to have a page with a list of about 40 things that could be done - I don't think any one of them is the silver bullet that will be the end of paid editing, but many of the measures will definitely help. So admins tend to vote these measures down - usually along the lines of "this would never work."
So the situation now is that even the most famous, long-term situation of undeclared paid editing can't have anything done about it. The "Wiki-establishment" has now made itself irrelevant - they can't enforce any rules - except perhaps against cooperative rule-following community members. Those who openly identify that they use socks to cheat can't be punished or expelled. They can do whatever they want - and you guys can do nothing! The rules I see the Wiki-establishment trying to enforce are along the lines of "we can't talk about that", "we can't let the outside press know anything about that", and maybe "don't go accusing anybody of anything unless you can prove it - and you can never prove anything on-Wiki." Meanwhile the Wiki-PR's of the world can do anything they want, 'cause the Wiki-establishment has just laid down and said that they're not going to even try enforcing anything!" Shame on all of you. Figure out something you can do, or get out of the way. Smallbones(smalltalk) 23:01, 27 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]
@DGG: and I hasten to add that you should know that this is nothing personal between us. Smallbones(smalltalk) 23:08, 27 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]
I understand that what you are suggesting is that the foundation engage in legal action against the people and companies involved. I agree, and would even support allowing their attorney to breach confidentiality to file lawsuits against people who do not observe the TOS. The WMF execs keep talking about our "brand"; using their own language, they need to defend it. I have also myself proposed many times to senior people there that they use their own communication staff to widely advertise where potential employers will see it , why using paid editors is a very bad idea. These areactions they can take, and we cannot--they are their proper responsibility.
But we can and should do what is within our own sphere to discourage it. Surely we do not want anyone atthe foundation setting standards for articles or blocking editors on their own initiative, or adjusting our reqquirements for us. We can do these things; we should not give up on them. As we both known, and as I hope everybody here knows, no single measure we can take will solve the problem or even make a substantial dent. But taking as many different approaches as we can, they will together discourage at least the beginners. We should not stop doing them out of frustration, which it seems to me might be the attitude you are implying. I do not see what you mean by "step out of the way" --the many things we do at COIN and NPP and AfC and normal editing are not in the way of a more definitive solution. Rather, we need mroe people to join us there. There's a 3 month laga AfC, though Iand a few others specialize now in reviewing and removing the worst cases immediately . We could use another dozen people, and so could NPP. At AfD and MfD, more participation from those who feel that substantial promotionalism is a good reason for deletion can change the consensus. The effective way to work at WP is the same for keeping out advertising as for improving articles: slow but persistent effort.
Your role, Smallbones, in calling so effectively attention to the problem is essential. I hope it will help us attract editors and admins and OTRS agents to take a more focussed role. I would hope it would activate the WMF, but I wouldn't count on it. We need individually to act as if they didn't exist and it depended on us. DGG ( talk ) 06:28, 28 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Do you realize how incomprehensible and therefore repellent your comment is to most of us? "COIN / NPP / AfC / laga AfC / MfD / OTRS" ?? Would you consider spelling them out, giving links, and paraphrasing (i.e saying they are conferences, or webinars, or discussion groups or votes, or whatever)? Numbersinstitute (talk) 23:13, 30 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]
The "page with a list of about 40 things that could be done" mentioned by Smallbones is User:Doc James/Paid editing. I'd like to thank Doc James in his community board rep role for facilitating discussions in this area and providing "air cover" e.g. for the creation of the paidlist, formerly kept in his user space. ☆ Bri (talk) 23:14, 27 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]
The WMF can do something - not suck at prioritizing tasks for software development. Having a development team dedicated to maintaining admin and anti-abuse tools would be quite helpful. But this is beyond them for the reasons I wrote about last month. My efforts against spamming are quite hamstrung by phab:T192023, and I am sick of competing for resources in popularity contests with shiny gadgets in order to get this done. MER-C 09:22, 28 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • It's not particularly there's a lot of promotional material driving it - new editors are likely to write about things they're interested in, so of course their articles are typical pretty positive (or very negative). A lot of other practices - notably, preferring third party sources - are also very unintuitive unless you've been around here a long time, and catch new editors. We can, of course, do lots to discourage paid editing; the real issue is that the effective measures will discourage unpaid editing even more strongly, since those with CoIs have much stronger motivation to go through the gauntlet of learning Wikipedia in the face of a reception here that's rarely helpful. If I tried to join today because I noticed my favourite band, Bobo the Guava King, lacked an article, of course it'd be written in a somewhat promotional manner, probably sourced entirely to their website, I'd return the next day to a wall of text on my user page about how I'm a spammer, how I'm in trouble for violating conflict of interest guidelines, the terms of service on paid editing, how the band is unnoteworthy and terrible, how the article I spent all that time working on has been deleted ... well, of course I'd quit and never return. WilyD 06:23, 30 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • [[User:WilyD|Wily]describes in a nutshell my initial experience editing an article. I was looking for a hobby to fill time while I recovered from surgery. Found a page that sparked my interest and made a few changes. In no time at all I was explaining to a complete stranger that I had no interest in an advertising agency, but I was a fan of the Charlie the Tuna character and remembered the tuna commercials from my childhood. Made me feel quite as if I had done something terribly horribly wrong. Now I try to clean up COI pages but have wondered if my interest in COI pages only makes me look more like a paid editor. While I've long been recovered, I still enjoy editing Wiki pages and maybe one day will be brave enough to write one from scratch. But if you want to add to the community, you've got to embrace the newbies without automatically assuming they are being paid. Just my two cents, and it's not worth even that. NotWilkins — Preceding unsigned comment added by Not Wilkins (talk • contribs) 15:28, 30 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • I don't know where to put this comment, but I am quite dismayed to see no mention of the passing[1] of top FA writer, gentleman and scholar extraordinaire, Brian Boulton. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 02:13, 28 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]
    • User:SandyGeorgia, thanks for letting us know. I just now checked his user page, he was known and liked by all the top people in Featured Articles. If you'd like to write more, please do. Sincerely, Smallbones(smalltalk) 03:54, 28 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]
      • I guess my disappointment is that one of the @WP:FAC coordinators: didn't make sure to let you all know. I think Brian deserves a full mention in the next Signpost :( :( If you decide to run an article, please ping me so I can contribute my memories of when he first appeared on the FAC scene, and what it was like to watch his production explode. He was so very widely respected, for his humility, his writing, and his willingness to pitch in to help everywhere at FAC. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 04:09, 28 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]
SandyGeorgia, with Bri and Smallbones practically running The Signpost on their own (and this month a lot of the work was down to one purpose), I can say from my own former Signpost experience that it is just not possible for the editorial 'team' to know about everything that is happening on and around Wikipedia. Thanks for letting The Signpost know. It's a shame in a way that not all FA writers are so gentlemanly in their approach to other members of the community as Brian was. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 05:38, 28 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]
It's a shame to see your last sentence tacked on to a mention of the sad occasion of someone's death. Unwatch, retract my offer to help write a Signpost article; please forget I stopped by. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 14:20, 28 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Let's say we were to tighten the sourcing standards for notability in WP:BIO to match WP:CORP - this would designate several types of coverage as routine, remove interviews as not intellectually independent and strengthen protections against churnalism. What coverage would count as routine? Coverage of job-related duties? Would this extend to e.g. appearing in X film, appearing in a footy match? Was hired/fired/quit? Spoke at a conference? What about the SNGs? I'm not a notability expert, just airing one possible way forward.
  • The easiest thing to do is to strongly encourage NPPers to draftify if COI is suspected.
  • I'd like to see non-extended confirmed editors prohibited from editing about privately held companies founded after (10 years prior to this year) and their personnel and investors, and advertising and marketing (broadly construed) in any namespace. But that's probably asking too much. MER-C 04:52, 28 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]
    • My impression is that tighter sourcing standards for notability of people would worsen the paid editing problem by making it harder for the people who don't pay for their publicity to become notable while not actually creating obstacles for people willing to pay for the right kind of coverage. But the actual problem in this instance has nothing to do with notability; the people whose articles were involved here are all clearly notable. It is that they wish to spin their articles to describe them as how they want to appear, not as they are, and that they are very persistent in that wish. If you read the linked special report, you would see that one of their methods is to use Wikipedia's own standards against us by describing reliable but unflattering sources as somehow being in violation of those standards. Adding more rules about how good a source must be to be usable only makes this kind of spin easier. —David Eppstein (talk) 08:15, 28 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]
      • Tighter standards would lead to more of the borderline notable vanity pages which I'd regard as the mainstream market for paid spammers being deleted. I don't know what we can do against reputation laundering by notable people and companies with practically unlimited resources. The best measure of success should be how much they have to pay - the more, the better. MER-C 09:15, 28 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Benjamin Mako Hill's presumptions are as lacking in substance as the uncivil repudiations meeted out to the ACTRIAL 'activists' by the senior WMF staff. Bearing in mind however, that it took nearly 7 years to get even ACPERM rolled out despite huge support from the community, tightening up the requirements further would need a lot of persuasion and testing. Clearly where all the traditional encyclopedic topics are covered - and are generally the least controversial ones - and being regularly maintained, anyone who works at NPP and AfC is well aware that the vast majority of new articles (whether in mainspace or drafts) are corporate or (auto)biographical spam and the single greatest threat to the integrity of the encyclopedia. As David Eppstein says, any measures should avoid collateral damage.
The problem is that even with the significant reduction in the stream of sewage that was successfully stemmed (succinctly summed up in the two short reports at ACTRIAL wrap-up and ACTRIAL results adopted by landslide), there are far too few truly active New Page Reviewers (less than 5% of the 750 who asked for the user right), and the backlog, once down to only 350 in a bout of initial enthusiasm, is now rapidly approaching 8,000 again. ACTRIAL proved that all the Foundation's arguments against it were totally unfounded, and that despite what are claimed to be founding principles, organic change is necessary. On this premise, while Wikipedia is, and can continue to be, "the encyclopedia anyone can edit", some the suggestions above for further restrictions, especially those by MER-C, may well be getting close to maturity and ready for a serious preliminary debate.
John from Idegon hits the nail on the head and Bri's Chinese Wall is certainly worth clicking the link and actutally reading it. The dark number of whitewashers and paid editors might already have reached such proportions that they could defeat a consensus, especially where we don't know how many of the WMF's own staff are still moonlighting and making money out of their privileges - it hardly comes as a surprise that the WMF wants to relax the rule, and rotten apples have been discovered among the NPPers themselves. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 08:27, 28 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Of the suggestions above, 3 come to mind as beneficial without major (or any, for the first 2) downsides: More NPP patrollers, more AfC reviewers, and authorisation for pending-changes in cases of "firmly suspected undisclosed paid editing". Disclosed paid editing already goes through a firmer wringer. I am staunchly against a further spread of DS. DS trades one set of participation handicaps for another, and so can be a necessary evil in some places, but I believe it isn't here - particularly when, unlike its current usage, we'd be placing on suspicion. Nosebagbear (talk) 10:18, 28 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Nosebagbear, more New Page Reviewers, yes, certainly, but not until we've weeded out all the inactive ones and hat collectors from among the ~750, 90% of whom either do very little or just nothing at all. If we can get that list severely pruned, there will be some paid editors that get purged along with them. Then with the new trend of admins at PERM understanding the need to first grant new requests on a probationary period only, we may be able to start again with a fairly clean slate. Expecting the top 5 or 6 patrollers to do 90% of the work just puts us back 10 years ago when The Blade of the Northern Lights, Scottywong, and I and a couple of others were doing all the work and decided to do something about it in the shape of ACTRIAL which was very rudely refused by the WMF until we threatened unilateral action by way of a script nearly 8 long years later. Now with the entire history only in the memory of us oldies, it nevertheless represented one of the major defeats ever for the WMF, and the recent Benjamin Mako Hill claims can equally be taken cum grano salis. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 12:43, 28 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Sorry, meant to clarify more active patrollers/reviewers Nosebagbear (talk) 23:46, 28 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • "presidential" should not be capitalized in the context in which it is used in this piece.~TPW 13:49, 28 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]
    I agree, per MOS:JOBTITLES ☆ Bri (talk) 15:52, 28 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • One thing which might help in at least a very small way (and perhaps more, in the minds of the more hopeful among us) would be if the Teahouse folks would stop posting giddy welcome and visit the teahouse messages on new user talk pages without noticing that their sole contributions at the time of the delivery of the invitations have been unadulterated SPAM. Back when I was admining, which was only a month ago (but now seems much longer :) this annoyed the bejesus out of me. – Athaenara ✉ 11:45, 30 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]


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