This new group of sockpuppet accounts wasn’t just offering to publish articles for a fee, but were also offering to protect potential clients’ articles from deletion for $30 per month. What’s also interesting in this case is that the article subjects were also the victims here. That means that today’s news of the banning of 381 accounts is actually larger than that earlier scandal in terms of the number of “black hat” editors being exposed and banned.
Wikipedia said then that it banned 300 accounts associated with the firm (which argued it only had 45 people working for them.) The organization at the time sent a cease-and-desist letter to the firm, which promoted its ability to help article subjects claim their “top spot in Google search results.” As you may recall, back in October 2013, the organization’s volunteers blocked hundreds of accounts associated with the consulting firm Wiki-PR. This is not the first time Wikipedia has faced problems with paid advocacy on its site, which aims to be an unbiased, accurate and trusted resource. The articles being posted were related to businesses, business people or artists, and they often included biased or skewed information alongside unattributed material and potential copyright violations, an announcement on Wikipedia parent organization Wikimedia’s blog this morning explains.Īs a result of the investigation, editors on the site have also deleted 210 articles that were created by these accounts, the post says, but from the sounds of things, there could be many more still out there.Įxplains the discussion page: “This list is not considered complete due to time constraints, there may be additional articles created by these socks that are not included here.” But the nature and the quality of the edits suggest the paid editing scheme began before that. The investigation (dubbed “Orangemoody” after the first sockpuppet account identified) into the suspicious activity began in July and reviewed edits from the end of April to early August. Case in point: this morning, the organization announced that editors on the English version of Wikipedia have banned 381 user accounts that were engaging in “undisclosed paid advocacy.” In other words, they were posting promotional articles to the user-editable online encyclopedia, without revealing that they were paid to do so.Īccording to the editor community discussion on the matter, these “sockpuppet” accounts, as they’re called, have been active on Wikipedia for some time. Sometimes Wikipedia’s reliance on volunteers to craft its online content comes back to bite them.