This should be fixed the old-fashioned way: By cutting off teh flow of money at the source. When clients are caught directly or indirectly using sock-puppetry and astroturfing on Wikipedia, banners should be added to the affected pages naming and shaming the clients.
"This page has been locked by Wikipedia in response to deceptive practices paid for by Engulf and Devour to circumvent our community standards and mislead readers."
If you want this to stop, you have to give the clients a disincentive. That will drive the good clients out and these firms will be left with erectile dysfunction flim-flam as their market.
Occasionally it does make its way back into their article, but ideally in the same way anything else does: as a factual description of something that happened, cited to third-party sources. For example here's one [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marty_Meehan#Wikipedia_editing
It's not supposed to be retaliation, though, so there's sometimes pushback from Wikipedians somewhat self-consciously worried that mentioning the Wikipedia controversy in the Wikipedia article is biasing towards too-meta an article. Ideally it should only be included if, in some hypothetical universe, a similar controversy not about Wikipedia (e.g. about Britannica payola) would also merit coverage in Wikipedia. But that hypothetical is sometimes difficult to answer.
Occasionally it does make its way back into their article, but ideally in the same way anything else does: as a factual description of something that happened, cited to third-party sources.
That one gets fun.
I occasionally look at my sisters' Wikipedia pages and laugh at the mistakes which I know about, which I can't fix because what is already there cites third party sources which were wrong, and I don't know of third party sources that have correct information.
If I really cared I could get it fixed. (Just ask my sisters to make an unambiguous statement somewhere that I can quote.) But in the meantime I get a chuckle out of things like Wikipedia thinking that I don't exist...
Yeah, this is a big problem with less rigorously covered subjects. If you think of Wikipedia as a summary of existing sources on a subject (which is what it aspires to be), and the existing sources suck, then the summary, by transitivity, also sucks. But there's not much that can be done about that within the scope of the mission, defined in that way. If you instead think of Wikipedia as a compendium of true information on all subjects, the problem gets much harder: then it would aspire not only to summarize all information ever produced, but also to vet all that information for accuracy, correct anything incorrect published in any academic field or in the popular press, and fill in gaps where the third-party sources are lacking entirely [1] ... plus convince people that these corrections, despite no citations, are true. I think that is better tackled in separate projects: one project (Wikipedia) to summarize the existing state of writing, and different projects to improve it in specific fields, e.g. a project to improve documentation of 20th-century punk rock, or to document the history of open-source software.
Wikipedia has, though, tried to cautiously make a few exceptions to what counts as a citation to address some of the more specific problems relating to individuals. Personal blogs are not generally considered published sources, but are acceptable sources for the specific case of summarizing what the person who writes the blog themselves thinks about a subject, in cases where that's relevant [2]. This is used most commonly to cover the "subject's side", e.g. if there is an article about someone that includes negative information, and that person has responded on their own blog, but hasn't managed to get a newspaper to publish their rebuttal, Wikipedia will still cite the rebuttal. I guess that's along the lines of asking your sisters to make an unambiguous statement somewhere about your existence.
The questionable reliability of news articles also means that they tend only to be treated as acceptable sources for newer things. If you're writing about WW1, it's frowned on to directly cite New York Times articles on the conflict, because some of them were wrong in hindsight, and we now have much better books and journal articles written about it, which have done all the legwork of reading through the newspaper archives and assessing their reliability. At this point, making a new argument about the conflict based solely on previously-unnoticed news articles is original research that ought to be submitted to a journal, and only to Wikipedia if it's accepted by the historical community first (this is not purely hypothetical with WW2, where people really do try to come up with novel interpretations of the Holocaust based on a new reading of old newspaper archives). Alas, for newer stuff there's often no such alternative, short of just not covering the subject at all, so newspaper articles are accepted on something like the Syrian civil war, because they haven't yet been superseded by anything better.
One thing that's interesting to me is that some of this source-evaluation difficulty would be simplified if they had applied some of the same rules as Wikipedia. Sometimes I will cite a New York Times obituary for an article, because it contains a bunch of facts about a person conveniently collated. But then I wonder: where did the NYT obituary author get this information? Is it based on solid first-hand research? Summarizing old NYT articles? Cribbing info from Encyclopedia Britannica? It would be nice to know!
The question is whether the Wikipedia snowjob is itself notable enough to warrant inclusion in Wikipedia.
Often some random internet debate or meme is not judged to be noteworthy enough for inclusion. Should someone hiring a PR firm to update their Wikipedia article count? I mean, if misleading PR is a topic that is generally discussed in the media about a firm that's one thing, but if fairly ordinary corporate PR efforts that just so happened to violate Wikipedia's neutrality policy, I'm not sure that that's all that notable amongst the many other things a company has done.
"Congress specifically enacted 47 U.S.C. § 230 (1996) to reverse the Prodigy findings and to provide for private blocking and screening of offensive material. § 230(c) states "that no provider or user of an interactive computer shall be treated as a publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider," thereby providing forums immunity for statements provided by third parties."
47 U.S.C. § 230 (1996) basically covers online forums from being responsible for what other people post on those forums.
From what I can tell, it doesn't necessarily protect a person who uses one of those forums to post libelous claims, just because that person cites another source.
Arguably, the law could be read that way, but I would be surprised if the courts actually interpreted the immunity as broadly as you're describing it---that would pretty much gut libel law altogether. Do you have any case law to support your interpretation?
Good goals, bad strategy. One simple thing will happen: company X competitors will astroturf Wikipedia posing as agents of company X. Company X gets punished and retaliates. After short period of time many pages include warnings that respective companies tried to manipulate the articles. And the cycle starts again.
> This should be fixed the old-fashioned way: By cutting off teh flow of money at the source. When clients are caught directly or indirectly using sock-puppetry and astroturfing on Wikipedia, banners should be added to the affected pages naming and shaming the clients.
So, you're saying instead I would just hire these firms to edit the pages of my competitors?
Of course you have to have a mechanism. Running an online business of any kind, but most especially with user-generated content, requires an unending investment in forensics. It's no different for Wikipedia than it is for eBay or even Hacker News.
Most of these companies would cease and desist after one politely worded but firm letter.
If they were the victim in the case, they would probably provide money and/or resources to track down a rogue PR firm, an unethical competitor, disgruntled ex-employee, or miscellaneous vigilante whack-jobber.
I don't think we need to get hysterical like some responders and assume that every corporation is out to do black bag jobs on each other. If they can spend a few bucks and get some easy astro-turfing, they will. If the penalties are such that it's not worth the bother, they won't.
Unfortunately this approach could be used by unscrupulous businesses to permanently tarnish the reputation of their competition. I can agree with the sentiment, but you've got to be a bit cautious with these sorts of heavy-handed punishments.
How would you prove the company paid for the services? How would you stop other companies form paying people to get the tag on competing companies pages?
No need to. Block, remove and move on is the common way. It works.
I don't see much difference in people trying to use Wikipedia to post spam, or people trying to use HN to post spam. Both is spam, both should get deleted, both should ban the users from posting more, and both do so. Having a large banner ontop of spam posts here that says "company X is trying to spam HN, get them!!!" would not actually improve my HN experience.
Except that would violate their policy of presenting information in as neutral manner as possible. It's also hard to see where this would stop: banners for Exxon stating they ruin the environment, a banner on the NSA article stating they violate civil rights?
As long as it is the truth and no relevant facts are left out, it is still neutral.
There is this strange notion in the US today that "neutral" means "doesn't upset or offend anyone". Or that neutral means "both sides get equal weights". If some corporation pays for getting their articles edited, then it is still a neutral fact that that was what they did, even if it upsets someone at the corporation that the truth comes out.
Which means that you don't understand the concept at all. Wikipedia is neutral because it doesn't hold to a particular position. "The NSA violates civil rights" is not a position that Wikipedia holds because it cannot hold a particular position in regards to this organization. Sure, it can state facts, but it will have to source the information that the NSA violates civil rights to a third party.
This is not to say that all sides must be held to have equal weight. Flat earthers should only get a passing mention on the article about the curvature of the earth, though they should be mentioned. Breathinarianism should be barely mentioned in an article on human health.
I've found, when I was working on contentious articles on Wikipedia (all those many years ago now!), that neutrality always highlighted extreme views and held them to the light of day - they seemed, if anything, more bizarre and absurd when presented in a neutral manner. That's really why Scientologists hate Wikipedia, IMO.
You obviously don't understand my comment at all. If Wikipedia has proof then there isn't any longer "a particular position", but a fact that can and should be stated. Wikipedia writes "Lee Harvey Oswald (October 18, 1939 – November 24, 1963) was, according to four government investigations,[citation needed][n 1] the sniper who assassinated John F. Kennedy". Note the "according to" and "citation needed". But it also writes "On November 24, 1963, Ruby shot and killed Lee Harvey Oswald". No "according to" and no citations.
Sure, not terribly interesting, but I got sick of people adding random "facts" without a source so I decided to use a reverse footnoting system to highlight it. Normally you add a citation footnote to clearly show where you got your fact or idea, mine was the opposite - it showed clearly that there was no citation so use the information at your own peril!
I also did it to force the editors to get sources and not just make stuff up. There was also often an issue where the fact was good, but was extraordinary and needed a source to back it up. The tag allowed the good info to stay until a source could be found. Unfortunately, sometimes bad info stays too long but it has the tag so at the very least you know that something is potentially fishy.
It was basically more wildly successful than I ever imagined. I really had no idea I was creating an important bit of Internet popular culture - I was just trying to make Wikipedia more reliable!
Loads of articles are flagged as advertisements, questionable notability, conflicts of interest etc and all that happens is the page sits there with the notice for years and nobody cares.
I think they should team up with Google and Apple and really hurt companies that shill, spam and link farm - app and search rankings. Then they should put a price on their heads.
Here's another idea: Remove questionable Wikipedia entries from the first page of search results. Could this be done algorithmically, or through the use of noindex attached to some trigger on Wikipedia's end?
Why not start with the simpler option of a cease-and-desist letter? Sounds like there should be a legal mechanism for a U.S. website wanting a U.S. company to stop editing its user-generated content.
"This page has been locked by Wikipedia in response to deceptive practices paid for by Engulf and Devour to circumvent our community standards and mislead readers."
If you want this to stop, you have to give the clients a disincentive. That will drive the good clients out and these firms will be left with erectile dysfunction flim-flam as their market.