Welcome to DU!
The truly grassroots left-of-center political community where regular people, not algorithms, drive the discussions and set the standards.
Join the community:
Create a free account
Support DU (and get rid of ads!):
Become a Star Member
Latest Breaking News
General Discussion
The DU Lounge
All Forums
Issue Forums
Culture Forums
Alliance Forums
Region Forums
Support Forums
Help & Search
Wikipedia Declares All-Out War On PR Sock Puppets
Wikipedia editors are actively engaged in a wide-ranging battle against PR firms attempting to edit the crowdsourced encyclopedia’s entries to reflect their clients’ best interests.
Over the past couple weeks, those Wikipedia editors have isolated several hundred user accounts linked to people “paid to write articles on Wikipedia promoting organizations or products,” according to Sue Gardner, executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation, which oversees Wikipedia’s operations. Those users’ accounts violate Wikipedia’s guidelines, “including prohibitions against sockpuppetry and undisclosed conflicts of interest.” Some 250 suspicious user accounts have already been nuked.
“Our readers know Wikipedia’s not perfect, but they also know that it has their best interests at heart, and is never trying to sell them a product or propagandize them in any way,” Gardner added. “Our goal is to provide neutral, reliable information for our readers, and anything that threatens that is a serious problem. We are actively examining this situation and exploring our options.”
The idea of “pay for play” is a contentious one among Wikipedia’s editors, many of whom pride themselves on a high standard of impartiality when it comes to managing content. But the platform’s crowd-sourced nature often works against them in that regard, with pages about controversial subjects often turning into battlegrounds as multiple parties attempt to edit and re-edit content to fit a particular vision—unless Wikipedia opts to lock a page down, as it does with George W. Bush or Scientology. No matter how hard the editors work, though, Wikipedia’s gargantuan size also means they can’t eliminate every single vanity page set up by insecure and ambitious types.
Indeed, correcting biased text is a thankless job for those Wikipedia editors—the literary-world equivalent of killing endless hordes of zombies approaching your protective fence.
MORE...
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/10/22/wikipedia-declares-all-out-war-on-pr-sock-puppets/
34 replies
= new reply since forum marked as read
= new reply since forum marked as read
subsidized by the government. You know, to combat the threat of communism.
