In early September 2015 the popular press picked up a story about what is called the “Orangemoody” network on Wikipedia. The story followed the Wikimedia community identifying about 250 fake Wikipedia accounts which were created for the purpose of promising to insert inappropriate bias into Wikipedia against Wikipedia policy in exchange for payment. I want to give a little background on this. Paid editing is a hot topic in the Wikipedia community. Overall – it is my opinion that paid editing mostly does not happen, and when it happens, it mostly does not matter. I edit health articles on Wikipedia, and for years I have looked for instances of major pharma companies inserting bias into Wikipedia. None of us Wikipedians have ever found anything like that, although about a month ago The Atlantic published an article called “The Covert World of People Trying to Edit Wikipedia—for Pay” which talked about how some smaller companies attempt to corrupt some low-traffic niche articles. The Atlantic piece is unrelated to the Orangemoody case, but they both have in common that they talk about how paid editors go into low-traffic, unpopular topics on Wikipedia and might corrupt them. This happens now. For various reasons, I think that Wikipedia infrastructure will make this even more difficult in the future. I am going to talk a bit more, but overall, I mostly want to raise this issue to say that it is not as impactful or as big of a concern as some people imagine it to be. The only time it is easy to insert promotional bias into Wikipedia is when no one on the Internet would contest it, which is a rare circumstance, because people online argue with almost everything.
For some background on the mood about paid staff, consider this article from The Signpost – “Community voices on paid editing“. The discussion here is about having corporate representatives edit Wikipedia, which the Wikipedia community frowns upon. When Wikipedians talk about paid editing, they are imagining public relations staff developing Wikipedia as part of a mass media campaign. Wikipedians asssume – rightly – that almost all Wikipedia tinkering by public relations staff has a negative impact on Wikipedia and the Wikimedia community because practically none of the tens of thousands of paid editors who have tried to spam Wikipedia make any effort at all to follow rules, acknowledge the volunteers who assist them, or have basic Internet communication literacy to know that they are being rude and foolish in a public record. When PR people come to Wikipedia, they typically invest a lot of time in putting promotional information into Wikipedia, then a Wikipedian volunteer takes a few seconds to erase everything they have done with either one click of the mouse or maybe up to three clicks. It takes very little effort for Wikipedians to remove a lot of promotional editing quickly, just because Wikipedia has so much protection built into the quality control infrastructure. PR staff who come to Wikipedia almost uniformly are identified and find their attempts to add promotional content to be futile. As a further aside on this point – no one expects PR staff to invest their time in Wikipedia if Wikipedia is not valuable to them, but culturally we Wikimedians are in an odd circumstance in which communications professionals on the outside are simultaneously desperate to inject bias into Wikipedia and dismissive that Wikipedia has any significance. A lot of criticism that comes to Wikipedia comes from a communications industry which is pouting because Wikipedia is not for sale, so they dismiss it as not important or fail to discuss it when selling Internet reputation services because they know that they lack the ability to engage Wikipedia on behalf of corporate clients which hire them.
When the Wikimedia community talks about “paid editing”, this is what they are always talking about: staff or contractors from an organization which come into Wikipedia to integrate some point of view in exchange for a payment and without regard for Wikimedia community rules or any attempt to participate as a peer to volunteer Wikimedia community members. “Paid editing” will not be welcome in Wikimedia projects anytime soon, and I doubt it ever will be, and I personally have almost no faith in people with a conflict of interest to contribute productively to Wikipedia wherever their on-wiki engagement overlaps with their professional conflict of interest. In Wikipedia there are the equivalent of thousands of printed paper pages and comments from thousands of people of what on Wikipedia is discussed under the heading of “paid editing” or “conflict of interest”. See the Conflict of interest archives or the Conflict of interest noticeboard, for example, but much more exists. Those talks seem urgent, and those kinds of “paid editors” seem like a pressing problem because they are like swarms of little problems, but overall, I think that kind of paid contribution is managed okay now and that various developments will come to greatly empower the Wikipedia community to address these kinds of problems in the future.
About the orangemoody case – the popular press has neglected some important details. To understand what happened here, please consider my subjective evaluation of the articles developed by this paid editing network –
- Articles developed were unpopular – probably all among the bottom 20% of articles in Wikipedia by traffic
- Orangemoody contributors were working on a developing world budget. They might have been charging less than American minimum wage for their work.
- The articles edited were not topics that influenced public thought. Typically they were about people who wanted an online resume, or businesses who wanted a listing in Wikipedia just because they would have bought a listing anywhere, or odd fringe topics which were so outside the norm as to have little coverage in any page presented by Google.
- The Orangemoody content was sloppy. This does not have to be a characteristic of paid editing, but in practice, it almost always is. Wikipedia contributors tend to try to follow some rules and paid editors rarely come to understand them. Orangemoody knew some of the rules – I am guessing that this person was a volunteer Wikipedia contributor for at least a year – but at the same time, a little scrutiny was all that it took to tear down a lot of what they tried to create. So many other places on the Internet are easier to scam than Wikipedia.
The big scam in Orangemoody was not so much the corruption of Wikipedia, which is what some media coverage presented, but rather defrauding the people who paid for the content by suggesting to them that sneaking their non-compliant content into Wikipedia could have a benefit for them. In my opinion, most paid content is like this – it is about vanity and less that well funded corporate or governmental conspirators are seeking to surreptitiously guide public opinion by leveraging their financial resources to corrupt Wikipedia.
I have a further opinion – paid editing mostly does not matter on Wikipedia. It is annoying to clean up, even if it only takes seconds to do, but it rarely persists long in popular high traffic places on Wikipedia. When it is persistent, it is in articles which no one reads anyway. If articles get popular, then they get reviewed more. In Wikipedia community thought, I know of no instance where someone has identified biased content inserted by a corporate public relations agent who was editing a popular Wikipedia article. Paid editing is not something I worry much about.