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Wiki-PR defends itself, condemns Wikipedia's actions

Wiki-PR, a public relations agency whose employees used a sophisticated array of concealed user accounts to create, edit, and maintain several thousand Wikipedia articles for paying clients, has told Business Insider that it was demonized by the online encyclopedia.

In an interview with the prominent business and technology news website, Jordan French, Wiki-PR's CEO, said he believes the Wikimedia Foundation "painted" his company to look like an "evil entity" that is "scrubbing truths from Wikipedia":

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In Wiki-PR's view, it is the victim of an egregious mistake: it did not break the WMF's terms of use, and Wikipedia "made a bunch of errors and confused us with someone else, largely", French told Business Insider. While French does not name who or what Wiki-PR was confused with, he was presumably referring to Mike Wood, the owner of professional writing service LegalMorning.com and User:Morning277, the first Wikipedia account implicated in the Wiki-PR scandal. Instead, French maintains that Wiki-PR provides a valuable service by protecting the Foundation from "legally actionable libel".

Yet many of French's new claims appear to be in conflict with the evidence. At least three questions are raised:

Were the allegations and community investigation all a mistake? The long-term abuse file shows that Wiki-PR used remote employees, IP address-hopping, and technical loopholes to maintain up to 12,000 English Wikipedia articles. The aftermath included a community ban for being "repeatedly unable or unwilling to adhere to [Wikipedia's] basic community standards." The Wikimedia Foundation's legal assessment of the allegations was strong enough to elicit a cease-and-desist order in November 2013.

Did Wiki-PR break the terms of use? The Signpost has gained access to an online document containing a list of steps for reforming the company's behavior, prepared privately by a Wikipedian and edited by French. French agreed to it on 18 November—just one day before the Foundation sent its cease-and-desist letter to Wiki-PR—by writing at the top of the document, from which the Signpost has redacted all but French's name: "Wiki-PR agrees to all of the terms laid out in this roadmap. We're working on implementing them. 11/18". The Signpost understands that this was an attempt by the Wikipedian to "provide suggestions for reform in line with community expectations", though the document includes a statement that "their completion does not ensure Wikipedia’s community acceptance", and that "nothing in this roadmap constitutes a binding agreement, contract, or guarantee."

Critically, the introduction that French had agreed to states: "Wiki-PR has seriously abused the Terms of Use (TOS) and community policies. In an attempt to redeem their conduct, Wiki-PR agrees to a comprehensive review of their practices and a detailed program of reform, in collaboration with members of the Wikipedia community." One item states: "Wiki-PR will prepare a detailed proposal for how it will manage and maintain a high standard expected from all employees. Employees will declare to Wiki-PR all of their Wikipedia accounts for monitoring. Employees will not be paid if a review of their conduct does not meet a high standard." To this, French added on 13 November: "Defining high standard: Contractors will be removed if conduct seriously breaches Wikipedia’s TOS or community policies."

The full text agreed to by French is reproduced here.

Does Wiki-PR protect the Foundation from being sued for libel? In general, as the Foundation only provides an interactive computer service, according to the US federal Communications Decency Act, Section 230 it cannot be held legally responsible in the US for defamatory content published on its sites: the responsibility lies with the individual who added the material. A recent German court's ruling on the matter was called a "legal victory" by the Foundation, though this has been disputed.

Furthermore, the number of articles Wiki-PR created from scratch belies the assertion that it was primarily combating libel. Seven examples of their article creations have been uploaded and are open for viewing. Sources in these new Wiki-PR articles typically include Yahoo! Voices and CNN iReport, which despite the well-known brand attachments can be published by anyone, with little to no moderation—or by the US website Vatalyst, which appears to have been offline for six months but was operated by Wiki-PR and similarly lacked editorial oversight. In many articles in which Wiki-PR was involved, these and similar sites gave the articles "references sections [that] always have a surfeit of citations, with the clients' press releases and web sites balanced by passing mentions in seemingly independent publications." French's claim in the interview that Wiki-PR has about 45 people directly conflicts with his earlier assertion to the Wall Street Journal that they have "hundreds" of editors on staff. Wiki-PR's site even includes solicitations that attempt to interest companies in Wiki-PR's article-creating experience. Such pages were lampooned in a 31 January Wikipediocracy blog post ("Extra Creamy Wikipedia – adventures in advertising").

Continuing suspicion

Wiki-PR's actions were sufficiently extensive that their online identities are still being discovered more than three months after the original revelations. Eleven additional accounts are now suspected to be editing on behalf of Wiki-PR; one, CitizenNeutral, was blocked as recently as 27 January. Before CitizenNeutral suddenly stopped editing at the end of September 2013—barely a week before the Daily Dot named Wiki-PR in an article titled "The battle to destroy Wikipedia's largest sockpuppet army"—the account had a contribution history that was characteristic of Wiki-PR employees.

Much of CitizenNeutral's early editing was filled with tagging articles for conflict of interest and puffery, which Wiki-PR commonly did prior to contacting the article's subject. A later focus was on recreating deleted articles, nearly all of which had been deleted for being authored by Wiki-PR. These 33 new articles were short, one-line stubs, with no relation to the previous iteration, which fits into Wiki-PR's typical practice. Vice's Martin Robbins profiled one Wiki-PR client in October 2013, detailing the experiences of academic Emad Rahim. His article was deleted over notability concerns. When a Wiki-PR employee recreated the page, "it contained only one sentence. Rather than apologizing, French told [the subject] he should raise his media profile, and connected [him] to Scarsdale Media, who offered 30 days of 'media relations efforts' for another $800." Rahim had already paid Wiki-PR $1500.

Nothing in this article should be construed as implying that Wiki-PR is continuing to break the Wikimedia Foundation's terms of use.
Tony1 and Kevin Gorman contributed writing and research for this story.

In brief

A meeting as part of the project "The boundaries of editing" on the German Wikipedia, supported by Wikimedia Germany. This was a precursor to the OBS study that was published a short time ago.

















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