Rap mogul and superstar Jay-Z (Shawn Carter) seems to know a lot about how Wikipedia works, who is editing an article related to a court case about him and who is paying them. Or maybe it's just his lawyers or tech team who think they know. You may be surprised how much they likely know, and why I think they know it.

Since this story involves several controversial court cases, The Signpost reminds our readers that anybody accused in court should be considered innocent until the accusations are proven in court. We also remind you that the identities of Wikipedia editors can never be completely proven using only Wikipedia's extensive records – even if they seem to have identified themselves. They may be spoofing or "Joe jobbing" in order to embarrass other people. This reporter is not a lawyer and is not offering legal advice.

The most controversial case involved is the criminal case against Sean Combs, better known as Diddy, who is charged with multiple sex offenses. He has been held in jail without bail since September and the trial is just getting underway. But Jay-Z's case is not about what Diddy did or didn't do. It's about a possible victim, known only as Jane Doe. She has accused both Jay-Z and Diddy of raping her at the same party about 25 years ago when she was 13 years old. She has also withdrawn her rape accusation against Jay-Z, and the details of her story have changed over time. She has said that her lawyer, Tony Buzbee encouraged her to file a civil lawsuit against Jay-Z.

In February Jay-Z filed a civil lawsuit against Buzbee and Doe, accusing them of defamation and extortion. The defamation allegedly occurred on several well known TV and radio programs as well as in court depositions. The extortion allegedly occurred during a legal procedure known as a demand letter. On May 5 Jay-Z amended his civil suit to include a reference to Wikipedia, perhaps not to identify a direct form of defamation or extortion, but as supporting information.

"129. Defendants' actions also undermined Mr. Carter's relationships, and his company Roc Nation's relationships, with their businesses in the sports and entertainment industry. For example, in violation of Wikipedia's rules, Buzbee directed his employees to edit Wikipedia pages to enhance Buzbee's image and damage Mr. Carter's and Roc Nation's reputations. Users with an IP address directly linked to the Buzbee Firm made over 100 positive edits to Buzbee's Wikipedia Page." (- PLAINTIFF SHAWN COREY CARTER'S AMENDED COMPLAINT AND DEMAND FOR JURY TRIAL) Filed 05/05/25 Page 38 of 52

It looks easy enough to check out this type of allegation. Did unregistered editors (aka "IP editors") who had a direct connection to Buzbee's law firm make 100 edits at the Wikipedia article Tony Buzbee, adding positive content about Buzbee or removing negative content about him?

This would not be the first court case that involves undeclared paid editing on Wikipedia. In a 2011 London high court case billionaire Louis Bacon won a suit gaining an order against the WMF, The Denver Post, and the publisher of WordPress to identify the authors of alleged defamation on their sites. Bacon was trying to get enough information to sue the now-convicted sex offender former fashion designer Peter Nygard. But a U.S. court would not enforce the U.K. court's order.

Diddy is one of the best known hip-hop artists in the world. He was formerly listed by Forbes as a billionaire, but his legal problems have caused his net worth to drop to a mere $90 million.

More complete information on the Diddy cases is available widely throughout the internet, including at USA Today and the BBC podcast Diddy on Trial.

Jay-Z is arguably the best and best known hip-hop artist in the world. It's not arguable that he's the richest. According to Forbes, his net worth is $2.5 billion and he is the 1,470th richest person in the world. Jay-Z does not appear to be implicated in the Diddy criminal case.

Tony Buzbee is a high-profile lawyer involved in many highly public and highly lucrative class action cases where he usually represents the plaintiffs. He's also represented Jimmy Buffet, Deshaun Watson, former Texas governor Rick Perry, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (in impeachment proceedings), Shell Oil, and Ford Motors. He has represented about 150 clients in several separate civil cases against Diddy. His net worth is estimated at $50 million.

It shouldn't be a mystery how Jay-Z, or his team, know about the number of edits made by IP editors to the Wikipedia article about Tony Buzbee or even about which IP editors have made the most edits there.

Many experienced Wikipedia editors know that the easiest way is go to the article's edit history and click on "Page statistics" near the top of that page or just directly type:

https://xtools.wmcloud.org/articleinfo/en.wikipedia.org/Tony_Buzbee

in the address bar of a browser.

"General statistics", the first section on the xtools page, tells you, as of May 11, that there were 204 total editors who have made 561 total edits, including 221 by IP editors, to the page since the first edit on 2012-03-21 by Pedrokelley.

In "Top editors", the third section on the page, the table tells you that the editor who has made the most edits is 12.11.122.122, an IP editor, who has made 79 edits between 2017-06-07 and 2022-05-02. The editor with the 4th most edits is 50.254.106.146, also an IP editor, who made 23 of them between 2015-03-11 and 2016-03-07.

It looks like we are in luck, tracing where Jay-Z found out that a group of IP editors working for Buzbee made over 100 edits. The 2 top IP editors made 102 out of 221 IP edits, sticking out like a sore thumb from the other IP editors (who had no more than 5 edits each). This means that it would be almost impossible for there to be a group of IP editors with 100 edits without including at least one of the top 2. But how did Jay-Z know that they made positive edits to the article? And how did he know they worked for Buzbee?

The only way to check whether somebody is consistently making positive (pro-Buzbee in this case) or negative edits is just to check their edit histories. In the Top Editors table, you can get their edit histories just by clicking on the editor's username (or IP number).

Clicking 12.11.122.122 takes you to this page: a list of all the IP editor's edits. A quick glance at the page tells you that the IP editor is a single purpose account or SPA. Seventy-five out of his 79 edits were to the Buzbee article or to its talk page

Clicking 50.254.106.146 takes you to this page. Another quick glance tells you that the IP editor is also an SPA, though the edits are not quite so concentrated on a single article.

Both these IP editors strongly supported positions favorable to Buzbee's image, including this edit by 50.254.106.146 which sources a $100 million court award to 10 Buzbee clients that is sourced only to a press release that was written by Buzbee's firm. The $100 million award had been overturned before the IP editor inserted this information into the article.

Clicking on a registered account name will usually take you to the editor's main user page, and from there just click on User contributions in the tools menu on the right hand side. For example clicking Pedrokelley will take you to their as yet uncreated user page. Don't worry! Using the tools menu will still take you to Special:Contributions/Pedrokelley! There you will see that all 32 of Pedrokelley's edits were to the same article, Tony Buzbee, and that he created the article. Click on the earliest edit which reads "02:14, 21 March 2012 diff hist +7,850 N Tony Buzbee ←Created page with 'Tony Buzbee… " to see how the earliest version of the page read. It suggests to me that it was copied from Buzbee's business website. There's almost nothing negative in the article, barely a hair out of place, and likely considered a copyright violation according to Wikipedia rules. (Compare this Wikipedia version to this version from his business website.)

Incidental information includes the talk page filled with complaints about bias and unreferenced edits. One SPA editor who was supportive of Buzbee was accused of having a conflict of interest after making this edit where they added another version of the $100 million court award story and a possible sex abuse story involving four minors – all without references.

Two days later the same editor added the $100 million court award story again after it had been reverted and added four more stories – all without references again.

Several other editors stick out from the others including sockpuppets who were blocked following sockpuppet investigations by administrators. A sockpuppet is an editor who uses two or more registered usernames or IP accounts to deceptively hide their editing. Sockfarms refer to large congregations of sockpuppets. Two editors, Th78blue and Pulpfiction621, were both blocked as sockpuppets of PapaTakaro, a fairly small and quirky sockfarm. But the editor Th34VengersHere was blocked as a member of the industrial scale Yoodaba sockfarm.

But how could Jay-Z know that the two IP editors were Buzbee employees? Short of a direct on-Wiki statement by an editor that they work for Buzbee, the main method used by Wikipedians would involve the checkuser function and be used only for internal Wikipedia purposes. But a publicly available IP address might rarely connect via either of the WHOIS or Geolocate services to Buzbee's law firm. In this case both the IP editor addresses can be traced directly to Buzbee's law firm main web page by both WHOIS and Geolocate.

Tony Buzbee and the IP editors and sockpuppets who appear to have worked for him seem to have broken Wikipedia rules, for example by not declaring that they are paid editors. The evidence is very strong. They were not contributing to Wikipedia in good faith.

But if we are looking at a violation by Buzbee et al of biographies of living persons (BLP) policy against Jay-Z, something appears to be missing — a direct statement by them disparaging Jay-Z. All of the seven editors whose histories were examined in the previous section stopped editing by September 2022, a full two years before there was any clash between Buzbee and Jay-Z. While the editing to the current Buzbee article is not calm, neither does there seem to be any BLP violation.

Our BLP policy of course is not the same as the laws against defamation. That is something that the courts are designed to handle.