Wikipedia threatens PR firm with legal action
Wikipedia’s parent company, the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF), has threatened Wiki-PR with legal action for ‘engaging in paid-advocacy editing’ of articles on the online-encyclopedia, and demanded that this practice immediately ‘cease and desist.’
Wiki-PR positions itself as a Wikipedia consulting firm, but has come under media scrutiny for its alleged 300-strong team of sockpuppet accounts that write and edit articles on Wikipedia on behalf of clients that get billed between $500- $1,000 per piece and $50 per month for ‘page management.’
WMF’s law firm Cooley LLP today issued a letter to Jordan French, the chief executive of Wiki-PR, demanding that ‘Wiki-PR cease and desist from further editing the Wikipedia website unless and until [they] have fully complied with the terms and conditions outlined by the Wikimedia Community.’
The letter, which was published on the WMF’s website also threatened other publicity firms that engage in editing content on Wikipedia of running the risk of seriously damaging the reputation of their clients.
The letter read: ‘Sockpuppetry and meatpuppetry are especially harmful when used to disguise secret works of advocacy purchased by clients to promote a particular product, idea or agenda.’
However, even as Wiki-PR denies violating Wikipedia’s regulations, it acknowledged that some ‘bad calls’ have been made by editors.
French was quoted in The Washington Times saying:
‘The ‘PR’ in Wiki-PR is a misnomer — we’re a research and writing firm.
We counsel our clients on how to adhere to Wikipedia’s rules. We research the subject and write in an accurate and properly referenced way about it. What we do is get Wikipedia to enforce the rules so our clients are presented accurately.’
Uploading false info on Wikipedia or elsewhere is wrong, but it shall not be confused with legitimate Wikipedia visibility services.
If some lawyer were caught committing fraud on the court, nobody would argue that all legal services shall be prohibited nationwide. Similarly, sockpuppeting and faking sources is NOT what legitimate Wikipedia visibility services are about.
Wikipedia traffic is commerce-dominated nowadays. 21 out of the 25 highest-traffic articles on Wikipedia are related to commercial subjects: corporations, movies, books, TV series, etc. A Wikipedia profile can add or detract tens of millions of dollars from the value of a brand or market cap of a company, so it’s to be expected that companies seek to participate in shaping their Wikipedia profiles.
It comes as a surprise to many, but: paid editing is NOT prohibited on Wikipedia; all efforts to ban it have failed, see the FAILED policy proposal at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Paid_editing_%28policy%29
Not only it’s not prohibited, it’s massive: in a recent study conducted by the Public Relations Society of America, 40% of PR professionals admitted to having edited Wikipedia.(http://www.mediabistro.com/prnewser/study-wikipedia-errors-damage-brands-reputations_b73200) In other words, hundreds of thousands of PR pros do Wikipedia visibility work.
The study also showed that “24% of company pages were created by a PR team”. I suspect that the true percentage is much higher, as many companies and PR pros do not admit editing Wikipedia fearing the backlash from those who equate PR with spreading lies. At WikiExperts, we have done ethical Wikipedia visibility work for some of the largest corporations in the world, never violating any Wikipedia rule.