Corruption in Wikiland? Paid PR scandal erupts at Wikipedia

In a large organization/community, bad apples are unavoidable. What matters is how the organization/community deals with such cases as they come along. If what the article says about this rogue trustee is true, then he needs to be fired, and fired hard, to send a message to the rest of the organization and its many international branches.

I can understand why Wikipedia the project generally does not want to make top-down changes, but Wikimedia the foundation needs strong leadership in order to avoid corruption among its ranks. With great power comes great responsibility, and it cannot be denied that Wiki[pm]edia has gained great power in today's world, whether intended or not. There must be rules. Those rules must be written down and enforced consistently. Yes, that will lead to bureaucracy, but bureaucracy tends to become necessary when your organization reaches a certain level of complexity.

I'm not sure who (if anyone) is in charge of granting and revoking "Residence" status, but that person needs to be dealt with, too, and swiftly, and harshly, if the allegations have merit. "Paid PR" is a vague concept, but openly advertising profit-motivated wiki-editing services is clearly unacceptable by the cultural standards of Wikipedia. If the community can demonstrate that it can enforce discipline even upon its most highly esteemed members, there is no reason to suppose that this incident will be a net loss for Wiki[pm]edia in the long term.

Fortunately, it shouldn't be too difficult to find out who made which edits.

Maybe it's time for Google to address the SEO problem from its end. If front-page SERPs are no longer guaranteed, the incentive to engage in these activities will be reduced.

Wikipedia (that is, site parked at the domain name "wikipedia.org") is operated by a 501(c)(3) nonprofit called Wikimedia. Wikimedia pays ~$4MM/yr to its employees in salary; most (or at least a plurality) of those employees are tech.

Wikimedia has a chapter in the UK (Wikimedia UK, or WMUK). WMUK is at least partly funded by "global" Wikimedia.

Both Wikimedia and WMUK are managed by boards of trustees, who select foundation executives, help manage fundraising, write mission statements, and that kind of stuff. I don't know if either WMUK or Wikimedia compensates trustees (but trustees do have a voice in compensation for foundation staff).

A trustee at WMUK, Roger Bamkin, is embroiled in a conflict-of-interest scandal. What seems to have happened is this:

Bamkin created a project, QRPEDIA, which acts as a sort of QR-based Bit.ly for Wikipedia articles. This is a good thing. What it does is allow people to create QR codes that can be displayed on buildings and landmarks which, when snapped with a scanner, will take you to the associated Wikipedia page. This is as close to a good use for QR codes as I've ever heard, because the ugliness of the QR code here is offset by the value of a symbol pointing out that you're looking at a landmark. Good for Roger Bamkin.

After conceiving of and executing QRPEDIA, Bamkin and a partner set out on a project to plaster QRPEDIA codes all over the UK county town of Monmouth, and in the process create a "Monmouthpedia". I'm not sure if either Bamkin or his associates were compensated for this project; as I understand it, the rationale for the project was to demonstrate the potential for QRPEDIA.

Now here's where it gets sketchy. Bamkin gets involved with the government of Gibraltar (you know, at the tip of Spain) to repeat the Monmouthpedia. Bamkin, acting as a consultant to Gibraltar, creates a project plan to train residents of the area to contribute to Wikipedia and navigate the rules & policies of the site. Moreover, Bamkin arranges to nominate tens of articles about Gibraltar to the Wikipedia "DYK" section, which occupies a spot on the Wikipedia front page.

And he's apparently done this for cash.

In the ensuing, ferocious, immediate hooplah surrounding the discovery of this transgression, it's discovered that Max Klein, another Wikipedia veteran (remember, anybody in the world can be a "veteran"; just spend a couple years donking around editing the site) is running a consultancy advertising a service to help commercial clients get better coverage on Wikipedia.

In addition to any other roles they might have served with WM/WP, Klein and Bamkin have also held roles as "Wikipedians in Residents"†. Residencies are grant-style sponsorships offered either by Wikimedia or by institutions to compensate editors for improving the encyclopedia.

The thing you want to understand about residencies is that they are not like trusteeships or adminships or any other status symbol on Wikipedia; they're grants, usually offered by organizations outside of Wikimedia. For instance, Klein's paid residency was sponsored by the Online Computer Library Center, a nonprofit unaffiliated with Wikimedia. Wikimedia status surely does contribute to selection for residency, but the final say in who gets the residency is the sponsor's.

Anyways.

There are a couple things that strike me in this drama.

1. Wikimedia owns an excruciatingly valuable piece of the Internet. Wikipedia articles occupy the top of many extremely valuable Google SERPs. Wikimedia itself raises mid-8-figures funding yearly without appearing to break a sweat. The opportunity for corruption inside Wikimedia is obvious and large.

2. The big story we have about corruption today has little to do with Wikimedia global. An elected trustee built a model for compensated improvement of the encyclopedia that went beyond the pale. It's not good, but it also doesn't appear to be tolerated. But this is nothing like corruption scandals at other charities; "corruption at nonprofits" tends to involve the nonprofit spending contributor dollars to hire cronies as consultants.

3. Violet Blue did not discover this drama. One assumes she was tipped (Wikidrama being what it is). Either way: I've probably done as much "reporting" on the incident as she did at this point. That's because Wikipedia itself EXPLODED when contributors competing for DYK spots noticed what was happening. This, to me, looks like the system "working".

4. Take any other large charity --- say, the American Red Cross --- and try to get a handle on their organizational politics and day-to-day drama. Does any other 501(c) in the US of comparable size operate with anything resembling the transparency (for better or worse) than Wikimedia does? I'm not saying Wikimedia is "fully transparent". They clearly aren't and probably never will be. But neither are many other charities. I don't know what the ACLU or PIH does with its contributions or staffing or internal promotion plans or conflict of interest guidelines and am happy to support them anyways.

† Here you start hearing the term "GLAM", which stands for Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums. GLAM is the Wikipedia project for doing outreach and joint projects with, well, GLAMs. GLAM is important to this story in part because it is, at least in the meager scale of Wikipedia --- remember, even the highest-status Wikipedians tend not to be, uh, globally competitive earners --- lucrative; libraries and museums tend to sponsor residencies.

I'm not sure there's a problem here. The article seems to imply the guy actually edited wikipedia home page to promote his client.

For what I understand of how "did you know" section works, it's not the case : it's automatically collecting recent additions (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Recent_additions/2012...).

It means that, worst case scenario, he only wrote a lot of new pages about Gibraltar. That's still an issue if those page are advertisement-like (which I did not checked if they are), but certainly not the same thing as spamming home page on purpose.

Also, he may as well have respected neutrality guidelines when writing those articles (even if it's a hard task, if you earn money from the person you're writing about).

The real problem is mostly : does others people have read those articles and checked them ? It's the good old wikipedia problem : only pages that attracts a lot of editors can be considered balanced enough, with or without PR, with or without money.

Mentions of Gibraltar were reviewed by third parties and not received special treatment.

See voting at http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Template_talk:Did_... .

I've had my articles on main page DYK a few times, and of course I was interested in topics of those articles.

Unfortunately paid PR (or corruption in top media properties), both in institutions of profit and non-profit, is a problem since time-immemorial. Containing corruption is one of the hardest problem to solve, and could become one of the main reasons to push people into believing machines more than people next-door.

Hope Wikimedia corrects this soon.

[Edited for spellings]