With undisclosed paid editing on the rise, Wikipedians and the Wikimedia Foundation are working together to stop the practice without discouraging user participation.
By Oliver Lee Bateman | MOTHERBOARD
Wikipedia is a strange beast: a latter-day Library of Alexandria that has to work overtime to keep erasing graffiti from its walls. For a brief moment in 2014, goalkeeper Tim Howard, star of the 2014 US World Cup soccer team, was listed on the site as the „secretary of defense,“ and earlier this year House Speaker Paul Ryan found himself included on a list of invertebrates. Vandalism has plagued Wikipedia since its inception in 2001, but the site flourished in spite of these problems. But paid editors, who create and edit text to suit the needs of their clients, present a thornier challenge, since some of the work they do is permissible under Wikimedia Foundation’s terms of use as long as they disclose these conflicts of interest on their user pages. Not all paid editors make these disclosures, perhaps preferring the advantages offered by the appearance of objectivity, and those same policies that have made Wikipedia so useful—anonymity and consensus—are now at the heart of a controversy over how to prevent the alteration of the encyclopedia’s text by undisclosed paid editors.
Brights - Die Natur des Zweifels 