At least 381 editors of Wikipedia’s English-language site have been banned after it was discovered that they were being paid to create and edit “promotional articles”.
The extortion scam, announced on the site’s administrator board, was uncovered after an investigation into the accounts, which were found to be flooding the website with bogus pad-for articles, promoting companies and their products.
Wikipedia’s CheckUser team found that the banned accounts, run by so-called “sockpuppets”, were active between April and August this year — but could have been operating for some time longer.
The investigation, dubbed “Orangemoody” after the first rogue account that was discovered, uncovered what was essentially an extortion racket being played out through the site’s pages. After creating a draft article filled with promotional links, the account holders would then contact their victims, asking for a fee in return for the article to be published. In some cases, the victims would then be charged up to $30 to stop the page being taken down or edited.
Wikipedia’s editors haven’t hesitated in taking zero-tolerance action against the scam accounts. Alongside the bans, some 210 articles created by the sockpuppets have also been deleted.
Although paid-for editing is nothing new in the Wikipedia community, this latest scandal is the first time that such editing has been discovered to be happening in secret. In the past, PR agencies have used the website for promotional purposes, but have generally followed Wikipedia’s strict editing guidelines.
