Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2015-09-02/In the media

The Orangemoody paid-editing case, covered in detail in this week's Special Report, caused a predictable and still ongoing avalanche of media coverage. Recode.net was first off the mark, publishing the same day (August 31), followed on Tuesday and Wednesday by –

• Fusion
• PC World
• Gizmodo
• The Next Web
• Softpedia
• PC Mag
• Venture Beat
• Wired
• Mashable
• Ars Technica
• TechCrunch
• The Washington Post
• The Independent
• BBC
• The Daily Express
• The Telegraph
• Daily Mail
• The Guardian
• The Times
• Die Zeit (Germany)
• Le Temps (Switzerland)
• and many others.

Many of these articles are largely summaries of the August 31 Wikimedia blog post that preceded them (co-authored by former Signpost editor-in-chief, The_ed17), demonstrating an advantage for the WMF in proactively publicising "things gone wrong": it retains a certain amount of control over the narrative.

The situation was very different when the Wiki-PR paid-editing story hit the news in 2013. Wide-ranging coverage sparked by Simon Owens' investigative piece in The Daily Dot (October 8, 2013) seemed to put the Foundation on the back foot. It took almost two weeks for then-executive director Sue Gardner to release a statement (eventually added to Owens' Daily Dot piece on October 21, 2013).

Of course, much has happened since 2013. The Foundation's terms of use now clearly forbid paid contributions without disclosure (a fact duly mentioned in the present media reports). Equally noteworthy is that Foundation staff took an active part in the Orangemoody investigation, unlike the 2013 Wiki-PR case. The Wiki-PR investigation had been proceeding for months before Owens' piece, and was merely "monitored" by the Foundation. By not getting more actively involved in the 2013 case – believing, perhaps, that the public would never learn of it – the Foundation could have been criticised for neglecting its responsibilities, failing to support its volunteers, and missing an opportunity to set the tone of the ensuing debate. (Indeed, Vice for example expressed surprise at the Foundation's lack of involvement.)

The difference between then and now is substantial, and on the whole encouraging: quite apart from the public-relations advantages, publicising the Orangemoody case might be seen to have been the right thing to do; being open about problems affecting a public good is what transparent organisations do.

One media outlet that did more than simply rework the Wikimedia blog post was The Independent, whose journalists contacted and interviewed several British article subjects affected – among them holiday company Quality Villas, online toy shop Little Citizens Boutique, stunt double Amanda Foster, Britain's Got Talent contestant Paul Manners, and jewellery designer Rachel Entwistle, whose spokesman told The Independent the scam had been "really disconcerting ... a whole world I’ve never heard of".

The article, titled "Wikipedia rocked by blackmail scandal", made the front page of The Independent's paper edition (September 2).

Later reports by UK mainstream media outlets have generally referenced the piece in The Independent. The BBC, like The Independent, spoke to Dan Thompson, Quality Villas' general manager. He told them that he had tried to create a page for his business in June:

The Golden Raspberry goes to the The Daily Express, which reported (archive link) that Wikipedia "employs 250,000 people to monitor its content, but it is still open to abuse." Apart from the fact that active editors in the English Wikipedia number only up to about 35,000 per month, one might have thought journalists at a national daily had by now become aware that Wikipedia's content is written and checked by volunteers – members of the general public – and that the Wikimedia Foundation has 277 employees, of whom not a single one is paid to monitor Wikipedia content.

The Orangemoody case is unlikely to be the last of its kind. AK