As far as I can see the edits are slightly peacocky, but not much worse than an ordinary
fanboy might do on a game or music article. The big issue to me is the undisclosed COI,
which is unethical. Proving that the edits were paid for does not seem reasonably
practicable unless you start off by assuming guilt.
Cheers,
Peter
-----Original Message-----
From: Wikimedia-l [mailto:wikimedia-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Gabriel
Thullen
Sent: Friday, April 14, 2017 6:40 PM
To: Wikimedia Mailing List
Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] [arbcom-l] Where is WMF with pursuing companies that offer paid
editing services
This advertising campaign is particularly interesting, it appears that this is the first
time we can talk about an exploit (as is said in computer security). It has been done once
so it can be done again.
What worries me here is that an advertising campaign like this one, mixing TV advertising
and content editing on Wikipedia is not a last minute thing, done on the spur of the
moment. IMHA, the agency responsible for these ads must have experienced wikipedians
working for them. These guys know how the community usually reacts. There is a lot of
money involved and they know that they will have to get it right the first time the ads
are aired.
This looks like a bait and trick, and we were all fooled by it (by we, I mean the
wikipedia community of editors). The bait was the minor grammatical errors in the new
introductory sentence. An experienced editor got tricked into correcting these missing
spaces and such, and the text itself gets a "stamp of approval", and the edit
done by a new account will no longer show up as the last modification done to the
article.
These paid edits were made on April 4, the article started to be vandalized one week
later, on April 11. But it looks like the campaign did not create the expected buzz
because Google reacted quickly (just under 3 hours) and Google Home stopped reading out
the Whopper article at the end of the advert.
The damage has been done.
Theverge.com claims to have done such a modification on
Wikipedia, to quote them "as did we, in a test yesterday".
We will probably see more of this.
Gabe
On Fri, Apr 14, 2017 at 5:39 PM, Dariusz Jemielniak <darekj(a)alk.edu.pl>
wrote:
On Fri, Apr 14, 2017 at 5:23 AM, Gnangarra
<gnangarra(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> but they didnt spam, nor did they introduce any false hoods, or
> remove controversial content, they just put a description of the
> Whopper for
the
> opening sentence.
I agree with James on this one. They "described" their product in a
very flattering way, unnecessarily introducing marketing jargon
("known as America's favorite", "00% beef with no preservatives",
"no
fillers", "daily sliced" etc.). It is spam and in the future, near
rather than far, we need to start seriously thinking how we can combat
such content attacks/hijacking. There are some similarities to our
work with anti-harassment, but I hope we'll be able to develop a more
dedicated approach to this problem, that the Burger King manifestation
is only a single example of.
dj
_______________________________________________
Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/
wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and
https://meta.wikimedia.org/
wiki/Wikimedia-l New messages to: Wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
Unsubscribe:
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l,
<mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>
_______________________________________________
Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l
New messages to: Wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
Unsubscribe:
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l,
<mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>