The Orangemoody network seems to have been providing a service: bring the apparently self-submitted but failed drafts of articles of persons, organizations, and businesses up to compliance with Wikipedia standards and get them live, then accept a previously negotiated fee. After some months of safeguarding those articles for free, they would offer to continue doing so at a monthly rate. I'm not seeing the harm.
Oh, I'd like to check if the articles were actually unduly promotional and POV and so forth, unfortunately the erstwhile investigators have deleted them so no-one except administrators may see. Which comes in handy for the investigators, because it means everybody must go by their characterizations of the articles.
I heard a murmur that Orangemoody would actually request deletion of its own articles if the subject failed to agree to the monthly fee, but Risker said this vaguely as if there were only a couple or few examples of this.
As well, though the IP addresses have not been disclosed, one of the accused Orangemoody accounts belongs to a Bangladeshi editor of three or more years. Raising the question of whether geolocation to Bangladesh and other nearby poor countries was a clue to the investigators to connect the Orangemoody accounts. Which on confirmation would raise the further question of whether the entire case was almost exclusively comparatively well-off westerners destroying the business and livelihood of impoverished Bangladeshis and other easterners just trying to put food on the table for their kids.
Trillium Corsage
02.09.2015, 21:53, "Matt Campbell" <email clipped>:
Glad to hear it.
-------- Original message -------- From: James Heilman <email clipped> Date: 09/01/2015 10:31 PM (GMT-05:00) To: Wikimedia Mailing List wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: [Wikimedia-l] "Wikipedia rocked by 'rogue editors' blackmail scam targeting small businesses and celebrities"
We have a number of discussions ongoing with respect to what measures we
should take to address the issue of promotional paid editing generally and
to prevent this from happening again
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators%27_noticeboard#Wikipe...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Doc_James/Paid_editing
--
James Heilman
MD, CCFP-EM, Wikipedian
The Wikipedia Open Textbook of Medicine
www.opentextbookofmedicine.com
As of July 2015 I am a board member of the Wikimedia Foundation
My emails; however, do not represent the official position of the WMF
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