Comment on London PR firm rewrites Wikipedia for governments and billionaires

gedaliyah@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

• SkunkWorkz@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  Yep like how North Face replaced photos of many pages that had people wearing their products in it. And this is probably just the tip of the iceberg, there must be plenty of stuff that hasn’t been caught yet.

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  • acockworkorange@mander.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    Wow. Do you have a link for that?

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    • brbposting@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      In 2019, The North Face faced consumer backlash and apologized after its marketing agency surreptitiously added photos featuring its apparel to Wikipedia articles on popular outdoor destinations.

      The North Face - Wikipedia en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_North_Face

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      • acockworkorange@mander.xyz ⁨21⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

        TIL about the South Butt.

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• hector@lemmy.today ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  Organized groups hire people to edit wiki pages, you can even spot them coaching each other on the talk section. Monied interests especially, but also history is under fire.

  Revisionists are rife, every monster from history is seemingly being rehabilitated, for at least 15 years. Feudalism has pr firms now too, it was great! No perversion of reality is too obvious that the sheep will not mindlessly take it as fact.

  Technical subjects’ articles utility depends on who wrote it, a share of them are showing off their learnings using technical words 95 percent or more will not fully grasp, while other entries are in common terms andd fully understandable.

  Wikipedia is a great resource, but not infallible, or a reliable source in itself, although it’s listed sources could well be reliable sources.

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  • gedaliyah@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    Although manipulating the sources cited is a great way to manipulate Wikipedia. You have to recruit 10-40 people to act as a group of editors to manufacture concensus across topics. Or you can just create a website or series of press releases.

    “Hey, this small-town museum has an article about a historical event. It must be true. Link it at the bottom.” Or “well, this local newspaper article says it is happened, so into the article it goes.”

    Even more effective, especially for political groups, is just publish dozens of supportive articles, while miring competing articles in edit wars and the bureaucracy that comes with it. For sources, just cite expert books that are favorable. It’s not easy, but hiring or recruiting 10-40 editors is trivial for political entities.

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    • hector@lemmy.today ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      They have firms whose job it is to hire out editing wikipedia pages on contract. It is not new or much of a secret. Idk the mechanics involved I don’t see why they would need that many anyone can change it with a source, there are groups that edit their own pages easy enough, politicians get caught doing it, circumstantially caught, regularly.

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      • gedaliyah@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

        Having a number of different editors allows manipulating the discussion and concensus protections built into Wikipedia.

        Depending on the topic, it may not be necessary. A complimentary article about a new technology product or company founder just takes a few press releases that get picked up. Manipulating world events and leaders requires more coordination.

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    • Riverside@reddthat.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      It’s even more structural than that. You can control functionally all editors by controlling the academia and media. Wikipedia is necessarily a reflection of the biases of the editors and the sources they peruse. Misogynistic bias in your society, media and academia will lead to a misogynistic Wikipedia. Racist bias in your society, media and academia will lead to a racist Wikipedia. Anticommunist bias in your society, media and academia will lead to an anticommunist Wikipedia.

      For example, western Wikipedia editors have been quick to deprecate Chinese state media sources such as CGTN or Russian such as RT (not complaining about the latter), but even after the horrifying complacency in genocide in Gaza, the BBC is still widely accepted.

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• merc@sh.itjust.works ⁨20⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  I don’t think anybody, other than maybe high-school kids, thought Wikipedia was some perfect site with no flaws. Even with these flaws, it’s really an amazing achievement and deserves massive amounts of praise.

  Just compare it to what came before: Encyclopaedia Britannica and the like. Wikipedia is estimated to be about 95x bigger than Encyclopedia Britannica. So, it goes more in depth on almost everything, and has orders of magnitude more articles than Britannica had. And, do you think Britannica didn’t face pressure to not publish controversial or unflattering information on rich people? It was probably much, much easier for the rich to get things their way when it was a single, for-profit publisher, rather than a worldwide group of volunteers. And then there’s the issue with being factual or having a neutral point of view. That’s always going to be a challenge, but it’s much more likely there will be systemic bias for an American-owned for-profit company than it is for a volunteer-based non-profit with editors worldwide.

  Also, the way Wikipedia works, it’s much harder for these PR firms to completely hide things they don’t like. Nearly all of Wikipedia’s edit history is easily visible just by clicking a link on the page you’re reading. If someone removed something unflattering, you can often find it just by going through the edits. It would be nice if the rich couldn’t adjust the main pages, but at least it’s extremely hard for them to make unflattering information completely disappear just due to how the editing process for Wikis works.

  Finally, paid PR professionals can’t just edit whatever they like. Wikipedia editors are notoriously proud of what they do, and annoyed at seeing their site vandalized. Often edits will be rolled back, or pages will be locked. Eventually a billionaire might get what they want, but to get a fact changed on Wikipedia they’ll probably need to pay a reputable news site to make a counter claim, then have one of their paid PR flacks to use that news article as a primary source to allow it to be used on Wikipedia. That’s an expensive and fragile process. Do it too often and you damage the reputation of the news site so it can no longer be used for that kind of thing. And, all it takes to undo that is a good journalist doing their job and reporting the truth and a volunteer Wikipedia editor updating the page.

  So, don’t lose hope, just think that billionaires are spending millions to try to launder their reputations, and often those attempts are being undone by some girl in sweatpants casually updating Wikipedia on her phone while she binges Critical Role.

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• RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  People need to stop treating it like a source, one stop shopping for info, like copypasting AI search results.

  Both of them require the reader to dig further into the information to find corroborating information and also to attempt to look for any information objectively critical of the result; and definitely check the source, hopefully being something reliable and objective as possible.

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• TankovayaDiviziya@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  So that explains why some entries on companies don’t mention about their unscrupulous history.

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• fort_burp@feddit.nl ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  Former Israeli PM Naftali Bennet describing how they manipulate information on Wikipedia.

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• UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world ⁨20⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  We honestly need to end the myth that Wikipedia is some impenetrable white tower.

  It’s a perpetual two-edged conversation. On the one end, you’ve got reactionaries doggedly insisting the existence of Wikipedia is an attack on their personal reputations and a warehouse for far-left ultra-communist radical propaganda. On the other, you’ve got a very naked western bias to articles (thanks to a preponderance of western editors) and this creeping pay-to-play model of participation that enthusiasts and supporters simply refuse to acknowledge.

  The utility of the site is such that nobody is really excited about ignoring it and replacing it is a herculean effort even would-be trillionaires haven’t managed. So the fight continues to be over degrees of control in editing existing articles and publishing new ones.

  It isn’t a White Tower, but Wikipedia has become - like it or not - a system of record with an implicit amount of reflexive trust that hundreds of millions of people have learned to adopt. You can’t cynically reject its contents any more than you can naively accept them.

  You think people break into the Louvre but can’t touch Wikipedia?

  I think there are enough copies of the Mona Lisa such that we wouldn’t need to question what it looks like if the original was stolen.

  In the same way, there are so many backups and mirrors and third-party logs of Wikipedia that we can very clearly see what is being changed and by whom. It is valuable in large part because it is so easily auditable. That’s not to say its infallible, but you can at least point to what you disagree with and challenge it piecemeal. This isn’t like a Grok AI or Conservapedia, where the preponderance is a black box of bullshit.

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