The Wikipedia Black Market

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We’ve all been told to never trust Wikipedia articles but have you ever thought about who actually writes these articles? Well, it’s usually just a bunch of dedicated volunteers who are looking to make information more accessible but there’s a much darker side of Wikipedia as well: the black market. There are entire businesses built around the idea of writing Wikipedia articles for businesses and individuals. Theoretically, these businesses are simply supposed to help people navigate the tricky world of publishing on Wikipedia, but it’s likely that they help with much more than that. Many of these businesses aim to build a specific online persona for a given customer. Some businesses even take it to the next level and help their clients get into reputable publishers like Forbes, Business Insider, and CNBC. Of course, this is not cheap and can easily cost $15 to $20,000 but for certain businesses, that’s more than worth the cost. This video explains the black market of Wikipedia and how people are able to buy biased Wikipedia articles.

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Timestamps:
0:00 - The Black Market
2:27 - Publishing An Article
5:31 - Paid Articles
8:39 - Bending Reality

Resources:

Disclaimer:
This video is not a solicitation or personal financial advice. All investing involves risk. Please do your own research.

[heartsofironever]

As a seasoned Wikipedia editor with over 40k edits and 10 years of service, I'll give you my insights, there's nothing wrong with publishing articles with only 10 edits, we welcome anyone who wants to edit no matter their social credit as long as they make good edits. I've also published over 200+ articles, and most of them take a week to be reviewed, the longest ever was 4 months. I also work at AFC (Articles for Creation) which is the project that approves and disapproves draft articles, and we have very harsh rules about organization and biographies, they are regularly nominated for deletion at AFD (Articles for Deletion) for being biased or not meeting the notability guidelines. You also have to disclose if you're being paid to edit, ad if we find out you're paid to edit but didn't disclose it you're getting an indefinite ban, we can also check your organization's IP connection and ban the entire company if their editors are too disruptive.

[danielvasquez]

Lol I remember students who would just edit articles on Wikipedia!! And now they’re in a business of selling them!??? Man I love it!!!

[quokka_yt]

As a Wikipedia editor, this video has quite a few inaccuracies, but it was interesting nonetheless.

Paid editing is a practice that we are very much aware of, and trying to limit to questionable avail.

Just two of the inaccuracies is that you don't need an account to edit at all, you can just edit without an account, and not all new articles have to go through the AfC process, just if your account is new.

[minimalist_zero]

I had no idea such a market existed, thanks for this, it was entertaining.

[danielvasquez]

I’ve always wondered how fast they would update these articles in Wikipedia!! I thought it was a bot or a machine that would source information!! Like the Super Bowl just ended, and they already have an article filled with stats on the game!! Even detailed descriptions too!!

[TheChrisLeone]

Teachers always said not to use wikipedia, but Wikipedia is literally a giant crowdsourced information website. Often it will be much more updated than my old textbook

[fatrick]

I read wikipedia as if I were reading someone's personal blog, but usually on go there visiting a page about a topic so dry and apolitical it is hard to imagine personal biases factoring into the article at all.

[llydrsn]

I've read this quote one time: "Wikipedia built the modern encyclopaedia based just on nerds' need to correct each other."

[geoffreyzziwambazza]

When I was in school, I would get all my information from Wikipedia, and then use the references section to cite the sources. Wikipedia uses legitimate sources for the articles, you just need to find key words on the website to properly correlate each citation. And I was doing this like 15 years ago. It’s a lot different for some college courses because you usually have to get your citations from peer reviewed publications, but the databases like Proquest are like the for profits of wikis.

[undivided_unified]

in the information age, it shouldnt be a surprise that the most lucrative resource is INFORMATION ITSELF. Knowledge is power and we've all see how far lies can go in our everyday lives. We need more accountability and transparency on who are the gate keepers.

[skoda]

Hello. An SEO guy here. Wikipedia articles used to be (and sometimes by some companies still are) considered the most valuable links out there, due to the fact, that Wikipedia is one of the most cited and visited website on the whole internet. Also, one of the most difficult to get a link from.

You know, Google was invented by those two guys (Eric Schmidt and Sergei Brin) during their university time. They were fascinated by the academic principle of evaluating quality research papers by the amount of citations. So that's what they have based their algorithms back in the days. They were assigning a rank (PageRank) to each and every website based on links linking to them. Not every link was equal, of course.

So there is still an incentive and reason to create a wikipedia article based around a client, that tou work with (like if I was working with Logically Answered, I would have to try to create a page for this profile). It was considered a PR stunt, due to the fact that your own Wikipedia page would give you a credibility, if shown in Google Search. It used to be that Wikipedia was always in top three results few years ago, if you would search for a brand (nowadays its a little less common - it might be due to the fact mentioned in the video - Google is paying to Wikipedia and probably it wants to pay less - so they have started showing Knowledge graphs and stuff).

SEO people are still doing those white glove stuff - creating content around brands to gain them more visibility, and it might be used to create Wikipedia pages, as mentioned in the video.

[dylangtech]

I have found this to be the case on several occasions where they would have a policy where a definition was used, but then when someone tried adding an example, the edit would be reversed and the user banned. For example, we entered a recession last year for more than a two quarters, and the Talk page asked why this wasn’t a recession, and a super admin claimed it was because a specific organization did not DECLARE it one after having met the universally agreed definition.

Clearly many of these people are being paid. There are much more controversial examples, but the official reasons why are usually “because authorities we get sources from don’t approve” and this is usually glossed over.

[taseenahmed]

thank you for always adding subtitles, I truly appreciate the effort.

[capitanodessa]

0:30 I have seen edits all the time.

I'm Argentinian, and most Wikipedia editors are aligned with peronism. What does this mean? That means that most political figures that still support the movement created by the fascist Juan Domingo Perón are usually written in a good light, dismissing corruption cases and highlighting "social justice" above all, and articles referring to detractors are written to make them look like the devil themselves.

That's why the English version is superior to the Spanish one.


The "Compare" tool is one of the greatest things ever

[brianbarker]

You can submit your ideas to the Articles for Creation process (AfC) and someone will start an article for you. Once your article is submitted, it goes to the new page patrollers for review and will get published if approved. There's also a whole deletion discussion process that takes place. You do enough edits and they give you "autopatrolled rights", being someone doesn't review your article before it gets published. To be honest I've been on wiki for 20 years now...

[mikairu]

Truly, greed can destroy even the noblest of pursuits

[balpreetsingh]

Interesting topic. Great video as always.

[christopheribarra]

I don't worry too much because information is also subject to natural selection. That's how science has gotten so far. The truthful stuff is what survives.

[nightking]

Even though this is true but it is the best we have. Apart from article itself, the references in the end are compiled quite well which could be helpful to go through on your own.

[AyushGupta-wnzd]

I'm glad that wikipedia puts a lot of effort and focus into making the information unbiased, independent and free. Information is very powerful and i donate to wikipedia every year. In this modern day of internet dystopia only wikipedia remains as one true source of information. I hope wikipedia stays strong