Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2017-02-06/Special report
Wolves nip at Wikipedia's heels: A perspective on the cost of paid editing
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- Smallbones has worked on articles impacted by paid editing throughout his 11 years as a Wikipedia contributor, including the topic explored in this special report. He has written on the subject for the Signpost. He has a Ph.D. in finance and professional experience in legitimate financial markets.
From 2013 until its demise in January 2017, Banc De Binary (BDB), a financial broker based in Israel, drew an international stream of accusations and regulatory penalties. Following a lawsuit and negative media reports about the company, a cohort of mostly undisclosed paid editors sought to influence the firm's coverage on Wikipedia.
Given the multiple, time-consuming deletion requests, sockpuppet investigations, and content disputes, it is clear the effort took its toll on Wikipedia's volunteer editors and functionaries. Can we quantify how much such an incident costs Wikipedia? Certainly there's the cost in editor time that could be used better elsewhere. There's the cost of administrative time spent in investigating sock puppets, banning editors, and the like. There's the cost of a diminished reputation for accuracy. And there can be significant costs to our readers from trusting an article or acting on the information in it.
BDB advertised itself as a leader in binary options, an industry viewed with great skepticism by many regulators and journalists. Exposés of scam artists in the industry now abound with titles like 80% losses guaranteed!, Ex-binary options salesman: Here is how we fleece the clients and The unethical sellers of dreams. One victim, after losing $113,250, told her BDB broker that she had no more money left to send him, according to computer records obtained by the Financial Times. The broker answered, "Don't you have a kidney? Sell it."
Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu's office has called for a worldwide ban on binary options trading.
Article creation by sock puppets
A 2013 sockpuppet investigation led to the determination that the initial version of the article had been created by a sock puppet. Scubadoofeck re-created the article, but was then banned as a sock puppet of User:Morning277. Morning277 had been a central figure in the 2013 Wiki-PR paid editing scandal, in which over 250 accounts were blocked or banned. The article has been deleted twice, has been the subject of at least three additional deletion requests, and has been the subject of extensive edit warring. A biography of the company's CEO was also deleted three times in 2013.
The Cyprus Securities and Exchange Commission (CySEC) licensed BDB as a broker in January 2013, allowing BDB to trade in many European Union countries. Though BDB was fined four times by CySEC, BDB kept its license until January 2017, when the company closed.
Edit wars
In June 2013 two US regulators, the SEC and the CFTC, filed civil suits against BDB and jointly issued a warning against the entire non-US binary options industry.
An external link to these civil suits was placed in the article two days later, prompting a protracted edit war. In May 2014, an editor nominated the article for deletion; that editor was blocked as yet another sockpuppet the next day. During the intervening 11 months, nearly 500 edits were made. An IP editor (traceable to Israel) claiming to be BDB CEO Oren Shabat Laurent, made five identical edits in the same day, all of which were reverted, to include highlights of Laurent's biography, and lists of products and countries served. He also reduced the coverage of the regulators' lawsuits and buried it at the bottom of the article. The article was protected due to edit warring, and vacillated between semi- and full protection until June 2014.
In May 2014, an editor observed changes in web search results relating to BDB, and asserted that the Wikipedia efforts might be part of a search engine optimization (SEO) effort to remove and de-emphasize coverage of the company's bad press from the web. The Times of Israel later noted, under a headline decrying the "wolves of Tel Aviv", that SEO "expertise has plainly been applied by fraudulent binary options firms, whose affiliated sites show up high in Google searches — sending unsuspecting and naive clients their way."
The article was kept after an Articles for Deletion discussion, despite the participation of User:BDBJack, who had declared he was working for BDB, and eight other editors whose comments were discounted as "obvious single-purpose accounts and socks".
User:BDBIsrael, later indefinitely blocked along with BDBJack, also stated that he was paid by BDB. In June he began relaying messages from the BDB board of directors, clearly stating that BDB had been a customer of Wiki-PR and naming several editors who either worked for BDB directly or through Wiki-PR. One of the editors who worked directly for BDB, User:Notsosoros was indefinitely blocked along with 37 related accounts for sockpuppeting. Most of these socks were apparently "sleeper accounts"—deceptive accounts being prepared to be used later—which hadn't yet edited the BDB article.
Word was posted on Wikipedia that BDB had advertised a five figure fee for "crisis management" of the article. This posting rallied Wikipedia editors to fight for an unbiased article.
A sock puppet started the editing in June 2014 with a request for speedy deletion [1]. 106 edits and six days later, the article was placed under full protection. On June 4 a well-known paid editor, who told the Signpost that he never accepted money from BDB, started another article deletion request, but the article was speedily kept. Three days later, he deleted 88% of the article text. The article talk page was even busier, with about 450 edits that month.
On June 16, 2014 the Wikimedia Foundation announced a new requirement for paid editors as part of Wikipedia's terms of use. Paid editors from that date forward were formally required to declare their paid status, their employer, clients, and other relevant affiliations, so that other editors could easily review their work. Paid editing at the BDB article slowed immediately. Only two banned or permanently blocked editors edited the article until 2016.
The collapse
2016 was a rough year for BDB. In January Israel changed its law to make trading binary options with its citizens illegal. In February BDB settled the US regulatory cases with $11 million in fines and restitution, and an agreement not to trade with or even indirectly solicit US residents. The Times of Israel ran a series of detailed exposés on the binary options industry, starting with "The wolves of Tel Aviv: Israel's vast, amoral binary options scam exposed" One article focused on BDB. The prime minister’s office condemned the whole industry, and the Knesset scheduled hearings on stopping all binary options trading in Israel. CySEC fined BDB four times and there were other regulatory setbacks in Australia, New Zealand, France, Belgium, and Belize.
This did not appear to stop the undisclosed paid editing on the BDB article. Four accounts, later banned or permanently blocked, removed content from the article in 2016: FoCuSandLeArN, Tianderni, Beranpolti, and Euclidthalis.
BDB fought hard to push its advertising into the article, and to remove news of its regulatory problems. Wikipedia editors and administrators fought harder and did a good job under the circumstances. Perhaps Wikipedia editors, myself included, could have been clearer: a reader skimming the article might have drawn the erroneous conclusion that BDB was a legitimate business with just a few problems with regulators. Of course we are constrained by what reliable secondary sources say – we could not have written, for instance, "BDB is a scam" unless several sources had printed that.
Other languages
Coverage of BDB in Wikipedia's German, Greek, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish editions was less informative than in the English edition. All the articles were created from 2013–14. They appear to have been translated from one of the English article versions written by BDB; all but one had a small paragraph on US regulation buried at the bottom.
The creator of the Spanish article got his account globally locked as a "spam only account", but the article stayed pretty much the same until December 2016. The Greek and Russian articles stayed much as originally written. The German and Portuguese articles started in 2013 with word of BDB’s regulatory problems in the lede, but those sentences were deleted in June 2014.
The bottom line
A prolonged conflict around an article impacts Wikipedia's most valuable resource—volunteer time—and impacts the quality of information conveyed to its readers. All of these should be regarded as significant costs to the Wikipedia project. Furthermore, to whatever extent Wikipedia's readers take detrimental action based on faulty information from Wikipedia, those individuals share in the cost, as well.
In total, three editors of the English-language article were banned as sock puppets of Morning277, and 17 others were banned or indefinitely blocked. These editors all pushed BDB's point of view. A couple dozen more were blocked as sock puppets of a BDB employee before they could edit the BDB article.
With 781 edits to the article and 870 edits to the talk page, BDB likely consumed hundreds of hours of our editors' time. Eight related deletion requests, two massive edit wars, 20 banned or blocked editors, and years of page protection likely used hundreds more hours of administrators' time.
The Israeli binary options industry is reported to take in more than US$1 billion per year. BDB reported unaudited revenues of $100 million in 2014. How much of that came from Wikipedia readers can only be guessed. But given the time and money BDB spent trying to manipulate the article on Wikipedia, it must have been a very large amount. Maybe we should all count our kidneys, and keep our eyes on the wolves.
Discuss this story
- It's not the tiny volunteer base. It's pretty much the entire Wikipedia community and the Wikimedia Foundation who constantly fail to accept how serious these issues are, and how they affect the encyclopedia's reputation. And their refusal to acknowledge and invest in the the need for more, policy based controls on who can edit, and who can patrol the new content. Many Recent Changes reviewers and New Page Patrollers are among the least qualified of all kinds of editors - over 20% of users who join WP:AfC do it to be able to be sure their own articles make it to mainspace.
- Thus far, the punishments for paid editing result in bans. What if the WMF chose to send "cease and desist" letters (and publicized such incidents) and if ignored, filed lawsuits against such editors? I know this would lead to a drain on the legal team's resources, but might WP's rules be taken more seriously? - kosboot (talk) 13:24, 6 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]
- There are certainly steps WMF legal could take. The key step for the WMF, IMHO, is to widely publicize that we have strict rules against advertising and undisclosed paid editing. Individual editors can do "naming and shaming" pointing out where specific companies are inserting ads into our articles. Smallbones(smalltalk) 14:39, 6 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]
- You've got to get those editors to find out first who the culprits are before they can do the naming and shaming. Since its conception, Wikipedia has had a totally dysfunctional system for vetting new content and/or new users. Every common or garden village residents blog or forum has stricter rules than Wikipedia. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 14:46, 6 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]
- Re: "totally dysfunctional system for vetting new content and/or new users"—@Kudpung, I know you're into ideas... Do you have any recommendations on this front? Or is it under discussion somewhere? czar 18:42, 6 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]
- It's been under discussion for 6 years but we've now arrived at a corner of a blank wall - on one side it's the WMF refusing to recognise it as a priority and on the othr is our volunteer community itself who insist on the 'anyone can edit' meme and continue to regard NPP as a hobbyhorse rather than a policy driven core function. As a result, I'm stepping down, but there is to be an election for people to carry on with the work I've been doing for the past 6 years. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 22:18, 6 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]
It takes a certain wherewithal to edit in high-activity topics, nevertheless with bad-faith actors. But it's insult to injury to then put our time-sinking editors through even more time sinks once it becomes apparent that (1) the actors are indeed bad-faith actors, and (2) the effort is designed to overwhelm our editing capacity. I hope there will be more discussions about article quality now that we're past the point of collecting garbage on every topic and in the stage of refining that garbage into that which is reliably sourced and that which isn't. To that end, it's worth collecting in one place stories like the one above as documentation for the many wasted hours of editor productivity. Juxtapose this situation with the other article in this Signpost on the women's march and how the editors chose to keep IP access because there were more productive IP edits than otherwise. I don't know the specifics of either situation, but that spirit of decentralized guild-like decision-making is emboldening. If our best editors are being overwhelmed in stewarding a topic, the best solution is not always the libertarian option of walking away and hoping someone else will fit in (nor is it to believe that particular stewards are the only ones worth considering), but the stewards should be able to appeal to the community for restrictions that will support their work in what becomes a war of attrition. I don't know how else to describe the above story, yet I especially don't know how to justify a volunteer sticking around for that kind of abuse once the problem gets that deep. Sometimes we fight for free/open in the wrong venues—the encyclopedia is free/open, but every individual article reflects the consensus of those who edit it, and those isolated instances may not be free/open. If Kudpung is correct in his assessment that both the community and admin do not treat these affairs seriously, I hope that in the future we could have more solidarity when our own editors are confronted with efforts so designed to exhaust them, because if those outside efforts succeed in their exhaustion, both our community and the encyclopedia will suffer. czar 18:42, 6 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]The tiny volunteer base are the idiots (like me) who organise and do the cleaning up. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 12:41, 6 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]
An interesting and well-researched article on a desperately important issue. I'd compare it to developers who will gain by building something that will cause harm, such as a mine in a nature reserve. The developers have professional staff skilled in the process and paid to advance their cause by whatever means (and that can include disinformation or other forms of "political" deception). The nimbies are volunteers, organise in their own time and at their own expense, and may be outflanked in many different ways. Guess who's more likely to win. Anything that can help tilt the balance in favour of truth is to be welcomed.Chiswick Chap (talk) 10:53, 8 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]
"Naming and shaming" vs. "assume good faith"
While "naming and shaming," as described in this piece and discussed above, has an important and legitimate role, it's an approach that should be used with caution. In some cases, "naming and shaming" can conflict with our assume good faith policy. One clear instance impacted a client of mine, who had diligently observed Wikipedia's policies in both letter and spirit. A columnist called out their clearly disclosed efforts, and Wikipedia founder Jimbo Wales repeated the (largely inaccurate) accusation, explicitly stating that shaming was in order. This prompted extensive discussion on Wikipedia; ultimately, no wrongdoing was found, but the accuracy of Wikipedia's content had already suffered substantial damage in the meantime. Beyond that, the call for "shaming" had negatively impacted our collaborative dynamics, with a variety of accusations, ranging from good faith but misguided comments to outright vandalism and harassment.
This is a dynamic I frequently encounter in less dramatic examples, when helping friends, teaching students, and advising clients. Shaming is a powerful tool; it has great power to advance our goals when used with care, and great power to damage our social dynamics when used recklessly. -Pete Forsyth (talk) 22:21, 6 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]
- Readers of this article might also be interested in Wikipedia vs. Banc De Binary: A 3-year battle against binary options ‘fake news’
Smallbones(smalltalk) 23:17, 29 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]