Tricky Wiki: How Public Relations Companies Try to Spin Wikipedia

Peter Dizikes
Full Frontal Scrutiny
January 29, 2008

For millions of Internet users, the collaborative online encyclopedia Wikipedia serves as a trusted information resource, its articles covering more topics than most can imagine — almost 2.2 million entries in English alone. Wikipedia’s own readers, their expertise and their dynamic scrutiny help maintain the site’s accuracy, as well as the neutrality vital to its reputation.

At least, that is how Wikipedia is supposed to operate.

In December 2007 the giant wisdom-of-the-commons encyclopedia was the Web’s 8th-most visited site, according to Alexa data. Type just about any proper noun into a major search engine and a Wikipedia entry about it will probably pop up in the first page of results.

But despite all the eyeballs scanning it, and the efforts of a large volunteer work force, Wikipedia has become something of a battleground for the truth, or, at least, a kind of operating history. Beyond Wiki-debates churning daily about obviously controversial topics such as abortion or gun control, or the biographies of U.S. presidential candidates, Wikipedia’s articles are becoming targets for anyone with a stake in making sure history unfolds according to proper talking points.

Workers at an array of corporate titans have altered their firms’ Wikipedia entries, in apparent violation of the site’s ideals, a variety of sources demonstrates. ExxonMobil employees have changed their own Wikipedia entry to put a shine on the company’s environmental record. People at pharmaceutical giant Sanofi-Aventis edited Wikipedia to claim its cancer-fighting drugs are superior to those of a rival, Bristol-Myers-Squibb. PepsiCo employees deleted references to potential health problems caused by their company’s famous soft drinks. Other corporations have hired public relations firms to manage their Wikipedia reputations or even create events, ideas and campaigns out of the online equivalent of whole cloth.

These kinds of “edits” tend to violate Wikipedia’s basic precepts. Take the site’s “neutral point of view” standard. A Wikipedia fact sheet tells employees of companies or public-relations firms: “You are strongly discouraged from writing articles about yourself or organisations in which you hold a vested interest.” Such edits constitute a conflict of interest, which the site defines as “contributing to Wikipedia in order to promote your own interests or those of other individuals, companies, or groups.”

Wikipedia entries also have a “notability” standard, requiring entries to have multiple sources of information that aspire to a neutral point of view, such as articles from the mainstream press. As Wikipedia guidelines say clearly, “information that is included [in an entry] must have been published by someone other than yourself (or your company).”

• A d v e r t i s e m e n t

Still, Wikipedia’s community of editors recognizes the difficulty of enforcing these regulations. “You can’t stop all this from happening,” says Mark Pellegrini, Wikipedia’s articles editor. “For every person we catch, we have no idea how many more we’re not catching.”

That includes public relations companies and their clients. Employees at the PR firm APCO Worldwide edited an entry on the pain-relief drug Vioxx, to claim that in a lawsuit involving the drug’s manufacturer, Merck, a majority of jurors favored Merck, even though the case ended in a hung jury. Merck is an APCO client.

As a case study, consider a Wikipedia entry titled “association management company,” created in September 2006 and still present as of January 2008, which describes firms representing industry or trade groups — a description that fits Kellen Communications, the U.S.-based public relations firm that created the entry.

A Kellen executive pointed to a Wikipedia article in an exchange with Consumer Reports WebWatch in August 2007, after WebWatch posted a blog entry showing a Web site called the Calorie Control Council is not, as it may appear, an unbiased source of dietary information. In fact, it is a site promoting low-calorie diet sweeteners, run by Kellen Interactive, the firm’s Web arm.

WebWatch published a dissenting letter from a Kellen vice-president, Keith Keeney, describing himself only as “Vice President, Communications” of the Calorie Control Council, saying Kellen is no mere “PR agency,” but an “association management company.” The distinction intends to elevate the status of both the Calorie Control Council and Kellen, implying they’re not peddling products but supporting the general interests of an entire industry. For further information, Keeney suggested WebWatch read Wikipedia’s association management company entry. It begins:

“An association management company (AMC) is a group of skilled professionals who provide management and specialized administrative services to trade associations and professional societies in an efficient, cost-effective manner,” and ends, “The first AMC was founded in 1886 [sic]. Since 1986, the AMC industry (as based on the number of Association Management Companies) has grown by 150%. There are an estimated 676 AMCs located in 48 US states and 11 other countries. The AMC industry serves more than 4,600 associations, encompassing nearly 5 million association members.”

In the “References” section at the bottom of the article’s page, where links to neutral sources are typically included, the first link leads to information sheets from the AMC Institute, a management-company clearinghouse.

An AMC Institute backgrounder listed in the entry’s references begins: “An association management company is a firm of skilled professionals whose goal is to provide management expertise and specialized administrative services to trade associations and professional societies in an efficient, cost-effective manner.” Moreover, the statistics in the Wikipedia article all derive from an AMC Institute fact sheet, which claims an industry growth rate of 150 percent since 1986, along with 676 association management companies in 48 states and 11 countries, 4,664 association clients, and 4.89 million members. Also, what of the original such company, dating to 1886? That is a reference to Fernley and Fernley, a Philadelphia company that “manages the AMC Institute,” according to its own press releases.

These facts also exist in an AMC Institute press release dated August 18, 2006, which lists Kellen employees Keith Keeney and Stan Samples as media contacts. Keeney is the same person who suggested WebWatch read this Wikipedia entry. Samples, it turns out, wrote the entry.

As it happens, every Wikipedia page contains a “history” tab at the top, displaying all the entry’s edits. The “association management company” entry was created September 26, 2006, by a user named “Stansamples.” He revised it two days later. And in October 2006, according to a tool called the “Wikiscanner,” which allows anyone to see who makes edits to Wikipedia entries, someone using Kellen computers twice edited the page further.

Samples acknowledges writing the entry, saying Kellen was working for the AMC Institute as its PR firm. “Wikipedia is a major informational force and we wanted to make sure people understand what an AMC does,” he said.

What about the virtually identical language of the AMC Institute press release and the Wikipedia page? “We wrote both things, we’re the author of the Web site and the author of that entry, so we’re just using our own material,” Samples said. “I mean, you don’t plagiarize yourself.” Samples added that since he “used my name as a login, I wasn’t hiding behind anything” — although it would take some effort to identify him as a Kellen employee working on behalf of the AMC Institute.

In short, Kellen touts its activities as an “association management company” via a Wikipedia page on the subject, even though that page was written by a Kellen employee, using language and data straight from other Kellen press releases. Asked if he thought this might constitute a violation of Wikipedia’s policies, Samples said, “I can’t really comment on that.”

Pellegrini, in an e-mail after reading the entry, wrote that its opening line “sounds very much like marketing-speak — which is exactly what our conflict-of-interest policy is meant to avoid.” The rest of the article, he added, “doesn’t sound encyclopedic, it sounds like something you’d read in a press brochure.” Pellegrini declined to pass immediate judgment on the entry’s overall validity, however. A public discussion on the Wikipedia’s discussion pages would need to happen first.

In October 2006, someone using Kellen’s computers edited Wikipedia pages about several sugar substitutes — Erythritol, Isomalt, Maltitol, Mannitol, and Sorbitol — adding a link on each page to Polyol.org, a web site consisting of “fact sheets” about these substances. Although these edits have since been undone, Polyol.org is a site created by Kellen, as noted at the bottom of the homepage.

Also in October 2006, a Kellen employee edited Wikipedia’s entry on Fructose, adding a link to the site Fructose.org — owned by the Calorie Control Council, which, along with thirteen other associations, shares the same address as Kellen. A Kellen employee edited Wikipedia’s entry on Horseradish, adding a link to another Kellen-run site, Horseradish.org. A Kellen employee also edited Wikipedia’s entry on the controversial sweetener Aspartame, adding a link to the site Aspartame.org — another Calorie Control Council-affiliated site. A Kellen employee also edited the page for the sweetener Acesulfame Potassium, adding a link to the Calorie Control Council web site. All of these edits have since been undone as well.

Kellen created the association management company entry after Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales banned the company from the site in 2006, after seeing a Kellen press release touting its efforts to create Wikipedia entries for clients. “I … banned Kellen Communications from contributing,” Wales told the blog of the PR firm Bite Communications in August 2006.

Michael Cummings, a Kellen executive, says the firm started writing about its clients on Wikipedia in the summer of 2006, having recognized the encyclopedia’s growth. He says doing so was not against Wikipedia policy at the time. “There was no specific language barring third parties or agencies from contributing to the site,” he says. In response to Kellen’s activities, he says, Wikipedia tightened its conflict-of-interest rules and let Kellen know about it. “Jimbo Wales called to tell me about this policy restricting anybody paid by a company, saying they should not be doing that.”

Cummings said he had not seen the Kellen-authored entry on “association management company,” and did not know about any of the contributions Kellen made to Wikipedia after its August 2006 ban was supposed to have been enacted.

Wales, no longer central to daily Wikipedia operations, stated in an e-mail he could not clearly recall the episode: “I may not have been involved personally, or if I was, it seemed routine to me.” He added, “We have had basically zero problems in this area. We consider it a complete non-issue. It is basically impossible to use Wikipedia in this way, because the community is distributed and monitors everything.”

It is, in fact, actually simple to make entries representing a conflict of interest on Wikipedia. It is harder to make them last for an extended period of time, however. Wales, for instance, was found to have edited his own Wikipedia entry, altering sections about a dispute over how much credit he deserves for founding the site. (He later apologized for doing so, and said he would not do it again.)

Pellegrini predicted this kind of corporate “information management” in 2004, when he wrote in a blog that “within the next year or two, we will begin to see organized corporate astroturfing campaigns” on the Wikipedia site. Today, Pellegrini believes he was right: “Between then and now, Wikipedia has become a much bigger target,” he says.

Statistics bear that out: as Wikipedia grows, it needs more repair work. Between January 2005 and October 2007, the number of edits made on Wikipedia per day increased from about 20,000 to more than 100,000. At the same time, the percentage of Wikipedia edits which are “reverts” — replacing inaccurate information, for instance — has risen from seven percent to 20 percent. That means: One in five edits goes toward trying to make the site free of disinformation.

“The encyclopedia started thanks to a small number of idealistic people, engaged in an almost academic exercise,” says Sue Gardner, executive director of Wikipedia. “And as it became more popular, the circle of contributors widened enormously, so it’s not really a surprise over time that the percentage of dubious edits has gone up, as the entity matures.” Gardner, who joined Wikipedia in 2007, indicated she was not familiar with the Kellen case.

To help clean itself up, Wikipedia now deploys programmed “bots” for tasks like restoring wrongly deleted pages. But much of the site’s heavy lifting is done by a group of 1,000 active volunteer “administrators,” nominated by peers after building a good track record, who take on additional duties such as monitoring the site or resolving disputes. Pellegrini, the site’s lead editor, is a doctoral student in computer engineering at the University of Delaware. A paid staff of 10 people in San Francisco manages the site, dealing with administration and technical issues. Wikipedia’s income derives from donations and fundraisers, and reported quarterly costs of more than $300,000 in fall 2005.

If those 1,000 Wikipedia administrators each thoroughly vetted 10 articles per day, it would still take almost half a year to completely check the site. Some dubious entries simply fall through the cracks. “Wikipedia does provide tools for educated, intelligent consumers, but you have to know what they are and how to use them,” says Jonathan Hochman, a Wikipedia administrator. “The average consumer has to be aware of some things when you look at an article: What are the references? Does it have good, respectable edits?”

Tabs on each Wikipedia page, like the “history” tab identifying “Stansamples,” allow readers to look under hood of a given entry. The “discussion” tab demonstrates where Wikipedia users debate matters of accuracy, balance and sources.

Readers should also think critically about an entry’s “references” or “external links” sections. Many PR firms and other companies have tried to place links on Wikipedia for business reasons, to drive web traffic to the linked sites and increase Google rankings; the practice is called “link-spamming.” In response, Wikipedia changed a basic policy in January 2007, so external links no longer count in the Google rankings. “The idea was to help reduce incentive for spamming,” notes Hochman.

Additionally, the Wikiscanner — created by Caltech graduate student Virgil Griffith and made public in August 2007, though not part of the Wikipedia site — shows who is behind otherwise anonymous edits. ExxonMobil employees, for instance, have made 1,205 edits to Wikipedia. In December 2004, an edit to the ExxonMobil article page deleted a reference to Alaskan wildlife harmed by the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill, and claimed the spill left “no long-term severe impact” to the local ecosystem. There are limits to the Wikiscanner, though: Only companies with their own IP addresses can be pinpointed as a source of certain edits.

Employees can, of course, write about their own companies legitimately. “There is no real hard-and-fast rule for determining a conflict of interest,” says Pellegrini. “I know it when I see it.” As Hochman notes, PR firms can “monitor a client’s brand in an above-board way,” if they announce and justify their edits in substantive terms on an article’s “discussion” page. Neutrality questions are decided, via public debate, on a case-by-case basis. Dozens of articles can be considered dubious for conflict-of-interest reasons at a given time, and dozens more considered for deletion from the site for any reason, including insignificance and outright fabrication. Wikipedia maintains public lists of these articles, and any reader can participate in these discussions.

All that said, there’s nothing illegal about managing reputations, and nothing to ensure what a person’s intent may be for making a Wikipedia edit, artificially sweetened or otherwise.

“Some PR firms want to edit their own entries in ways that are constructive, and they want to play by our rules,” says Gardner. “And then others I’m sure want to make edits for their own purposes and don’t really care about Wikipedia itself.”

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