DeVos's link to Wikipedia was not made explicit. Gottlieb and Theranos were directly tied by the WSJ to Wikipedia edits by banned sock puppet jppcap. Secretary of Education, and Theranos, a failed blood testing company, whose former CEO is now facing criminal charges.Ĭitadel LLC admitted Griffin's use of Status Labs to edit Wikipedia, according to the WSJ. Griffin, owner of Citadel LLC, Omeed Malik, Betsy DeVos – before she became U.S. The WSJ documented Status Labs 'reputation management' for five firms and individuals including Jacob Gottlieb, former owner of the defunct hedge fund Visium Asset Management, billionaire Kenneth C. The Wall Street Journal published an in-depth investigation of Status Labs activities and documented their Wikipedia editing in the Decemarticle titled 'How the 1% Scrubs Its Image Online'. You'd think they would have gotten the messageĭarius Fisher's firm Status Labs, the successor firm of Wiki-PR, has continued editing for six years after they were all banned by the Wikipedia community. This change was voted on by 1,389 Wikipedians, probably the largest such vote in Wikipedia's history and was supported by 79% of the voters. The Wiki-PR scandal was widely covered in the mainstream press, including articles in the Daily Dot, Vice, Verge, the Independent, Ars Technica, AdAge, and many others.įollowing Wiki-PR's activities, the WMF changed the Terms of Use stating that every paid editor must declare their paid editing status as well as their employers, clients, and other affiliations. When they began advertising under yet another name, that name was included in the ban. When Wiki-PR started advertising using the Status Labs name, the community ban was extended to Status Labs. The WMF later issued a cease-and-desist letter telling them not to edit Wikipedia, using the same language as the first sentence of the community ban.

This ban has been enacted because has, as an organization, proven themselves repeatedly unable or unwilling to adhere to our basic community standards. The community banned the firm – and not just the firm – in these terms:Įmployees, contractors, owners, and anyone who derives financial benefit from editing the English Wikipedia on behalf of or its founders are banned from editing the English Wikipedia.

They first came to light in 2013 when Wikipedias and the WMF blocked 250 accounts in the then-largest paid editing scandal in the history of Wikipedia. Wiki-PR/Status Labs is likely the best known of the commercial paid editing firms among Wikipedians. Many of the worst offenders have been questionable financial firms such as retail foreign exchange traders, or outright scam artists like binary options traders and some cryptocurrency firms. The Conflict of interest noticeboard used by Wikipedia editors to report ongoing problems, reports that many incidents per month. The subject even has its own article Paid editing on Wikipedia citing dozens of well documented incidents. Paid editing has long been a problem on Wikipedia. Status Labs was contacted for comment for this article but did not respond before publication. One of their clients, Jacob Gottlieb, was interviewed by The Wall Street Journal during a recent investigation, and said he paid $4,000 to $5,000 per month. 'Fees for reputation management can range from a few thousand dollars a year to hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, depending on the clients and his or her needs,' according to Status Lab CEO Darius Fisher. Its clients pay high fees for their services. In 2014 CNBC reported that Status Labs was apparently a 'small shop' and that one of CNBC's freelancers was solicited by email for payment by Status Labs to slip 'a client's name into copy.' If Status Labs will spam a large national cable news organization, they'll likely spam anywhere they think they can get away with. Just one of the more notorious companies, Wiki-PR – now known as Status Labs – declared operating revenues of over $7 million for 2017, had 200 active clients in August 2018, and currently employs 48 staff members. Taken together, the hundreds or thousands of businesses who commercially insert advertisements into the encyclopedia likely bring in many times that amount. Their budget is about $100 million per year. It supports the servers that provide over a billion people a month with immediate access to the encyclopedia, maintains and upgrades the software, and provides grants to editors' projects throughout the world.

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