| No Images? Click here   Most people who make changes to Wikipedia pages are volunteers. A few people, however, have figured out how to manipulate Wikipedia’s supposedly neutral system to turn a profit.Facebook, Axios and NBC took advantage of that and paid a guy to whitewash their Wikipedia pages. Here is Ashley Feinberg on how she got the story.What was the seed for the story?I got the original tip from a reporter at another outlet who had stumbled across this guy suggesting edits to Jonathan Swan’s page on behalf of Axios, and he just thought it would make a quick funny thing. Once I started looking into the guy doing it, though, I realized how much more there actually was. The reporter who gave me the original tip is incredibly pissed he missed it, which is all anyone can ever really hope for tbh.Describe the most challenging part of reporting it out.I can’t fully express how tedious it is to read this guy’s arguments. Just encyclopedia-length pedantry and quibbling about one of the most boring topics imaginable (Wikipedia rules) that goes on for hours and hours. This is after already spending however many more hours going through his thousands and thousands of edit log entries to find his clients. The most challenging part was not having my brain completely melt.Were there any surprises? |
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