Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2019-11-29/From the archives

MER-C was interviewed by Mabeenot for The Signpost's WikiProject report originally published July 18, 2011. We invited them to revisit the report and comment on any changes that have happened since 2011. In 2014 MER-C was given the mop in a unanimous RfA. We will publish MER-C's reactions, followed by the original report. –B

Well, this interview aged quickly. So what has changed? What does spam look like nowadays on Wikipedia?

Firstly, I don't know if linkspam in all its forms has increased or not since them. It is no longer economical for me to spend time pursuing it.

I spend my time dealing with undisclosed paid editing instead. UPE is an imprecise term. A better one is covert advertising – the insertion of advertisements that very closely mimic the format of legitimate encyclopedic articles written by volunteers. It is irrelevant whether disclosure is made per the Terms of Use because there is no indication whatsoever to the casual reader that editors have been paid for in both cases. A reader would need to check all of the page history, the talk page and the user pages of all significant contributors to the article in order to determine whether content is paid for. The disclosure requirement is therefore completely pointless for the casual reader.

The most obvious form of UPE involves the creation of articles that would not otherwise warrant inclusion. Long term contributors may remember when Wikipedia:Conflict of interest was titled Wikipedia:Vanity page. This is exactly the functionality these "articles" serve. Ghostwritten vanity pages are designed explicitly to show up on the first item and the sidebar of a Google search, but are difficult for Wikipedians to find and, if found, to evaluate the notability of their subject. Spam is less about Viagra or Cialis, and more about early-stage startups, businesspeople, motivational speakers, cryptocurrencies and so forth.

There are numerous companies that offer ghostwritten vanity pages for a small amount of money, typically a few hundred dollars. These companies employ freelancers in English speaking Third World countries who have very few opportunities for legitimate employment. In fact, similiar dishonest activities such as running a fake news website or writing for an essay mill turn out to be quite lucrative, in purchasing power parity terms, for the freelancers concerned.^[1][2]

The level of abuse is systematic, pervasive, and of increasing sophistication. The worst spammers have taken on characteristics of advanced persistent threats, including the use of compromised computers, VPNs and cloud computing infrastructure to post spam. There are no effective admin tools. Two new page patrollers, who screen newly created articles for notability and other problems, have been blocked for corruptly reviewing spam last week (Meeanaya and Ceethekreator). It is only a matter of time before paid editors systematically infiltrate the admin corps.

Much of the increase in spamming is a consequence of Wikipedia's own success. However, a large portion of the blame lies squarely with the Wikimedia Foundation. The WMF places significant emphasis in materials targeted at donors on crude metrics of content quantity and community size simply because that is what the WMF thinks donors want to hear.^[3] The WMF therefore faces incentives very similar to Facebook and Google. Social media sites tolerate a high level of bots, Russian trolls and spammers because fake accounts pad their key metrics of monthly active users and ad impressions, giving the illusion of growth and making them look good in the eyes of their customers (advertisers) and investors. Similar emphasis is put by the WMF (and Facebook) on outreach efforts in the poor countries that are the source of much of the spam, despite multiple past high-profile failures, again because the WMF thinks donors want to see desperate, impoverished people in sub-Saharan Africa being helped.^[4][5] A few extra vanity pages and sockpuppets certainly help the WMF look good in their pitch to donors.

The WMF does not sufficiently care about our admin tools being fit for purpose.^[6] Like Facebook, Youtube and Google before recent scandals, investments in content moderation are seen as purely a cost^[7][8] while "initiatives" that provide feel-good anecdotes for donors or increase donor-targeted metrics and hence increase donations are heavily prioritized. The WMF deserves nothing but utter condemnation and scorn for the complete lack of maintenance, let alone investment, in the code underlying the administrator toolset. A seemingly simple task such as adding a checkbox to the delete form that deletes the associated talk page requires nothing less than a fundamental rewrite of the relevant code.

The fight against spam is nothing short of an existential battle against the degeneration of this encyclopedia into a large set of vanity pages about attention-seeking subjects. And we're losing.