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By Smallbones

An anniversary hit us right between the eyes just before deadline: June 16 marks the fifth anniversary of the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) changing its terms of use to ban undeclared paid editing.

This Tuesday, Ad Age revealed that employees of Leo Burnett Tailor Made replaced photos in Wikipedia articles on a dozen national parks and similar sites, with photos of the same sites featuring models wearing clothing from The North Face, complete with the company's logo. The employees who replaced the photos did not declare their paid status on Wikipedia. They violated Wikipedia policies that prohibit advertising, marketing, promotion, and public relations content, as well as the WMF's terms of use. I am not a lawyer, but it looks like they also violated the Federal Trade Commission's rules against deceptive advertising.

The undeclared paid editors then bragged about it in a video now posted on Ad Age. Other news coverage that includes the video are "North Face tried to scam Wikipedia to get its products to the top of Google search" in The Verge and "Wikipedia is mad at The North Face for 'unethically' manipulating pages" in Dazed. The WMF reacted quickly and appropriately with "Let's talk about The North Face defacing Wikipedia".

The North Face's paid editors were honest to the extent that their intentions as stated in the video were perfectly clear. They wanted to use Wikipedia – while avoiding the scrutiny of Wikipedia's editors and administrators – to reach the top of Google searches for images of those outdoor sites for marketing purposes.

They were not honest when they said that they were "collaborating with Wikipedia".

Ad Age, in a new story, reports that The North Face has apologized via twitter:

"We believe deeply in Wikipedia's mission and integrity – and apologise for engaging in activity inconsistent with those principles. Effective immediately, we have ended the campaign and moving forward, we'll strive to do better and commit to ensuring that our teams and vendors are better trained on Wikipedia's site policies."

We hope to hear more from The North Face.

To mark the fifth anniversary of the terms of use change that banned undeclared paid editing, the next issue of The Signpost will focus on how paid editing affects our encyclopedia. We want to hear from editors, administrators, arbitrators, bureaucrats, WMF employees and board members. We want to hear from all sides of the issue, including those who oppose paid editing, those who support it, and paid editors – both declared and undeclared. And most of all we want to hear from ordinary Wikipedia editors.

We also invite The North Face to publish an apology here, addressed directly to Wikipedia editors and readers.

We want to know how to fix a system of dealing with paid editors that has not been working very well. We want to know:

  • How paid editing affects your work on Wikipedia.
  • Has the ban on undeclared paid editing affected your ability to add encyclopedic information?
  • Have you interacted with paid editors? How effective has it been?
  • What are your ideas on solving the problem?

Send article length submissions to Signpost/Newsroom/Submissions. If you want to simply write a paragraph, please add it to the comments below. If you want to submit material confidentially, please email me directly.

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I'm still waiting on a steward to act on my request at Steward requests/Global... The accounts of the users who did this still aren't locked.. –MJL ‐Talk‐☖ 02:17, 31 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

@MJL: thanks for working on the case. I suppose this is fast breaking news, so the stewards haven't seen all the evidence yet, but it would be hard for them to miss this with all the on- and off-wiki evidence. Smallbones(smalltalk) 02:29, 31 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]
@Smallbones: [Thank you for the ping] Considering all that is linked in the request... I am of the belief no one wants to be the one to actually to pull the trigger. It's a little controversial over at Commons right now. –MJL ‐Talk‐☖ 02:37, 31 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]
It looks like 13 accounts, some quite old, have now been globally locked [1] Smallbones(smalltalk) 00:49, 5 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • This makes me so irate. I thought North Face's ad agency was just adding some photos into articles until an editor showed how they had photoshopped in some of their products into otherwise beautiful photographs. I think that paid editors can work ethically on Wikipedia if they abide by the rules and don't try to sneak in surreptitious plugs for products. I think that we were lucky they were so oblivious and bragged about their act so it was easy to find out about and address. I think if this happens again, the marketing agencies won't be so stupid as to admit what they were doing. This will require more vigilance from us all. Liz Read! Talk! 02:43, 31 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • It's not clear from the Signpost article whether these images were copyright/license violations themselves (in addition to their uploading and use in articles violating PAID policy). From the deletion logs and global-lock request it seems like they were, which is a whole additional can of worms that I think should be highlighted as well. DMacks (talk) 03:07, 31 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]
    I wonder if we could slap them with a copyright suit. Daß Wölf 21:22, 31 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Thanks to the editors who first caught this and realized the trickery in progress. And yes, North Face should apologize on behalf of their company. Randy Kryn (talk) 03:18, 31 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Irony: Under the "all publicity is good publicity" maxim it's likely that the coverage of this incident in the media, and indeed right here in the Signpost, will end up being better advertising for TNF than the original photos themselves...  — Amakuru (talk) 08:20, 31 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]
    There's a limit to how far that maxim goes; being more familiar TNF and also hating it is not likely to cause Wikipedians to buy their stuff. Per the marketing expert quoted by the NYT's article, the stunt was "wildly misguided" and "They completely, absolutely, egregiously violated just about every principle you can think about with respect to trying to maintain consumer trust." - Sdkb (talk) 17:41, 31 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Someone has added a see-also link to the incident to The North Face's page, - it could use writing into a proper section since there is now proper coverage. I'd do it but I suspect I'm too annoyed at this moment in time. Even neutrally written it should act as an ongoing piece of negative coverage. Nosebagbear (talk) 10:06, 31 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]
    No, that would be WP:UNDUE. I'm not even sure what purpose the see also link serves. This isn't really an important thing in a summary of The North Face.  — Amakuru (talk) 11:58, 31 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]
    @Amakuru: - I don't see how a few lines would be UNDUE - a quick look at the first page of a google search shows 12 articles on it, 9 of which are reliable sources, including the NYT, BBC, Guardian and Drum) Nosebagbear (talk) 22:19, 1 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]
    @Nosebagbear: well what we have now is not just a few lines, but an entire section, which by my calculation is occupying around 31% of the whole article. And this for a company that has existed since 1968. Perhaps it is a bigger story for them than I had first thought, there is a bit of coverage here and there, but I imagine it will blow over and to have this huge section looks like both WP:RECENTISM and WP:NAVEL to me. Thanks  — Amakuru (talk) 22:26, 1 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]
The North Face could use a major expansion, since it was barely longer than The South Butt before the controversy was added. The section could be trimmed a bit but it's about what I would expect if the rest of the article were fully developed. –dlthewave ☎ 22:54, 1 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Now there's a section it's reasonable. Personally I think one or two of the lines provided by them might be worth including, but the % coverage is relatively good. Nosebagbear (talk) 20:22, 2 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • A popular saying in my language goes "cheap things will always turn out expensive"; as a buisness administration student with a enthusiasm on companies and marketing I hate instances like this because it just mislead people to think companies are greedy. -Gouleg (Talk • Contribs) 13:43, 31 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]
    There's nothing misleading about the idea that companies are greedy. Boing! said Zebedee (talk) 14:42, 31 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]
    ^^^. Sdkb (talk) 17:35, 31 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • One group of perfectly legal Paid Editors have very sucessfully managed to control pages like Kosmos Energy. Their stratergy is nicely asking form multiple edit request. It basically whitewashed the entire article. User:16912 Rhiannon and his co workers at Beutler Ink have been very busy working below the rader. --Salix alba (talk): 17:23, 31 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • North Face should donate money to apologize Forgiveness is not for sale, and there is no price to pay to make up for intentional wrongdoing, but I do think it would be an appropriate show of goodwill and a fitting apology if North Face would make a financial donation to the Wikipedia community of editors to protect its integrity. Words are fine but they went in their direction by leveraging their financial power to hire people to deceive the volunteer community of editors and Wikipedia's readers. It would be proper for them to donate money to the Wikipedia community to develop infrastructure to help prevent others from replicating what they did. Their offense is against Wikipedia's community of editors and readers. Personally, I think it would be appropriate to start a conversation with them donating to wiki community moderation approximately the same amount of money as they spent on the ad campaign. Blue Rasberry (talk) 18:21, 31 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]
I fully understand the value that a donation from TNF would bring - talk is cheap, an apology is nice, but actions speak louder than words. OTOH, there is a downside to asking for a donation. Talk is cheap, but so is a million dollar donation for a company that size. The real nasty downside is that somebody would almost inevitably take a request for $1 million (or whatever amount) as being some form of extortion, something like "you don't pay us, we'll drag your name through the mud until you do." Unfortunately, some non-profits have acted that way in the past, and also some CEOs could, in good faith, misinterpret our motives.
So what would speak louder than money? Some sort of commitment on their part to address the problem in a creative way. The creative part dictates that they'd have to think of it themselves, but here are a few thing that might point them in the right direction.
  • Forming a "Corporate friends of Wikipedia" not to donate money but to get businesses involved in suggesting ad agencies to avoid, or photos and records they might donate to Commons or WikiSource, or writing a general code of practice in business's dealings with Wikipedia. Recruit other businesses into "CFW"
  • In their non-Wiki corporate charity work, e.g. with GLAMS, orchestras, athletic events (5Ks and the like), parks and natural sites, suggest a Wiki component to the activities funded. The Wiki component might be a photo contest (without logos!), an edit-a-thon, or some other educational component that might be tied to Wikipedia.
Money might leave a bad taste in everybody's mouth, but a commitment to engage in Wiki-friendly activities could help everybody. Smallbones(smalltalk) 19:52, 31 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Or the money should be spent on improving our anti-spam tools, which are unfit for purpose. MER-C 20:12, 31 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Good idea. Smallbones(smalltalk) 20:19, 31 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • This kind of subversive action is what makes me tempted to support an outright ban on all paid editing. However, Smallbones's suggestion about an encouragement of corporate "Wiki-friendly activities" is a good one, and the proposal of a "Corporate friends of Wikipedia" is a particularly creative idea. Since North Face has proven they have the resources to send professional photographers to exotic natural landmarks, I think an apt form of apology would be if they had said photographers take good photos of such places—without the advertising—and donate them to Wikimedia Commons. We would get good content, and they would get to say that they are promoting awareness around the great outdoors, something which they already say they care about. It would be a win-win. -Indy beetle (talk) 20:53, 31 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]
@Indy beetle: I would prefer them doing the Material on this page is licensed CC-BY-SA 4.0-thing for their website that Smallbones talked about here for baseball companies. They could also create an internal company policy for any future editing that occurs on company time or propriety. What I mean to say is, asking them to create to list themselves at WP:SIP and creating an Incident Response Team would go a long way to towards committing themselves to best practices. naming and firing the people responsible wouldn't hurt as well... just saying.–MJL ‐Talk‐☖ 21:34, 31 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • I don't remember the details, but there was a public relations code of conduct regarding Wikipedia at one point that got a lot of attention. If North Face were to lead on creating a corporate code of conduct regarding Wikipedia that they would adhere to and encourage fellow corporations to adhere to, that would be a good move on their part. SchreiberBike | ⌨  21:30, 31 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]
    @SchreiberBike: you might be interested in my response above. –MJL ‐Talk‐☖ 21:35, 31 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • For most difficult-to-solve problems there is a simple, obvious solution that does not work. This is one of those problems. Everyone who talks about changing some rule to make it so that what North Face did would be forbidden misses the fact that what North Face did was already forbidden. New ways to detect new and innovative advertising techniques will help. New rules, not so much. So lets look at it from another perspective: You are a company that wants a better presence on Wikipedia. You know nothing about Wikipedia's rules or the harm that will come to your reputation if you hire an unethical undisclosed paid editor and it comes out in the press. So how do we at Wikipedia get you, the business owner, in contact with an ethical consultant who will honestly tell you what can't be done (PR, whitewashing by your employees) what can be done (adding information that is missing even though well sourced and relevant simple because nobody cared enough to add it, removing obvious lies added by your competitors or disgruntled ex-employees, fixing obvious errors like not listing the new CEO you got five years ago or listing a discontinued product as current) and who always follows Wikipedia:Best practices for editors with close associations to the letter? How do we get the "hire the sleazeballs and you get hurt, hire the ethical consultant and you won't get even half of what you want but you will get an improved article on Wikipedia" message to these business owners in Wikipedia's voice? Can we create a list of declared ethical paid editors who we have never caught cheating or hiding their activities, ever? How do we make it super easy for the business owner to do the right thing? --Guy Macon (talk) 17:47, 1 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]
    • That list already exists and I am the de facto curator. But it wasn't created as a how-to for corporations looking to "manage their Internet presence" or whatever euphemism. ☆ Bri (talk) 22:11, 1 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]
      • Then we need something that is, and we need a way to get its existence into the minds of the business owners. "Managing their Internet presence" isn't a euphemism. It is something that businesses -- including a certain non-profit business called The Wikimedia Foundation -- have to do now. I know that some here are very much anti-business, but do we really expect a business owner to sit and do nothing as some idiot makes it so that Wikipedia contains lies about them and nobody bothers to fix it? We need to help the ethical business owner to [A] recognize what is ethical on Wikipedia and what is cheating, and [B] tell the difference between the sellers of sleaze paid editing services and full disclosure paid editors who follow the rules. --Guy Macon (talk) 06:13, 2 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]
        • I agree that it would be useful to improve the process by which a non-tech savvy business owner can correct errors and out-of-date information. For this particular situation, though, I don't think it would have helped. The company treated Wikipedia as just another search engine optimization target. An ethical consultant isn't required to know that inserting your branding into an encyclopedia (and then bragging about it) is poor behaviour. isaacl (talk) 06:27, 2 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • I took a look at the images before they were deleted. Some of them were easily salvageable with minimal cropping (one had a small black backpack with North Face logo at the very bottom of the image) and most of them can be reused with copious cropping. They were deleted because there's question over authorship and copyright. But if the authorship is established (and I think it has been, based on news release), I think the images (with advertising cropped out) can be reused. So I echo with Smallbones' views about reusing the images they uploaded, but we can do the cropping on a volunteer-basis to shield WMF away from being viewed as an "office action". OhanaUnitedTalk page 22:09, 1 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Paid editing really affects my livelihood ... I'm not getting paid enough! Us Paid Editors™ need to form a union to demand equality and a raise. Seriously, you think pre-teens and high-school students added all this content? GUYWAN ( t · c ) 23:50, 1 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Warning: Invisible elephants in the room?:
  • My first potential invisible elephant is the unmentioned disappearance of our usual Humour article. Two months ago the Humour article got blanked (with my support, incidentally) after being deemed offensive to transsexuals. Last month's editorial mentioned that dispute, and got some flak for what it said about it. This month we have no Humour article, and seemingly no mention of this in the editorial, so instead I seemingly end up having to post this brief comment about this rather strange state of affairs in the middle of yet another discussion of paid editing. On the other hand, my thanks to GUYWAN, for their above comment that seems to be trying to fill the void created by the disappearance of the Humour piece, even if I can't entirely avoid wondering whether this just might be a case of 'many a true word is spoken in jest'.
  • My second potential invisible elephant is this: Including this editorial, we have no fewer than 3 major items about paid editing in this issue. I'd rather like to see some clear explanation in this editorial as to why this should be the case, so this seeming absence counts as my second invisible elephant. Admittedly, as with some of the other potential elephants here, there might conceivably be a sensible explanation hidden away in there somewhere (for example, to give a speculation obviously far too implausible to be believable, one might find a claim that an anniversary next month of a historic vote to introduce a self-evidently unenforceable ban requires 3 articles this month), but if life is far too short to be wasted on wild goose chases, then it is presumably not long enough to be wasted on invisible elephant chases either.
  • My third potential invisible elephant is the community's strange apparent belief in apparent fairy tales about Wikipedia being almost entirely created by an army of totally pure and unsullied and objective amateur editors. I am of course one of the arguably foolish and/or deluded members of that army (as a look at my relatively unproductive rate of editing would indeed suggest ), and it is presumably a grave violation of WP:AGF and WP:NPA for any editor to publicly doubt this (indeed even to doubt it solely in the secrecy of one's inner soul would seem to be a violation of WP:AGF ). But common sense suggests that vast numbers of Wikipedia pages have been largely created by various kinds of vested interests (including paid editors, but not confined to them), and that there is no way of preventing this, and it's not particularly obvious that it would be desirable to prevent it were that possible (since it's not obviously desirable to lose all the pages they have created), provided the editors do a competent job, including trying to ensure that the resulting articles are not counter-productively overtly POV.
  • My fourth invisible elephant is our ignoring here the apparent logical impossibility of knowing how we've been affected by paid editing when we have no way of knowing whether the editors who are making our life a misery are doing so because they are secretly being paid, or because they are doing so for other reasons (and of course seemingly necessary rules like WP:AGF and WP:NPA make it almost impossible to even raise the issue in any particular case).
  • And quite likely there are a few more potential invisible elephants that I've just been too blind to notice. Tlhslobus (talk) 02:15, 3 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • One solution is to discourage search engines from giving Wikipedia articles a "rankings boost" compared to the exact same content appearing on a random blog merely because it is on Wikipedia. davidwr/(talk)/(contribs) 19:54, 13 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • What we need are some regular down to earth chubby Wikipedia editors willing to take and upload photos involving North Face products. Companies pay a pretty penny to have models model their products, so ordinary people modelling their products should be like putting their tongue to the hot iron. Wnt (talk) 12:00, 27 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]


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