17 ms·

How paid Wikipedia editors squeeze you dry

197 points by akolbe 3y ago

sufehmi 3y ago
If you're willing to cause damage to a very useful resource like Wikipedia just to sell something - then you deserve to be scammed.
precompute 3y ago
I, in my naivete, after reading the title, thought wikipedia had started paying long-term editors for their work. Apparently not. I guess $250MM isn't enough to pay the people that maintain the website.
- ProllyInfamous 3y ago
  >I guess $250MM isn't enough to pay the people that maintain the website. We do this not because it's easy, but because we can. —A 20-Year Wikipedian
- jampekka 3y ago
  Getting pay involved tends to ruin volunteer organizations. Greed is not good.
jokoon 3y ago
I don't understand why some people like to criticize the reputation of wikipedia. Wikipedia is not perfect, but their process is quite mature and robust. I even read people saying wikipedia is politicized.
- cxr 3y ago
  > Wikipedia is not perfect, but their process is quite mature and robust. Wikipedia's processes are anything but. It almost feels like it's less mature now than it was 10 years ago. I've seen this with other communities where people move on and the only people left are disproportionately made up of mediocre Peter principle-proving folks who see it as a comfortable and insular hobby where seniority/tenure trumps everything else.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago
  I'm convinced it's attacked by bad-actors because there are few sites that respect the user as much as Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_Wikipedia
2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago
Wikipedia is a treasure. Free to use, no cookie banner, fast, and no account required. It is refreshing compared to the rest of the internet that trends towards maximum extraction.
gn4d 3y ago
Nation-state actors on Wikipedia which hide behind the byzantine rules and regulations on the site are a far worse problem, imho. I think Wikipedia is still the best tool for information on the net, if the user approaches it with a critical mind, check sources (which a frightening number of times say the exact opposite of what was included in the article!), and check Talk and revision history pages. But, I would bet that most people do not approach Wikipedia in this manner. Furthermore, Wikipedia is used to train LLMs, and the problem compounds via citogenesis. If you spend time editing Wikipedia a decent amount, you will see the same groups of moderators and actors which rapidly alter certain types of articles to fit particular metanarratvies. Anyone who points this out will get revdel'd, which means that non-admins can't even see what happened. revdelling is supposed to be reserved for doxing and serious matters, but when you see it abused with your own eyes by the same users working in tandem with mods (I am talking within 3-4 minutes of a controversial post going live), then I guarantee you will never look at Wikipedia the same way again. There are obvious nation-state actors acting out in the open, running automated software (dozens of edits across pages within minutes) without an authorized bot, and they are allied with particular circles of mods who are on the same payroll. If any other user attempts even a mere fraction of a percentage of the biased and violative TOS activity in which they engage, you will get revdel'd and/or have your account banhammered.
quatrefoil 3y ago
Although Wikipedia admins are generally pretty diligent about vanity articles about firms or individuals, anecdotally, I think people have a lot more luck astroturfing within legitimate articles. There are so many niche articles about some general concept with a weird section plugging an obscure product toward the end.
Smoosh 3y ago
Perhaps I’m just getting old and weary and the scales are falling from my eyes, but the number of assholes in the world who are willing to destroy some valuable resource or community for a small benefit to themselves seems to be increasing, and also increasing their efforts and their effectiveness.
- Y_Y 3y ago
  The commons needs more tragedy!
- jfengel 3y ago
  You should take some pride that you made it this far. The world is just chock full of assholes, and for the most part the best you can hope for is to not notice. A weird kind of solace but I hope it helps a little.
- idiotsecant 3y ago
  No, you and I just had the singular luck to exist at a time where computers were for weirdos, deviants, and dreamers. The internet was full of people who had naive ideas of what it would be used for and built beautiful and horrible things but they were built largely on ideology, not the banal mediocre lukewarm lawful neutral selfish tribal beige tyranny of the rest of the world. The technology is mature enough now that laws and rules and rent seeking and all the old power games are here and and will continue to increase in concentration. At least we got to see something new.
  - alentred 3y ago
    My goodness, you are right. Your comment is like a cold shower, I never thought of it in this way. *We are hippies.* I'll keep being a naive optimist as I am, but this way of thinking offers an important perspective to add some realism to my judgment. Thank you, I mean it.
  - ctrw 3y ago
    You just need to be as disreputable to the current establishment as we were to the previous one. Slap a swastika on it and you'll never have people trying to take over your project. Same way goatse kept the old forums from being overran by normies: https://web.archive.org/web/20040109213953/http://www.goatse.cx/ https://web.archive.org/web/20040109213953/http://www.goatse...
srbloom 3y ago
Maybe all of these victims can get their wish of Wikipedia notoriety on a page called “List of victims of Wikipedia article scams”
gurchik 3y ago
Getting an article created for you or your business is not some mysterious black box. Every article on Wikipedia has to follow WP:NOTE (notability guidelines)[1]. In short, it just means you have to have multiple sources directly about the subject, and these sources are independent from the subject of the article, and the sources are WP:RELIABLE (e.g., from a reputable source like a well known news publisher). The only reason these guidelines exist is because all articles need to have references. No references, no article. The vast majority of deleted articles don't have any references. If you have just a couple references, that article is likely to float around in some gray area for a long time. There are articles on the site only a couple sentences long, but they have notable references, so they can't easily be deleted. People mistakenly think that paying off an administrator is a golden ticket to getting on the site. They misunderstand that the majority of governance on the site is done in public, and often doesn't involve administrators at all. For example, I've been involved in a couple requests for article deletion (sometimes as the person requesting the deletion, sometimes not). In all my experiences, no administrator was involved in the debate. If there are good reasons to delete an article, a bribed administrator will simply be outvoted by the public. ^1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability ^2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources
- alecco 3y ago
  Wikipedia reliable sources list has always very controversial. They used to consider even Buzzfeed (not just BuzfeedNews) as a good reliable source until there was a huge campaign against it. But removing that was a token win in a sea of bias.
- Radim 3y ago
  I don't think WP:NOTE or WP:RELIABLE as such are what ruffles people's feathers. Rather, it's Wikipedia's insistence on pre-chewed secondary sources from legacy media – the roundabout "No original research" policy – which was a questionable (and often questioned) move from the start. Now public trust in corporate news is at a record low [0], for good reasons. Wikipedia simply hitched their "truth and reliability wagon" to a dying horse, and the chicken are coming home to roost. [0] https://fortune.com/2023/02/15/trust-in-media-low-misinform-mislead-biased-republicans-democrats-poll-gallup/ https://fortune.com/2023/02/15/trust-in-media-low-misinform-...
Animats 3y ago
It's great to see an article about spam where the spammers are losing and their customers are victims. I used to spend a lot of time working on the Wikipedia conflict of interest notice board, [WP:COIN]. Hate mail. One lawsuit. Here's my essay on that.[1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Hints_on_dealing_with_conflict_of_interest_problems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Hints_on_dealing_wit...
redundantly 3y ago
> These customers include many small businesses... a private detective agency... That's just plain funny right there.
1905 3y ago
Wikimedia is about as unbiased as a legacy media news outlet. Every major issue on wiki has some kind of narrative slant
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago
  What is your alternative?
- eimrine 3y ago
  The George Bush wiki page has the biggest number of edits, isn't it an example of how the appropriate narrative happens?
  - sokoloff 3y ago
    Biggest number of edits could mean “exhaustively converged on the truth” or could mean “best funded and/or most doggedly persistent wins”.
emodendroket 3y ago
I don't doubt this kind of scam is happening. But I think it stretches credibility to say that there aren't many more people successfully paying to make Wikipedia articles more to their liking.
charcircuit 3y ago
>The volunteer community is extremely diligent about finding and deleting any promotional material that marketing companies try to post on Wikipedia. I think it's much more common for me to see articles that do the opposite. They take some article, find some negative news article and write about them in the Wikipedia article. Especially for small communities where there are no notable publications except for major drama, it pretty much means that the Wikipedia article is going to highlight the negative side of the community even if that isn't actually representative of what the community is actually about.
- cuu508 3y ago
  Can you point to a few specific examples? Are there signs this is targetted, and done maliciously? I have not previously noticed/recogmized articles like this, and am asking out of curiosity.
  - charcircuit 3y ago
    I would rather not as they are seen as controversial to outsiders since outsiders have probably only heard of them due to the drama. The common theme of these articles is that if you go to their wikipedia page and go to the very first revision you will see that the article was made to document a controversy. I don't think it's necessarily the person writing the wikipedia page malicious, but it creates a reinforcing cycle where journalists don't know what XYZ is so the Google it, get the wikipedia page Since wikipedia ranks highly, then see a bunch of controversial stuff, and then propagate that more. Similar with average people wondering what it is. Personally, I don't like controversy sections in wikipedia article as the way wikipedia works does not make them work well. Good luck trying to correct misinformation while simultaneously following wikipedia's rules as you can't correct misinformation yourself.
    - denton-scratch 3y ago
      > you can't correct misinformation yourself Huh? Do you mean "you can't correct misinformation about yourself? Who do you think is allowed to correct misinformation?
palmfacehn 3y ago
Wikipedia as an institution, their insider-only ways, byzantine guidelines and more all incentivize this kind of abuse. There's a pessimistic comment on this page observing, "The world is just chock full of assholes..". Wikipedia editors are not exempt here. Wikipedia shouldn't be so difficult to edit or highly politicized. There was a time when IP editors made the majority of contributions. Today correcting a typo might trigger a full-time editor to defend his turf. Even asking questions about an uncited assertion on a talk page can be labeled as disruptive. I feel bad for the victims of the scam. It can be hard to edit or correct basic facts. Most business owners don't have time to specialize in Wikipedia lawfare. I have no sympathy for the WMF or the hard-core believers who wrote this expose'. Their policies created opportunities for these scammers to exploit. The fact that they wrote this without an ounce of self-reflection or awareness of the problems is more troubling than the scam itself. Scams will come and go, but we've been stuck with Wikipedia as Google's and therefore the Internet's arbiter of "truthiness" for too long.
- the_gipsy 3y ago
  > Even asking questions about an uncited assertion on a talk page can be labeled as disruptive. From their perspective it's spam. And it seems to work, as in: they have a wikipedia and you can complain but elsewhere.
- jokoon 3y ago
  That's some mid level whataboutism. > the Internet's arbiter of "truthiness" for too long. That's funny how you use a word made popular by Stephen Colbert. Wikipedia is fine. We are not "stuck" with wikipedia, there are alternatives. Wikipedia is a free source of information, with certain rules. It is good enough. > highly politicized You cannot reach perfect objectivity or neutrality. Wikipedia depends on sources. People who attack wikipedia often sound like they have an agenda.
- neurostimulant 3y ago
  Man, you can't even post a comment in the article without knowing how to edit a wiki yourself.
- gurchik 3y ago
tivert 3y ago
> Thanks to the community, paid editing firms rarely succeed in influencing the actual content on Wikipedia. There are paid editing firms that we are aware of with a 0% success rate. That kind of sounds like bragging that they detect 100% of the paid editing they detect.
gksierra 3y ago
For a brief period I considered becoming a private detective. A friend of mine knew I was looking to practice and sent me a photo on Wikipedia that was faked. It claimed to be of private military contractors in an outfit called GK Sierra in one country, but they were actually US soldiers in a different country. I spent a while digging into this company and a couple of related companies. They had edited themselves into Wikipedia articles in small ways over the years, and gotten themselves included in click bait lists of military contractors. They made a half-assed effort to cover this up by changing their Wikipedia user name, but that just creates a different record that was still searchable. There was a Wikipedia article mentioning a rumor they worked for Mossad, but I suspected they were also the source for that rumor. They claimed they worked for the CIA, and they had a real contracting number with the DoD. But I didn't find any evidence these contracts were real, and when I sent a FOIA to the CIA they said the information either didn't exist or was classified. The weirdest thing I noticed was that it had bled into the culture to some extent. People who wanted to give themselves an edgy camo aesthetic would find these click bait articles and vandalized Wikipedia pages and not realize it was a sham - or realized and were doing it ironically, how is one to tell. I saw an admin of some forum who took it as a handle. I saw someone present a military-themed outfit in GTA named after it. Eventually I got to the point where I was gathering more and more evidence and none of it was making any sense, and I realized I was never going to make real headway without finding a way to interview these people. I could see pieces of what they were doing, but as far as why they were doing it, that information just didn't seem to be written down on the Internet. The prospect of flying across the country to try and track down someone who was doing things I couldn't understand wasn't appealing, so I just let it go. As a disclaimer, I'm working off of memory here, some of the details may be wrong. --- Looking back at their deleted Wikipedia page on the Wayback machine, it's all so outlandish that I have to imagine it was an elaborate prank. It's a lot more paperwork than most pranks involve, but I just can't imagine that whoever put this together intended anyone to believe it. Maybe they wanted to see if they could do enough legend building that the Wikipedia mods would have some doubt and keep up the page for a ridiculous hoax? If I was practicing a skill, maybe they were too? Impossible to say.

197 points by akolbe 3y ago

If you're willing to cause damage to a very useful resource like Wikipedia just to sell something - then you deserve to be scammed.

precompute 3y ago

I, in my naivete, after reading the title, thought wikipedia had started paying long-term editors for their work. Apparently not. I guess $250MM isn't enough to pay the people that maintain the website.

ProllyInfamous 3y ago
>I guess $250MM isn't enough to pay the people that maintain the website. We do this not because it's easy, but because we can. —A 20-Year Wikipedian
jampekka 3y ago
Getting pay involved tends to ruin volunteer organizations. Greed is not good.

jokoon 3y ago

I don't understand why some people like to criticize the reputation of wikipedia. Wikipedia is not perfect, but their process is quite mature and robust. I even read people saying wikipedia is politicized.

cxr 3y ago
> Wikipedia is not perfect, but their process is quite mature and robust. Wikipedia's processes are anything but. It almost feels like it's less mature now than it was 10 years ago. I've seen this with other communities where people move on and the only people left are disproportionately made up of mediocre Peter principle-proving folks who see it as a comfortable and insular hobby where seniority/tenure trumps everything else.
2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago
I'm convinced it's attacked by bad-actors because there are few sites that respect the user as much as Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_Wikipedia

2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago

Wikipedia is a treasure. Free to use, no cookie banner, fast, and no account required. It is refreshing compared to the rest of the internet that trends towards maximum extraction.

gn4d 3y ago

Nation-state actors on Wikipedia which hide behind the byzantine rules and regulations on the site are a far worse problem, imho. I think Wikipedia is still the best tool for information on the net, if the user approaches it with a critical mind, check sources (which a frightening number of times say the exact opposite of what was included in the article!), and check Talk and revision history pages. But, I would bet that most people do not approach Wikipedia in this manner. Furthermore, Wikipedia is used to train LLMs, and the problem compounds via citogenesis. If you spend time editing Wikipedia a decent amount, you will see the same groups of moderators and actors which rapidly alter certain types of articles to fit particular metanarratvies. Anyone who points this out will get revdel'd, which means that non-admins can't even see what happened. revdelling is supposed to be reserved for doxing and serious matters, but when you see it abused with your own eyes by the same users working in tandem with mods (I am talking within 3-4 minutes of a controversial post going live), then I guarantee you will never look at Wikipedia the same way again. There are obvious nation-state actors acting out in the open, running automated software (dozens of edits across pages within minutes) without an authorized bot, and they are allied with particular circles of mods who are on the same payroll. If any other user attempts even a mere fraction of a percentage of the biased and violative TOS activity in which they engage, you will get revdel'd and/or have your account banhammered.

quatrefoil 3y ago

Although Wikipedia admins are generally pretty diligent about vanity articles about firms or individuals, anecdotally, I think people have a lot more luck astroturfing within legitimate articles. There are so many niche articles about some general concept with a weird section plugging an obscure product toward the end.

Smoosh 3y ago

Perhaps I’m just getting old and weary and the scales are falling from my eyes, but the number of assholes in the world who are willing to destroy some valuable resource or community for a small benefit to themselves seems to be increasing, and also increasing their efforts and their effectiveness.

Y_Y 3y ago
The commons needs more tragedy!
jfengel 3y ago
You should take some pride that you made it this far. The world is just chock full of assholes, and for the most part the best you can hope for is to not notice. A weird kind of solace but I hope it helps a little.
idiotsecant 3y ago
No, you and I just had the singular luck to exist at a time where computers were for weirdos, deviants, and dreamers. The internet was full of people who had naive ideas of what it would be used for and built beautiful and horrible things but they were built largely on ideology, not the banal mediocre lukewarm lawful neutral selfish tribal beige tyranny of the rest of the world. The technology is mature enough now that laws and rules and rent seeking and all the old power games are here and and will continue to increase in concentration. At least we got to see something new.
- alentred 3y ago
  My goodness, you are right. Your comment is like a cold shower, I never thought of it in this way. *We are hippies.* I'll keep being a naive optimist as I am, but this way of thinking offers an important perspective to add some realism to my judgment. Thank you, I mean it.
- ctrw 3y ago
  You just need to be as disreputable to the current establishment as we were to the previous one. Slap a swastika on it and you'll never have people trying to take over your project. Same way goatse kept the old forums from being overran by normies: https://web.archive.org/web/20040109213953/http://www.goatse.cx/ https://web.archive.org/web/20040109213953/http://www.goatse...

srbloom 3y ago

Maybe all of these victims can get their wish of Wikipedia notoriety on a page called “List of victims of Wikipedia article scams”

gurchik 3y ago

Getting an article created for you or your business is not some mysterious black box. Every article on Wikipedia has to follow WP:NOTE (notability guidelines)[1]. In short, it just means you have to have multiple sources directly about the subject, and these sources are independent from the subject of the article, and the sources are WP:RELIABLE (e.g., from a reputable source like a well known news publisher). The only reason these guidelines exist is because all articles need to have references. No references, no article. The vast majority of deleted articles don't have any references. If you have just a couple references, that article is likely to float around in some gray area for a long time. There are articles on the site only a couple sentences long, but they have notable references, so they can't easily be deleted. People mistakenly think that paying off an administrator is a golden ticket to getting on the site. They misunderstand that the majority of governance on the site is done in public, and often doesn't involve administrators at all. For example, I've been involved in a couple requests for article deletion (sometimes as the person requesting the deletion, sometimes not). In all my experiences, no administrator was involved in the debate. If there are good reasons to delete an article, a bribed administrator will simply be outvoted by the public. ^1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability ^2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources

alecco 3y ago
Wikipedia reliable sources list has always very controversial. They used to consider even Buzzfeed (not just BuzfeedNews) as a good reliable source until there was a huge campaign against it. But removing that was a token win in a sea of bias.
Radim 3y ago
I don't think WP:NOTE or WP:RELIABLE as such are what ruffles people's feathers. Rather, it's Wikipedia's insistence on pre-chewed secondary sources from legacy media – the roundabout "No original research" policy – which was a questionable (and often questioned) move from the start. Now public trust in corporate news is at a record low [0], for good reasons. Wikipedia simply hitched their "truth and reliability wagon" to a dying horse, and the chicken are coming home to roost. [0] https://fortune.com/2023/02/15/trust-in-media-low-misinform-mislead-biased-republicans-democrats-poll-gallup/ https://fortune.com/2023/02/15/trust-in-media-low-misinform-...

Animats 3y ago

It's great to see an article about spam where the spammers are losing and their customers are victims. I used to spend a lot of time working on the Wikipedia conflict of interest notice board, [WP:COIN]. Hate mail. One lawsuit. Here's my essay on that.[1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Hints_on_dealing_with_conflict_of_interest_problems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Hints_on_dealing_wit...

redundantly 3y ago

> These customers include many small businesses... a private detective agency... That's just plain funny right there.

1905 3y ago

Wikimedia is about as unbiased as a legacy media news outlet. Every major issue on wiki has some kind of narrative slant

2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago
What is your alternative?
eimrine 3y ago
The George Bush wiki page has the biggest number of edits, isn't it an example of how the appropriate narrative happens?
- sokoloff 3y ago
  Biggest number of edits could mean “exhaustively converged on the truth” or could mean “best funded and/or most doggedly persistent wins”.

emodendroket 3y ago

I don't doubt this kind of scam is happening. But I think it stretches credibility to say that there aren't many more people successfully paying to make Wikipedia articles more to their liking.

charcircuit 3y ago

>The volunteer community is extremely diligent about finding and deleting any promotional material that marketing companies try to post on Wikipedia. I think it's much more common for me to see articles that do the opposite. They take some article, find some negative news article and write about them in the Wikipedia article. Especially for small communities where there are no notable publications except for major drama, it pretty much means that the Wikipedia article is going to highlight the negative side of the community even if that isn't actually representative of what the community is actually about.

cuu508 3y ago
Can you point to a few specific examples? Are there signs this is targetted, and done maliciously? I have not previously noticed/recogmized articles like this, and am asking out of curiosity.
- charcircuit 3y ago
  I would rather not as they are seen as controversial to outsiders since outsiders have probably only heard of them due to the drama. The common theme of these articles is that if you go to their wikipedia page and go to the very first revision you will see that the article was made to document a controversy. I don't think it's necessarily the person writing the wikipedia page malicious, but it creates a reinforcing cycle where journalists don't know what XYZ is so the Google it, get the wikipedia page Since wikipedia ranks highly, then see a bunch of controversial stuff, and then propagate that more. Similar with average people wondering what it is. Personally, I don't like controversy sections in wikipedia article as the way wikipedia works does not make them work well. Good luck trying to correct misinformation while simultaneously following wikipedia's rules as you can't correct misinformation yourself.
  - denton-scratch 3y ago
    > you can't correct misinformation yourself Huh? Do you mean "you can't correct misinformation about yourself? Who do you think is allowed to correct misinformation?

palmfacehn 3y ago

Wikipedia as an institution, their insider-only ways, byzantine guidelines and more all incentivize this kind of abuse. There's a pessimistic comment on this page observing, "The world is just chock full of assholes..". Wikipedia editors are not exempt here. Wikipedia shouldn't be so difficult to edit or highly politicized. There was a time when IP editors made the majority of contributions. Today correcting a typo might trigger a full-time editor to defend his turf. Even asking questions about an uncited assertion on a talk page can be labeled as disruptive. I feel bad for the victims of the scam. It can be hard to edit or correct basic facts. Most business owners don't have time to specialize in Wikipedia lawfare. I have no sympathy for the WMF or the hard-core believers who wrote this expose'. Their policies created opportunities for these scammers to exploit. The fact that they wrote this without an ounce of self-reflection or awareness of the problems is more troubling than the scam itself. Scams will come and go, but we've been stuck with Wikipedia as Google's and therefore the Internet's arbiter of "truthiness" for too long.

the_gipsy 3y ago
> Even asking questions about an uncited assertion on a talk page can be labeled as disruptive. From their perspective it's spam. And it seems to work, as in: they have a wikipedia and you can complain but elsewhere.
jokoon 3y ago
That's some mid level whataboutism. > the Internet's arbiter of "truthiness" for too long. That's funny how you use a word made popular by Stephen Colbert. Wikipedia is fine. We are not "stuck" with wikipedia, there are alternatives. Wikipedia is a free source of information, with certain rules. It is good enough. > highly politicized You cannot reach perfect objectivity or neutrality. Wikipedia depends on sources. People who attack wikipedia often sound like they have an agenda.
neurostimulant 3y ago
Man, you can't even post a comment in the article without knowing how to edit a wiki yourself.
gurchik 3y ago

tivert 3y ago

> Thanks to the community, paid editing firms rarely succeed in influencing the actual content on Wikipedia. There are paid editing firms that we are aware of with a 0% success rate. That kind of sounds like bragging that they detect 100% of the paid editing they detect.

gksierra 3y ago

For a brief period I considered becoming a private detective. A friend of mine knew I was looking to practice and sent me a photo on Wikipedia that was faked. It claimed to be of private military contractors in an outfit called GK Sierra in one country, but they were actually US soldiers in a different country. I spent a while digging into this company and a couple of related companies. They had edited themselves into Wikipedia articles in small ways over the years, and gotten themselves included in click bait lists of military contractors. They made a half-assed effort to cover this up by changing their Wikipedia user name, but that just creates a different record that was still searchable. There was a Wikipedia article mentioning a rumor they worked for Mossad, but I suspected they were also the source for that rumor. They claimed they worked for the CIA, and they had a real contracting number with the DoD. But I didn't find any evidence these contracts were real, and when I sent a FOIA to the CIA they said the information either didn't exist or was classified. The weirdest thing I noticed was that it had bled into the culture to some extent. People who wanted to give themselves an edgy camo aesthetic would find these click bait articles and vandalized Wikipedia pages and not realize it was a sham - or realized and were doing it ironically, how is one to tell. I saw an admin of some forum who took it as a handle. I saw someone present a military-themed outfit in GTA named after it. Eventually I got to the point where I was gathering more and more evidence and none of it was making any sense, and I realized I was never going to make real headway without finding a way to interview these people. I could see pieces of what they were doing, but as far as why they were doing it, that information just didn't seem to be written down on the Internet. The prospect of flying across the country to try and track down someone who was doing things I couldn't understand wasn't appealing, so I just let it go. As a disclaimer, I'm working off of memory here, some of the details may be wrong. --- Looking back at their deleted Wikipedia page on the Wayback machine, it's all so outlandish that I have to imagine it was an elaborate prank. It's a lot more paperwork than most pranks involve, but I just can't imagine that whoever put this together intended anyone to believe it. Maybe they wanted to see if they could do enough legend building that the Wikipedia mods would have some doubt and keep up the page for a ridiculous hoax? If I was practicing a skill, maybe they were too? Impossible to say.