Decades ago, when Wikipedia was making its transition from a for-profit venture owned by a web portal company called Bomis, which peddled early Internet content (including soft porn), few would have considered its content valuable in any real sense. Today, however, a Wikipedia article is a mark of high distinction, signaling a level of status and credibility that’s impossible to buy — almost.

Over the past two decades, as Wikipedia rose to the fourth most visited site online, a boomtown industry feeding an insatiable demand for services like article creation, editing, management and deletion has emerged. While the Wikipedia community, along with the Wikimedia Foundation, work to fight illicit “black hat” editing with undisclosed conflicts of interest, it’s a losing battle, with a seemingly unlimited supply of new front companies springing up to replace editor accounts and companies that get banned from the site.

But the white hat vs. black hat distinction — white-hat editing abides by the site’s regulations, like disclosing paid interests and not making direct edits to articles — sidesteps the real point: given the sheer scale of paid editing on Wikipedia, there’s a reasonable likelihood that any article with even the most remote economic interest will eventually be shaped by the entity that stands to benefit. The question this leaves us asking is whether we can really apply the historic term “encyclopedia” to a sprawling network of thousands of articles carefully pruned by the PR departments of billion dollar companies, or if Wikipedia is something else entirely.

In Wikipedia lore, the practice of paid editing began around 2006 with an editor named Gregory Kohs who started MyWikiBiz, which created articles on behalf of companies in exchange for payment. “It is strange that a minor Pokémon character will get a 1,200-word article, but a Fortune 500 company will get ... maybe 100 words,” Kohs said at the time, noting the legions of editors often devoted to niche topics but who displayed almost total indifference to corporate issues. Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales personally called Kohs and told him MyWikiBiz was “antithetical” to Wikipedia’s values, even though Kohs openly identified himself as a paid editor associated with specific clients. Ultimately, Wales permanently banned Kohs from the site, leading him to shutter MyWikiBiz.

In retrospect, the Kohs affair seems quaint. Today, Wikipedia’s list of black-hat editors includes over 200 companies, many of which operate dozens of front companies and subsidiary brands. One of the biggest and highest-profile is Abtach, a Pakistani firm founded in 2015 linked to an IT company called Intermarket Group. On Wikipedia, Abtach has been tied to at least 130 different Wikipedia editing front companies that operate under domains like Wikicreatorsinc.com, Wikicreation.services, Wikipedia Pro, Wikipedia Legends, and USAwikispecialists.com. Alongside its Wikipedia activities, Abtach’s owners run a parallel business selling low-cost trademark applications under names like Trademark Terminal, Trademark Eminent, Trademark Excel and more than a dozen others. In 2022, the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) found that firms tied to Abtach had defrauded customers, in some cases by billing them for multiple filings when only one single-class trademark was filed. USPTO invalidated 5,500 trademarks as a result of the investigation and Google banned the companies from advertising. The previous year, the Federal Investigation Agency, Pakistan’s equivalent to the FBI, investigated the company for criminal fraud.

While Abtach may have pushed the boundaries farther than most, there are hundreds of Abtach-like companies out there — many based in Pakistan, India and Ukraine, but some of the longest standing and most impactful in the UK, Switzerland, France, Spain and the US — each with a profusion of front sites and domains ready to slurp up overflowing demand. Most of what these black hat firms offer is a kind of blunt-force approach to reputation management. For $1,200 to $1,500, they promise to create a Wikipedia article about you or your company. The process will take around a week (or so you’ll be told) with half the payment made up front and the other half upon completion. Payments are usually made in the form of bank wires, which are much more difficult to reverse than credit card charges. Frequently, the newly created article will be taken down by Wikipedia community editors patrolling for articles that don’t meet the site’s notability threshold. In some of these cases, black-hat companies will demand further payment to get the article back up, forcing clients to double the $1,500 investment, then triple it, etc.

And customers will continue to pay. As a result, Wikipedia houses thousands upon thousands of articles on subjects like British investment immigration consultancies, Canadian frozen foods producers, cellulite-busting self-massage accessories, custom T-shirt retailers, Swedish online travel agencies, German disinfectant brands (“for external use only”), industrial waste management companies, RegTech software firms, and virtually every other type of garden variety corporate mush. If you want to know the history of “an American diversified corporation focused primarily on the natural gas industry, and headquartered in Tulsa, Oklahoma,” you can. Curious about a defunct Milwaukee tannery? You’re covered. Packaging producers, electronic device recyclers, self-storage chains — it’s all there in drab abundance.

While the low end of the paid editing market offers article creation for a few thousand dollars, the market scales up — way up. In 2015, LA-based publicity firm Sunshine Sacks was caught editing articles on behalf of A-list clients like Naomi Campbell, Mia Farrow and Sara Brightman. Four years before that, a now defunct UK-based PR firm called Bell Pottinger was caught making hundreds of edits for its clients, a service the company described as ranking among its “dark arts.” Paris-based Publicis Groupe, one of the world’s biggest advertising and PR companies, was found operating an extensive network of sock puppets — Wikipedia editor accounts operated by other accounts in coordinated efforts to manipulate content — tied to IP addresses that traced back to Publicis’ offices. While one such account was busy editing pages on a variety of random topics, including M*A*S*H*, the Lithuanian men’s basketball team, and the concept of eternal inflation, it also spent disproportionate effort on the article for Leo Burnett Worldwide, a Publicis subsidiary. Evidently emboldened by their experience, in 2019 a subsidiary of a Publicis subsidiary launched a campaign for North Face that replaced images on the articles of notable outdoor sites with images of models wearing the brand’s gear.

On the other side of the spectrum, white-hat firms are the K Street lobbyists of the Wikipedia world — and are appropriately scornful of their black-hatted brethren whom they see as the equivalent of editorial ambulance chasers. While the best white-hat firms scrupulously abide by Wikipedia rules, disclosing their affiliation and refraining from making direct edits to their clients’ articles, their impact on the site is far greater since their work, rooted in a skilled application of deep knowledge about Wikipedia and its community, centers on articles of serious economic, political, and cultural import.

The costs for white-hat editing are significant, which leads to the question of whether — and why — it’s worth it. “Wikipedia is very popular for branding,” Mike Wood, founder of a white-hat firm called Legal Morning, told me during a phone interview. “It used to be a very popular marketing tool where you could market yourself, people could see your products and services. It’s no longer like that. I tell clients it’s simply a branding tool where people can go and verify you’re a reputable company or person and they’re probably more likely to want to do business with you than someone who does not.”

In 2014, an editor called CorporateM argued on the Talk page for the article on McKinsey & Co for the addition of a “Notable Works” section and against the inclusion of ties to the rise of Enron. A quick click on CorporateM’s handle reveals the editor to be David King, owner of a white-hat Wikipedia consultancy called Ethical Wiki, which had been hired by McKinsey. King also identified himself as a hired Wikipedia specialist for Bain & Co, Yelp and Yelp’s founder Jeremy Stoppleman, Qualcomm, Kaspersky Lab, software company Forcepoint, the RSA Conference and many others.

While the mainstream media has covered the issue of Wikipedia editing, they have not been immune to its temptations. In 2020, during the lead-up to A.G. Sulzberger — the scion to the Sulzberger dynasty that controls the New York Times — assuming the chairman position at the newspaper, the Times hired one of the first and most highly regarded white-hat Wikipedia firms, Beutler Ink. Readying A.G. for the new post at the height of the #MeToo movement, the firm requested community editors beef up of the section on the incoming chairman’s journalistic experience, including a heroic account of Sulzberger’s time as an intern at the Providence Journal, where he “revealed” a local country club was not open to women. A range of other similar additions were requested — and made — including Sulzberger’s stint at The Oregonian newspaper, “writing more than 300 pieces about local government and public life, including a series of investigative exposés on misconduct by Multnomah County Sheriff Bernie Giusto” — language provided almost verbatim by Beutler Ink.

Curiously, Beutler Ink’s editors fought hardest to have Wikipedia editors amend the styling of Sulzberger’s name from his initials followed by periods with spaces after them, “A. G. Sulzberger,” as is common convention to a more idiosyncratic “A.G. Sulzberger.” (They did not win that fight.) Beutler Ink also requested that the first line of A.G.’s article distance him from his father, the outgoing chairman, by first mentioning his work at the paper before any mention of his father, and wanted editors to remove the statement that Sulzberger and his wife “practice the Jewish faith.”

Amid the transition at the top of the New York Times Company, Beutler Ink was also hard at work on Times executive editor Dean Baquet’s article, successfully petitioning editors to remove a quote by Baquet claiming he identified not as black but as “Creole” by arguing that the source publication, LA Observed, was “not an ideal source.” The agency also submitted fully fleshed-out copy for the article, filling out its sections on “Career” and “Notable Stories,” revamping its “Awards” section from bullet points to lengthier prose, and adding a number of awards that did not previously appear in the section. A Wikipedia editor addressed Beutler Ink’s suggestions by writing, simply: “The Awards section has been updated. ✅ Done.”

The shakeup at the Times was not limited to a new corporate chairman. In the summer of 2020, the company also named a new CEO, Meredith Kopit Levien, who’d previously served as COO. Around six weeks later, Beutler Ink editors began working extensively on the Wikipedia article for Kopit Levien, shaping the content with in-depth, fully written “suggestions” highlighting her professional accomplishments. In one representative edit, a Beutler Ink editor added a sentence regarding her previous position as COO: “In this role, Kopit Levien managed ‘the teams responsible for digital product, design, audience and brand, and consumer revenue and advertising’.”

If the latter phrase is suggestive of an update to a LinkedIn profile, it’s for good reason. In a video interview with me, Beutler Ink founder William Beutler says his 17-person agency, which is mostly focused on Wikipedia services, generally works with the corporate communications departments of the clients they serve. “The majority of our work is for large, mostly American, often multinational [companies],” said Beutler, noting that most of these companies already have articles up but need them modified in some way. Beutler describes these articles as being “underbaked” or out of date. But there is a symbiotic nature to the word. “Volunteer Wikipedia editors are just not that passionate about writing articles about big companies,” Beutler said. They’re just not going to give away their volunteer labor for that. So we fill a gap, a very real gap.”

While Beutler Ink specialists were hard at work on the Times’ Wikipedia articles, a top-tier advertising agency called Droga5 was busy crafting a brand campaign for the Times. In 2018, it had launched a “Truth is Hard” campaign for the paper, the first such brand campaign for the Times in a decade. Now, in 2020, right when the paper was readying to revamp the Wikipedia articles on its three most important executives, the ad agency began rolling out an extension of the New York Times’ “The Truth is Worth It” campaign, this one called “The Truth is Essential.”

There’s more than a flicker of irony in the Times paying a Wikipedia firm to manipulate what are supposed to be community-contributed articles in the internet’s encyclopedia while flogging the idea of capital-t Truth. But for the Times — and countless global brands — Wikipedia is just as important a part of its marketing mix as digital billboards, sponsored TikTok videos and commercials produced by celebrity directors. In many ways, more so. Where else can “encyclopedic” biographies of top company figures like Sulzberger, Baquet and Kopit Levien be shaped by (almost) unseen hands, coordinated to precisely reflect the Truth as envisioned by the New York Times’ comms department?

In this regard, paid Wikipedia manipulation is an almost flawless marketing discipline. It delivers on all fronts, from PR credibility to domain authority to digital reach. It’s why everyone from Indian dramedies to American sound artists to the world’s most powerful newspaper are beating down its door.

Is this antithetical to an “open encyclopedia,” or just a legitimate adaptation in the age of SEO, globalism, and the attention economy? When we think of an encyclopedia — be it Diderot’s enlightenment Encyclopedie, Pliny’s Naturalis Historia, or the leather-bound, gilt-embossed staple of upwardly mobile middle class 1980s America, Encyclopedia Brittanica — what distinguishes the category are two factors: its indexed, catalog-like nature and the significance of its content. There’s no doubt that Wikipedia — crammed with valuable information that is both so deep and so broad it literally cannot be metaphorically represented for the purposes of this sentence — has both. But there is a real risk that the purity of the Wikipedia experiment is being steadily eroded by a cataract of pay-to-play activity.

The list of Beutler Ink’s clients alone reveals the staggering scale of this activity. A small sample includes media executive and Democratic mega donor Jeffrey Katzenberg, Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla, Reddit co-founder Steve Huffman, Simon and Schuster CEO Jonathan Karl and Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks. Corporate clients include Reddit, MetLife, Accenture, Intel, IBM, Hubspot, Hilton, Vox Media, Dick’s Sporting Goods, United Airlines, Amdocs, Gallup, Allergan, Breyers, Vimeo and Waymo.

The PR tactics and marketing KPIs involved are just as diverse. While the New York Times turned to Wikipedia to burnish its brand, NBC News hired a white-hat firm to do damage control during a period of major upheaval. The scandal began when Today show host and media super-star Matt Lauer was abruptly fired in 2017 following serious allegations of sexual misconduct. In October 2019, an excerpt from a book by Ronan Farrow reported shocking details on the allegations, and claims top NBC executives, including NBC News chairman Andrew Lack and president Noah Oppenheim, quashed Farrow’s reporting on the scandal when he was at the network.

The revelations sent NBC into a tailspin. Two weeks after the book excerpt was published, a specialist from a white-hat firm called WhiteHatWiki suggested significant edits to the articles on NBC executive Andy Lack and forcefully pushed back on a claim in the article that Lack had obstructed an NBC News investigation into Harvey Weinstein. In another case, the WhiteHatWiki specialist devoted hundreds of words to refuting the case that Lack sought to minimize allegations against Matt Lauer. The specialist took particular issue with the sentence, “In 2019, investigative journalist Ronan Farrow claimed that Lack downplayed a human resources complaint of rape against Today anchor Matt Lauer,” arguing that it glossed over “nuances,” and proposed replacing it with a 200-word paragraph offering context into Lack’s response to the scandal. (These requests were rejected by editors.)

WhiteHatWiki also worked on NBC president Noah Oppenheim’s Wikipedia page, who had served as senior vice president of the “Today” show. Starting in January 2018, a WhiteHatWiki specialist began requesting extensive edits to the article, including an extension of his professional history and the removal of a section titled “Alleged Misconduct,” which one of the specialists argued was “misleading and highly inflammatory.” The section was eventually removed. The WhiteHatWiki employee argued vociferously to have claims that Oppenheim chose not to publish Farrow’s story removed from the article and substituted with a lengthier paragraph claiming Oppenheim strongly supported Farrow but in the end the story still had “missing gaps,” and including a quote from Oppenheimer saying, “The notion that we would try to cover for a powerful person is deeply offensive to all of us…” Some of these changes were adopted in the article, which presented Oppenheim’s view of the situation, though the latter quote was left out. WhiteHatWiki, which was the subject of a lengthy HuffingtonPost piece in 2019, continued to edit Oppenheim’s article as recently as early 2023 when a specialist requested further updates to the article.

In addition to NBC, WhiteHatWiki has worked with Axios, former Time Magazine editor John Huey, Facebook, Vishva Dixit, a senior executive at Genentech, trading platform Robinhood, Toptal, General Assembly founder Adam Pritzker, Character.ai, UK property platform Nextdoor, and dozens of others.

Paid Wikipedia editing is not going anywhere. For clients, the value is simply too great to resist. The top-tier companies that hire top white-hat firms, which are accustomed to paying upward of $20,000 per month for PR services, do not flinch at the relatively low cost. But the bigger point is that these firms are editing what millions of people see as the truth, precisely because of its crowd-sourced nature.

Paid firms or PR companies doing the heavy lifting of researching and writing suggested changes, and community editors adjudicating (sometimes lightly) and then entering changes into the system represents a fundamental departure from Wikipedia’s mission, and the commonsense understanding of it. In this case, companies have found a loophole to exploit. But, as is so often the case with powerful interests, the widespread use of that loophole has ended up functionally changing the system it’s a part of.

While the practice seems limited to articles on companies, their executives, and their products, it’s possible that economic Wikipedia will slide into the kind of battleground that political Wikipedia already is, with paid editors feuding over the definitions and descriptions of procedures, materials, ideas, concepts and slogans — exactly the same kind of slow warfare that plays out in the marketplace and in civil courtrooms every day. Whether this is a good or bad thing is hard to say. But it’s clear that if that day does arrive, we will have lost the Wikipedia that captured the world’s attention and served as our communal watering hole for information, only to be replaced by yet another digital space captured by interests far removed from our own.

— Ashley Rindsberg