Twelve years ago, on June 16, 2014, the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) announced that as part of the site's terms of use (ToU), all paid editors must declare that they are paid editors, and disclose their employers, clients, and other affiliations (unless a Wikimedia project has implemented alternative disclosure policies).

Surprisingly, six days earlier a group of PR practitioners had made a similar "Statement on Wikipedia from participating communications firms" (which we'll refer to below as the "2014 statement"). It was posted on Wikipedia by the founder and president of PR firm Beutler Ink, Bill Beutler (User:WWB Too).

While they did not make any hard and fast promises, they did express their intentions to follow the Wikipedia community’s conflict of interest (COI) rules, the WMF terms of use, and to try to correct any infractions made within their own firms and to inform other firms when those firms violated the rules.

Beutler explained much of the PR group's statement and much else that has happened with paid editing since then in a presentation at WikiConference North America 2024 (complete with video).

This article investigates how well some of the largest firms who signed the 2014 statement executed their plan.

There has been an explosion in the growth of disinformation in general across the internet. Not surprisingly, there has also been a tremendous rise in paid editing activity on Wikipedia, most of it only declared as COI editing, rather than the required declaration of paid editing. The category Wikipedia conflict of interest edit requests, listed 253 unanswered edit requests from June as of June 16, 2026, or about 17 unanswered requests for each day. Enforcement activity among Wikipedia editors and admins has also surged since 2014.

Beutler's 2024 presentation mentions four particular cases after 2014:

• Operation Orangemoody in 2015,
• a stunt by Burger King in 2017 which was later awarded a prize for creative advertising at Cannes,
• the North Face scandal in 2019, and
• the editing which was paid by the city of Portland, Oregon for Rene Gonzalez (politician) in 2024.

Other paid editing scandals that Beutler didn't mention include Jeffrey Epstein's reputation management efforts (see The Signpost's 2020 report) plus two other well-known sex offenders.

For many other such scandals, see the list in the right hand column at the top of this page, which includes a U.S. presidential candidate, an award-winning novelist, a Canadian charity, an imploded submersible operator, Russian oligarchs, an Indian billionaire, and on and on.

The question of whether Wikipedians can trust PR firms is especially important now. Paid editors are in a rush to incorporate AI into their operations. The New York Times recently reported that a reputation management company, Terakeet, charges their clients $5–10 million per year for their services, which in some cases included Wikipedia editing. How are we going to be able to properly review this firm's editing? It will be difficult, but is not impossible. The Times's sources identified User:VentureKit and User:Quorum816 as Terakeet's paid editors on Wikipedia. Both accounts were blocked as sock puppets (see previous Signpost coverage).

Representatives of some of the largest PR companies in the world signed the 2014 statement on Wikipedia:

• Edelman is one of the largest independent PR agencies in the world. It was represented in 2014 by Phil Gomes who founded the Facebook Group CREWE which tried to exert influence on Wikipedia in favor of PR companies.
• Omnicom, which did not sign, is one of the largest networks of PR, advertising, and marketing firms in the world. It owns FleishmanHillard, Ketchum Inc. and Porter Novelli which all signed.
• Ogilvy & Mather, a large subsidiary of the non-signing WPP plc, signed. Several of its subsidiaries also signed, including Burson (then known as Burson-Marsteller)
• Many companies owned by (or "partnering with") MDC Partners, a large PR firm, did not sign the 2014 statement. Only MDC itself and its partner Allison+Partners signed the statement.

Other PR firms signed after the original posting. WWB Too suggested in the video that these firms hadn't had much experience editing Wikipedia, or were just "jumping on the bandwagon".

To see how well the companies who signed the 2014 PR editing statement followed the principles laid down in their statement, I examine articles where they were obviously paid and had a very serious COI, the Wikipedia articles about the PR company itself.

Phil Gomes of Edelman provided much of the impetus behind the 2014 statement by sending an open letter to Jimmy Wales letting him know what Wikipedia could do for PR firms and then organizing a Facebook page to exchange information and opinions from others. The Facebook page, known as CREWE for Corporate Representatives for Ethical Wikipedia Engagement became controversial in its own right (see previous Signpost coverage).

The open letter said that "communications professionals and the Wikipedia community can/must work together" because Wikipedia was near the top of every Google search page for every company and many Wikipedia articles were "derelict" or out of date. Among Gomes's suggestions on how Wikipedia could accommodate PR professionals' needs was:

"We could revive discussion about some guidance you gave in 2006, whereby a company could author a suggested entry, license it under the (GNU Free Documentation License), post it on its own site, and 'notify Wikipedians who are totally independent.' "

Of course, they could have done that without permission from Wikipedia.

On Wikipedia Gomes, as User:Philgomes, made only 71 edits, mostly before the 2014 statement. After the statement there was little PR company editing to the Edelman article for about six years. From 2020 to 2024 Edelman's representative acting on the Edelman article was User:MichaelBush48 who had a passing acquaintance with the 2014 statement, and seemed to act in good faith, but appeared to be somewhat confused about how to implement the statement's principles. He made 47 edits, including 8 to the article, 34 to the talk page, 4 to Wikiprojects asking for help adding his talk page requests to the article and in 2023 one to his user page making a clear disclosure of his COI. The requests were long and rambling and generally ignored.

Signatories from this group included FleishmanHillard, Ketchum Inc. and Porter Novelli

The article on Omnicom Group itself was not edited by any declared paid editors. The article on FleishmanHillard was only edited twice by an informally declared "conflict of interest" editor. Those edits were minor.

Two fairly detailed requested edits were made by User:Heatherer on the article talk page for Ketchum Inc. Two independent editors replied that they had inserted some of the material but disagreed with other material and left it out. Heatherer pointedly asked them to put the disputed material into the article, but eventually let the independent editors alone.

Porter Novelli is a subsidiary of Omicon and in turn has Voce Communications as a subsidiary. Voce signed the 2014 statement, but there is no Wikipedia article about it. Porter Novelli specializes in work for non-profits, government agencies, and other public service public relations. It may be the company most compliant with the 2014 statement.

There are a couple of editors in the history of the article about the company that are a bit surprising. One is from the owner of a small PR firm that signed the 2014 statement after the first posting, though there is not much in the actual edits that is surprising. Another editor Timtempleton was an active and widely respected Wikipedia editor who was suddenly indefinitely blocked by a checkuser.

For the most part, the three editors who declared their COI status on the article talk page were model citizens. They suggested long edits on their user talk pages and clearly were respectful toward ordinary editors. Nevertheless, they may have overwhelmed those volunteer editors with the seven long detailed requests submitted from 2017 through 2023.

WPP plc is a holding company that owns Ogilvy & Mather and WPP Media (formerly known as Group M) is the holding group's media operation. Both WPP plc and WPP Media have been clients of Beutler Ink with the talk page requests and Articles for creation submissions handled by User:Inkian Jason. This paid editor properly declared their paid status on their user page, as they have with about 150 other Beutler Ink projects. Their work on the two WPP articles went smoothly and was quickly accepted by other editors.

After the 2014 statement two declared paid editors started a formal set of long detailed edit requests on the Ogilvy article. Heatherer and Danilo Two were also working through Beutler Ink, which is run by User:WWB Too, William Beutler, who originally posted the 2014 statement.

Both of these paid editors used similar methods to make changes to the article. Both submitted about six long, multi-step requests, which were inserted into the article with minor changes or corrections by just two editors for each paid editor.

A third apparent paid editor, RedZone22 made only three total edits in 2022 and 2024, seemingly trying to follow the same playbook. They did not, however declare their employer or client, only saying "I am connected to Ogilvy".

Burson-Marsteller, now just called Burson, had only one declared paid editor, User:BCW Editor starting in 2019 with the difficult task of merging the articles for Burson-Marsteller and Cohn & Wolfe after the companies themselves merged. The half-dozen or more detailed requests in this case may have been justified in taking up so much volunteer time. But it likely would have been easier to keep the Cohn & Wolfe article and just summarize the material into one section with a link to the older material.

Burson did have a couple of skeletons in the closet. In the 1980s they did PR work that was criticized, involving the Bhopal disaster and the Chicago Tylenol murders which had long been included in the article. The requested edits apparently did not have any effect on these sections of the article.

While there is no rule against submitting long requests and fine-tuning an article, there is an essay (which is not an official policy or guideline, but in this case is quite influential) known as WP:BOGOF or "Buy one get one free". The essay strongly suggests to paid editing companies that they not overload our volunteers with long and detailed requests as it creates a systemic bias. The more time volunteers spend editing articles about commercial companies, the less time they have for creating and editing articles about other more interesting and worthwhile topics.

Heatherer also was a paid editor on this page while employed by Beutler Ink. They posted their edit request as a draft on an apparently long user page that was later deleted because it was "Unambiguous advertising or promotion". Two independent editors apparently inserted the bulk of the draft into the article. Both of these editors showed their independence, saying that they couldn't insert all of the information provided in the draft.

Another apparent paid editor, Ademdcpartners, made only one edit and it was directly to the article page, announcing a new CEO.

Near the end of Bill Beutler's presentation at WikiConference 2024 he seems disappointed that his big effort to bring in more PR firms to ethical paid editing didn't work. His work just seemed to fade away.

Most noticeably, perhaps, was the lack of interest by the signatories in editing articles. There just weren't that many attempts at self-interested edits.

The major Wiki-sins of commission were pushing the independent reviewers too hard and not appreciating the benefit the reviewers provide them by providing a second point of view.

One thing that Beutler shouldn't be disappointed about though, is that he got a lot of business from some very big PR firms who didn't want to go to all the effort to do the editing themselves. It may simply take too much effort for a PR firm to ethically edit Wikipedia themselves. It may be too far from their usual business practices for PR folks to participate here.