Twelve years ago, on June 16, 2014, the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) announced that as part of the terms of use (ToU) all paid editors, with some exceptions for Wikipedians in residence (WiR), must declare that they are paid editors, and disclose their employers, clients, and other affiliations.

Surprisingly, a group of PR practitioners had made a similar "Statement on Wikipedia from participating communications firms"(2014 statement) ten days earlier [1] 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 been a tremendous growth 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, as of 06-16-26 listed 253 unanswered edit requests in June, 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 4 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 paid 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 have included 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 include a U.S. presidential candidate, an award-winning novelist, a Canadian charity, a sunken 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 include 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 police 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 from participating communications firms.

• 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.
• Omnicon is one of the largest networks of PR, advertising, and marketing firms in the world. It owns FleishmanHillard, Ketchum Inc. and Porter Novelli which also signed.
• WPP plc (not a signer) is a financial holding company that owns the very large Ogilvy & Mather a signer which owns several other signers, including Burson-Marsteller, as it was known in 2014, and is now just called Burson.
• MDC Partners a large PR firm that owns or "partners with" many other companies which did not sign the 2014 statement. Only MDC itself signed the statement.

Other PR firms signed after the original group of 8. User:WWB Too suggested that these firm hadn't had much experience editing Wikipedia, or were just "jumping on the bandwagon".

(triple check all of this - it's important, but super-confusing!)

To examine how well these companies followed the principles laid down in the statement, I examine articles where they were obviously paid and had a very serious COI, in most cases 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|link] to Jimmy Wales letting him know what Wikipedia could do for PR firms and then organizing a Face Book page to exchange information and opinions from others. The Face Book 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 Wiki-projects 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.

Burson-Marsteller

FleishmanHillard, Ketchum Inc. and Porter Novelli (all owned by Omnicom

WPP plc (not a signer) is a holding company that owns Ogilvy & Mather a signer which owns several other signers, including Burson-Marsteller which merged with Cohn & Wolfe into Burson Cohn & Wolfe (BCW) in 2024. Then BCW merged with Hill & Knowlton, which is now just called Burson.

After the 2014 statement two declared paid editors started a more formal set of long detailed edit requests. While their client was Olgilvy Heatherer and Danilo Two were actually working for the firm 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".

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.

MDC Partners 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.

Porter Novelli is a subsidiary of Omicon and in turn has Voce Communications (another signer of the 2014 statement) as a subsidiary. It 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 also signed the 2014 statement, 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 permanently 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 editors with the seven long detailed requests submitted from 2017 through 2023.

Voce Communications?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p3bEJd4JlkM

Note that this draft article is still under development and is still in the process of fact checking!

quote, video at 28 minutes (meaning PR people using PR tools to benefit PR companies)