Who is a typical paid editor? Who are their typical clients?: Remember the golden rule!
Who are the paid editors who Wikipedians spend so much time looking for? Who are their clients? It will be easier to describe people who aren't typical paid editors or their clients.
Most long term Wikipedians are not paid editors. At least, as a percentage, very few long term editors declare that they are paid for editing, as would be required by the WMF terms of use and the English language Wikipedia policy WP:PAID if they were editing for pay. Perhaps 1% or less actually declare that they are paid. Others might mistakenly ignore the policy, but declare that they have a conflict of interest. This article attempts to give an overall picture of the paid editing industry – both the providers of this "service" and their clients.
Readers of The Signpost might be excused if they think the providers are (or were) just the few firms like Wiki-PR or Orangemoody who were caught years ago and banned. Or you might think that the few declared paid editors who put their required disclosures on their user pages are all there are.
Regular readers of this column might think that the main clients are sex offenders. We have reported on three of the best known sex offenders of the 21st century, Jeffrey Epstein, Mohamed Al-Fayed, and Peter Nygard who appear to have paid editors to doctor Wikipedia's articles about themselves. We remind our readers that other apparent paid editing clients are very different from the sex offenders shown in this section.
Perhaps billionaires are more typical clients. We have reported on more than twenty billionaire clients, for example here and here. But there are many other types of clients, including people who are completely ignorant of Wikipedia's rules, and some providers who will give you a very strange song and dance routine while trying to convince their potential clients that they are following Wikipedia’s rules.
The Bureau of Investigative Journalism (TBIJ) is one of the leading publications to investigate paid editing on Wikipedia. In 2011, they were the first to report on the infamous PR firm Bell Pottinger who promised that they could perform "dark arts" on Wikipedia. To Bell Pottinger's embarrassment, they said that on undercover video
This January, TBIJ did it again.
They focused on the whitewashing of Qatar's human-rights record, as well as one of Wikipedia's most persistent paid editors, the London lobbying and PR firm Portland Communications.
Qatar was mentioned a dozen times, for example about reporting ahead of the 2022 World Cup and the deaths of many workers building the stadiums "according to [Portland Communications'] insiders. They have also obscured mentions of a major terrorist-financing case involving Qatari businessmen." Politicians were another target. The Qataris commonly requested Wikipedia edits.
In 2012 Portland had removed the words "wife beater" from the Wikipedia article about the Belgian beer Stella Artois and they were caught by other news sources. Soon after this incident, the Chartered Institute of Public Relations issued rules that PR practitioners should not edit Wikipedia articles and should cooperate with volunteer editors. Following the publication of the 2026 TBIJ article and specifically referencing both the article and Portland, the CIPR addressed the issue again at CIPR raises concerns over PR firm's unethical editing of Wikipedia.
Despite being caught earlier, Portland had kept on doing "Wiki-laundering" as TBIJ calls it. The term Wiki-laundering might include adding biased material to a client’s article, but certainly includes "whitewashing," the removal of cited material.
Portland, however, did not stop their practice of editing Wikipedia. They simply farmed out the job to a contractor and kept his work secret.
"No one said, 'We should stop doing this.' The question was how we could keep doing it without getting caught."
— Unnamed former Portland Communications employee quoted in The Bureau of Investigative Journalism
In February TBIJ did it again. This time they focused on Jeffrey Epstein's close relationship with the UK Ambassador to the US, Peter Mandelson. In September 2025 an undisclosed paid editor – who was later blocked – made 14 edits to the Mandelson article. Mandelson was sacked on September 11 and the story is still reverberating through British politics. Prime Minister Keir Starmer's judgement in appointing Mandelson is still being questioned and he appears likely to lose the prime ministership, in part because of the Mandelson affair.
The New York Times reports that Mac Cummings's Terakeet reputation management firm charges its customers "on average" a $5–$10 million annual fee for ongoing reputation management, which might include polishing clients' Wikipedia pages, among other online activities. Some of those customers have included "MetLife, JP Morgan Chase, Oracle, Target, Walmart, Disney and Bain Capital" (links added), though we don’t know if Terakeet edited Wikipedia on their behalf.
Of particular interest is Goldman Sachs and its outgoing General Counsel Kathryn Ruemmler. She was White House Counsel to President Barack Obama. She then joined the law firm Latham and Watkins. In 2020 she joined Goldman Sachs and was promoted to General Counsel in 2021. Her main reputation problem was her long friendship with Jeffrey Epstein. She wrote, received, or was mentioned in over 10,000 documents – mostly emails – released in the Epstein files in January.
Robert F. Smith, who Forbes listed as the third richest Black American in 2025 (worth about $10 billion), was another Terakeet customer according to The Times. His career was set as an investment manager once Robert Brockman offered him $1 billion to manage, complete with Brockman's advice and one other condition. Brockman made his billions providing software to automobile dealers and was proud of the efficiency of his system of managing software production. Smith would use Brockman's money to buy other niche software providers and apply Brockman's management system. The other condition was that the profits would be invested in Caribbean tax havens to evade US taxes. What could go wrong?
When the IRS caught up with the scheme 15 years later, Smith got lucky once and then lucky again. First he had to pay fines and forgo tax credits totaling $321 million and publicly confess the scheme in a legally binding document. In return Smith got an unusual non-prosecution agreement. He was expected to testify at Brockman's trial. But Brockman couldn't be tried because he suffered from dementia, and he died before any trial. Smith avoided the public humiliation of testifying in court that he was a tax cheat, which might have affected the viability of his investment firm. Brockman's estate later settled with the IRS (paywalled) for $750 million.
The Times focused on a 2020 Forbes article which described Smith's tax problems. Terakeet pushed the Forbes article down on Google search results.
"Terakeet's efforts paid off. By 2023, a Google search for 'Robert F. Smith' did not yield prominent mention of Mr. Smith's tax fraud within the first 100 results. For the average user, the same search result holds true today."
— The New York Times
There were other similar articles that didn't show up in search results, including ones from Bloomberg, the Washington Post, and even one from The Signpost.
The Signpost article found that the Robert F. Smith article showed mild signs of paid editing, as of 2020. The editing from 2021 through 2023, when Terakeet might have edited the article, was very different featuring several edit wars, personal attacks, and many banned editors and sockpuppets.
The Times also identified the current ambassador from the United Arab Emirates Yousef Al Otaiba as a client of Terakeet, who paid over $6 million from 2020-2022. The UAE account had started in 2019 and was focused on promoting UAE tourism. It was properly registered as a foreign agent with US authorities, allowing The Times to closely document the UAE's online activities with Terakeet.
Al Otaiba had been the subject of a 2017 article in The Intercept about his alleged association with prostitutes and sex trafficking victims.
Terakeet churned out favorable online articles about Al Otaiba's many contacts with philanthropies and similar organizations pushing the Intercept article off the first page of Google search results.
The Times sources identified User:VentureKit and User:Quorum816 as Terakeet's paid editors on Wikipedia. Both accounts were blocked as sock puppets with about 20 other accounts in the same sock farm and many of their contributions were removed from the encyclopedia.
Many unsophisticated paid editors attempt to publish their work through the Articles for creation waiting line. A new "audit" by a well known paid editing firm tells these editors what they might have suspected all along: AfC is not an easy way to get their articles published.
The paid editing company "analyzed 1,009 draft submissions that survived initial triage during two sampling windows in late 2025. This is not a peer reviewed academic study. The authors might be unconsciously biased because of their paid editing work and the sample selection might be flawed, especially the "triage" part. But these are mere quibbles. They have done the work and delivered the most credible overview of AfC that this reporter has seen.
Just to summarize their major conclusions:
If these results make AfC look better than you expected, remember the "triage" step in the sample selection. Some submissions were rejected before they could be put in the sample.
The Product Dragon Association, a registered Canadian nonprofit, published a press release two weeks ago How to Get on Wikipedia: Free Nonprofit Program Provides Help and Free Wiki Page Listings for Small Businesses which goes on to promise "professional editorial support" for the program which is aimed at businesses with "under $5 million in annual revenue". (In the US this would likely include a medium size single location retail store or a small construction contractor.)
The press release acknowledges that Wikipedia’s notability requirements make it extremely difficult for small businesses to qualify for an article, but states that
"Made possible through partnership with professional wiki page editors and publishers, the Free Wiki Page Program launched in a limited closed test phase in January 2026 and has been well received, achieving a 100% successful publication rate across all participating businesses during the pilot period. The program is now accepting ongoing applications from individuals and small businesses with under $5 million in annual revenue."
The press release then encourages these readers to take a "Wikipedia eligibility quiz" and submit an application on an ongoing basis.
A link to Production Dragon gives further details at the page "How to Get on Wikipedia: Free Wiki Page Program" written by Alexander Frakking. Now it starts to get strange. Most of the information he writes about Wikipedia is more-or-less correct, and what he writes about a free Wiki page may be correct, as long as you remember that Wikipedia is not the only wiki around.
This page reminds me of the Signpost article How paid editors squeeze you dry. It gives good information on why small businesses should not expect to qualify for a Wikipedia article. It even gives a check-list showing readers what they should expect. But the basic idea of a free Wiki article published with help from professional wiki page editors doesn't seem to connect to reality.
You likely can get a free "Wiki article" but not on Wikipedia. Most likely it will end up on Notablewiki, which is the best source I could find on the web for Alex Frakking. It also has a similar article for Frakking's doppelganger, based on photos available on the web and in that article.
It does get even stranger with some of the businesses Frakking mentions being difficult or impossible to contact. Frakking has not returned my phone calls. Product Dragon Association, however, is a Canadian nonprofit. It was registered in 2022, but hasn't filed any of the required annual reports. Its status is listed as "Active – Dissolution Pending (Non-compliance) Annual filings overdue".
It doesn't look like there are any typical paid editing providers. There are too few sex offenders who have been caught paying for edits to say that they are a major part of this market. Their existence on Wikipedia does show that there are paid editors who will accept any challenge – if they get paid enough.
Combining the billionaire class with the clients described in the TBIJ and New York Times articles looks more promising. The clients are big businesses and the 1% (paywalled) or the extreme upper class. The paid editors likely consider themselves elites as well. They are not editing because they love the Golden Rule, unless they use an alternate version that reads "those who have the gold rule".
But other types of potential paid editing clients have a more difficult path. Many don't seem to know Wikipedia's rules and put themselves through the difficult articles for creation process or even subject themselves to possible scammers or oddball providers.
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