PAID USERS, INCLUDING EMPLOYEES, IMPROPERLY EDITED ADANI ARTICLES, SAYS WIKIPEDIA NEWSPAPER

Wed 22 February 2023:

Wikipedia’s online newspaper, written and edited by community members, has published a report claiming that their investigations reveal that the Adani group employed undeclared paid editors to write and sanitise related Wikipedia pages.

While the Wikipedia report has been published in the aftermath of Hindenburg Research’s report on the Adani Group, it includes allegedly unscrupulous editing and contributions made years before this news break.

The Signpost, according to its own Wikipedia page, focuses on English Wikipedia, its sister projects, the Wikimedia Foundation, and the Wikimedia movement at large.

This article, written by a Wikipedia community user Smallbones, is tagged under the ‘disinformation report’ category.

The article notes that Adani and the eponymous group of companies were recently accused by a short-seller of a very serious “con”, involving accounting fraud, stock price manipulation and money laundering, referring to the Hindenburg report titled Adani Group: How The World’s 3rd Richest Man Is Pulling The Largest Con In Corporate History.

Citing that the company lost about $67 billion in net worth, the article asks, “Did he and his employees also try to “con” Wikipedia readers with non-neutral PR versions of related Wikipedia articles? Almost certainly they did.”

According to Signpost, more than 40 “sockpuppets” or undeclared paid editors created or revised nine related articles on the Adani family and family businesses.

‘Sockpuppetry’ refers to the misuse of multiple Wikipedia accounts.

All these accounts were later blocked or banned by Wikipedia.

Among those who fiddled with Adani articles, the report says, was a person using a company IP address, who rewrote the article for ‘Adani Group’ entirely.

The report says:

“Many of them edited several of the articles and added non-neutral material or puffery. A declared paid editor, using a company IP address, completely rewrote the Adani Group article. Others removed warnings about conflict-of-interest editing. Some created articles by unusual methods that avoided Wikipedia’s quality control systems.”

The report notes that perhaps “the most concerning finding” is that an user named ‘Hatchens’, who reviews articles was banned for abusing his position and was possibly corruptly approving several Adani articles. ‘Hatchens’ edited seven of the nine articles examined by the Signpost.

The report makes detailed illustrations of which user edited which article, revealing extensive changes made to articles earlier written in straightforward style by respected editors.

Pages that were thus tampered with include those on ‘Gautam Adani’, his wife ‘Priti Adani’, their son ‘Karan Adani’, Gautam’s nephew ‘Pranav Adani’, the ‘Adani Group’, ‘Adani Enterprises’, ‘Adani Transmission’, ‘Adani Green Energy’, and ‘Adani Ports and SEZ’.

The report also notes that as early as 2013 and 2014, Wikipedia’s account name regulations meant that two users named ‘Adanigrouponline’ and ‘Adani Group’ were blocked. “These were single purpose accounts (SPAs) editing Adani related articles, including a complete rewrite of the Adani Group article which removed a conflict-of-interest notice from the top of the article. They also added a detailed list of business units, and – the paid editors’ favorite section – a list of awards,” the report noted.

Signpost also notes that “no entirely on-Wiki investigation of a user’s edits can completely identify an editor’s name or employer. Even if the editor identifies themself as an employee of a company, they may be simply trying to embarrass the company…We can, however, examine the nearly complete record of edits made to Wikipedia and identify editors that are likely to be sockpuppets, or that appear to be working together with other accounts.”

Source: The Wire

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