Do you ever wonder who updates the Wikipedia pages of celebrities? In many cases, it’s the fans. In others, it’s the “orchestra of users” who feel obligated to maintain a service they use for free. But have you ever looked at an entry so free from even remotely negative facts about the subject and thought, “Did they pay for this?” According to the New York Times, you may have been right.
Sunshine Sachs is a P.R. firm that specializes “in crisis communications and the representation of Hollywood clients who have included Ben Affleck, Leonardo DiCaprio and the Hollywood Foreign Press Association and its Golden Globe Awards.” Another specialty is, uh, maintaining their clients’ Wikipedia pages. Their recent “brush up” of Naomi Campbell’s page “to eliminate a potentially embarrassing reference to Babywoman as a ‘critical and commercial failure’” sparked an investigation into their practices.
Sunshine Sachs has played loose with Wikipedia’s standards and recently violated the site’s updated terms of use agreement, by employing paid editors who fail to disclose their conflict of interest on the website.
Wikipedia’s new guidelines don’t ban paid edits, but they do require disclosure of those making them. And Mr. Sunshine (no, really) is really sorry for breaking the rules.
In an email on Friday, Ken Sunshine, a founder of Sunshine Sachs, acknowledged that several staff members had violated the terms of use by failing to disclose their association with the firm. Mr. Sunshine said a key employee in his web operation was not aware of Wikipedia’s new terms. All employees who edit on Wikipedia have now disclosed their affiliation with Sunshine, he added.
A researcher named Jack Craver recently posted some of the Sunshine edits he discovered. “Many of the edits Sunshine employees have made are innocuous – even helpful,” he writes. But some are just plain hilarious.