More than 300 stema accounts that received gold by Wikipedia and edited articles are deleted at the same time

ByLas - initially (Lori Semprevio)

Wikipedia is a free Internet encyclopedia that anyone can edit without anonymity, but it is problematic if "biased article posting" or "wrong content article posting" conducted with reward, taking advantage of editing system of multiple people as the opposite It was done. After receiving this, Wikipedia formed a team to investigate the stealth marketing (stema) account that posts articles with compensation. As a result of the survey, it was announced that 381 accounts that were supposed to be self-made performances were blocked simultaneously from the English version of Wikipedia.

Hundreds of "black hat" English Wikipedia accounts blocked following investigation «Wikimedia blog
https://blog.wikimedia.org/2015/08/31/wikipedia-accounts-blocked-paid-advocacy/

Wikipedia: Administrators' noticeboard - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Administrators%27_noticeboard&oldid=678838796#Wikipedia:Long-term_abuse.2FOrangemoody

According to a survey conducted by Wikipedia from April to August 2015, we have confirmed an article with a very wide range of promotional links written for commercial purposes among English Wikipedia. Survey is a tool which can query the user's IP address etcCheckuser"The 381 accounts that were done by the team and found to have posted articles for financial purposes have been removed from Wikipedia.

Most of these accounts posted articles related to business, posting articles containing biased information, sources of unknown origin, and potential copyright violations upon compensation. After the article was released, it was said that he was undertaking "supervision act" for 30 dollars a month (about 3,600 yen), which prevents change or deletion of the article contents, such as revising the correction of the article by a third party, 210 articles posted / edited by the account have also been deleted. Although it is a survey in just a few months, since similar methods are repeated, it is suggested that a series of fraudulent article submissions have been operated in the long term by a large group.

Below is a bubble graph showing activities of stema account created from Checkuser's data. It turns out that the yellow circle represents the IP address, the green color represents the account, and there are two parts where the plural accounts are concentrated in the same IP address and two patterns where plural IP addresses are gathered in one account I will.


In addition, Wikipedia asks "editor's request", if you find an article posted by an undeleted stema account, you are asked to confirm the contents and correct and delete promptly.