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Opinion

What Jimbo's question revealed about scamming

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By Smallbones
This opinion piece begins with a very controversial event. Jimmy Wales asked former ArbCom member Bradv if he was working with a paid editing group. ArbCom has declared that there was no basis for this question, that the evidence behind Wales's question was seriously flawed. The Signpost requested an interview with Bradv, but he declined and said that his statement on his usertalk page should be included in full. It is included below. – S

The last two weeks might have felt like the end of an era on Wikipedia. Jimmy Wales's seat on the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees was never under threat, and he retains his symbolic "founder's flag". But following a request for arbitration filed against him, he resigned all his administrative and technical functions on Wikipedia. The only real power he will retain other than his Board seat is influence from the trust most Wikipedians have almost always placed in him. No administrator or Arbitration committee can take that power away. It's developed over more than 22 years, largely as the result of his practice of responding to almost any question – albeit sometimes with a long delay – on his talk page. But even that power has waned, over the years, as he has spent less time on Wikipedia. For example, the monthly pageviews for his talkpage (since 2015, when these numbers were first recorded) illustrate some of this decline in his interest and influence.

Pageviews for User talk:Jimbo Wales were over 30,000 per month in 2015, and fell to less than 5,000 in 2023 [7]

But something else happened as well. Seemingly unnoticed by the parties in this dispute, they agreed on a much bigger problem.

The controversy

The immediate cause of the controversy around Wales was a message he left on the talk page of a former ArbCom member, Bradv, about an undeclared paid-editing company named WikiExperts.

Wales wrote:

I have what seems to me a credible report that you have been recommending to people that they use WikiExperts. Is this true? … If it is a lie, then fine. But please tell me the truth.
— Jimbo Wales

The report Wales based his inquiry on turned out to be a lot less credible than he stated. But speaking in general terms, it's common practice – indeed, a recommended procedure – to ask a suspected undisclosed paid editor (UPE) about your suspicions in order to clear up any possible misunderstandings.

Many editors will ask via the standard (if overly long) {{Uw-coi}} template:

Information icon Hello,

We welcome your contributions, but if you have an external relationship with the people, places or things you have written about on Wikipedia, you may have a conflict of interest (COI)....

In addition, you are required by the Wikimedia Foundation's terms of use to disclose your employer, client, and affiliation ... See Wikipedia:Paid-contribution disclosure.

Also, editing for the purpose of advertising, publicising, or promoting anyone or anything is not permitted. Thank you.

But this case was different.

Wales was very direct in his question. It was labeled "casting aspersions" and severely criticized. What made matters worse is that Wales's actions are closely watched by other editors, with his words carrying a lot of weight. Bradv shouldn't have been expected to answer the question; he had been missing from Wikipedia for more than eight months since leaving his post at ArbCom.

I have investigated the "credible accusation", as has ArbCom. I did uncover an indication that somebody using Bradv’s name was repeatedly pushing their company’s paid editing service on an article subject whose article was in danger of deletion. The use of Bradv’s username was most likely a scam – something like the extortion documented in the 8-year-old Orangemoody case. ArbCom concluded that it was an "obvious Joe job".

Wales apologized for his tone, but still maintained that the question about a former arb working for a UPE firm was important to address. "I don't think keeping these matters hushed benefits anyone other than the ultimate scammers," he wrote: "I would like us to think about how we might better get the word out to potential victims of these scams, so that the business model of the scammers dries up as much as possible."

Several leaders in the fight against UPE responded rapidly to Wales. Bradv, a former ArbCom member, had been one of them, and they couldn't imagine him working for a UPE firm. According to one current arbitrator, the editors standing against Wales included "2 stewards (1 of whom is also an enwiki checkuser and former ombud), 5 enwiki checkusers (not counting the steward), and an editor who is among the foremost in combating UPE on enwiki (and who has worked collaboratively with the Foundation on fighting paid editing firms like this)".

They also thought that a UPE firm was scamming new Wikipedia editors and its other customers – that Bradv was a victim of a Joe job. Somebody must have been impersonating him. Indeed, UPE firms commonly lie to Wikipedia editors and their other customers, and impersonate Wikipedia admins and other editors, so that Wales and his "credible" source had made the rookie mistake of believing UPE lies.

It might have been all downhill from there. Related discussions began on User talk:Jimbo Wales, and on the village pump, and a request for arbitration was filed. The next morning, Wales requested that his remaining administrative and technical tools be removed.

Assume good faith

Though he was giving up tools that he hadn't used for years, the situation must have been difficult for Wales. He founded Wikipedia more than 22 years ago, and was the ultimate arbiter of editors' conduct for several years. To the outside world, it might have still seemed that he was the embodiment of Wikipedia. He was the inspiration for many editors, and one of the most level-headed of us around. A lot of cheap shots were aimed at him during this time, but for the most part he's kept going, preaching the gospel of "assume good faith" and "imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge in their own language." I, for one, encourage Jimmy to keep the faith and stay with us. We will still need his guidance.

In an interview for this column, Wales told The Signpost "We need to remember such old fashioned essentials as 'Assume Good Faith'. I include myself in that, of course." He believes his recent mistake was making an intemperate remark and he hopes it might be forgiven. He also assumes that those who called him out on the mistake were acting in good faith.

"When I realized my mistake I did what I think was the honorable thing to do: a mea culpa."

What really makes Wikipedia work well is kindness, compassion, forgiveness, and behaving honorably. It is my belief that people will make mistakes - we're human after all - and that there's a right way to deal with mistakes - not through defensiveness or combativeness, but humility and thoughtfulness.
— Jimbo Wales

Bradv returned to editing Wikipedia on April 18, and soon responded to the general situation on his own talk page.

I have spent the last several hours reading through the conversation on my talk page and elsewhere over the past few days. While much of what needed to be said has been said already, I thought I would write down a few thoughts of my own, and perhaps reiterate the wise words of others.

First of all, thank you to all those who came to my defence. Not only is it heart-warming to see this level of support from the community, you have all made excellent points that ultimately raise awareness of issues involved paid editing, off-wiki communication, and administrator competence.

Obviously, the allegations made by Jimbo Wales are entirely untrue and without merit. I don't really feel the need to respond to them, but I would be remiss in posting a message here without including this point.

Sadly, the practice of conning potential article subjects for outrageous sums of money is all too common. Jimbo makes the point that we need to do a better job of communicating the risks involved in hiring paid editors, and on this point I wholeheartedly agree. In my time as an arbitrator I encountered several instances of people paying for articles and then emailing ArbCom when they ultimately got ripped off. The point I always want to make to these people, and the one we should be shouting from the rooftops, is that you do not need to pay to have an article written about you. If you or the things you've done really are worthy of an article, we will write it for free.

Not only do we need to communicate these risks to our readers, it seems we also need to do a better job of communicating that to our editors. Any one who wants to be active in the area of combatting undisclosed paid editing needs to watch out for scams, including blackmail, extortion, and obvious joe jobs. This includes the most basic steps of checking someone's contributions before accusing them of impropriety. And if the evidence is unclear, getting a second opinion from someone else experienced in this area of editing before publicizing allegations, especially those involving off-wiki conduct, is imperative.

While I have not received an apology from Jimbo for anything beyond the "tone" of his inquiry, I do not require one. I don't believe the initial query was made out of malice. Rather, Jimbo has been disconnected from the community for quite some time, and does not have a full appreciation of the depth of knowledge and experience that the editing community has in dealing with issues like these. I am pleased that Jimbo has recognized this and resigned many of his advanced user rights, instead entrusting them solely to those trusted by the community.

Lastly, as a former arb I can't help but point out that the laying down of these tools was done under a cloud, and should not be restored without community consensus. (Seriously, I tried to not include this point, but it really needs to be said.)


— User:Bradv

How the scam works

The mystery of this situation is why so many of the participants didn't seem to understand that they almost all agreed on one thing.[1] Wikipedia is deluged by a scam where paid editing services extort their marks out of outrageous sums, thousands or tens of thousands of dollars. Their marks include customers that they attract by false advertising, plus those they get by scamming new Wikipedia editors by preying on those who have had their drafts deleted, plus those they extort whose drafts the scammers have deleted themselves. Our temple of knowledge is being polluted by the worst type of money-chaser, by people who will do anything for a buck. This has been going on since before the Orangemoody scandal of 2015, which was widely documented at the time.

While I was writing this, a "reputation management company" calling itself "Reputn Agency" sent out a press release announcing the "launch of its groundbreaking new service: Negative Wikipedia Page Improvement," which is "designed to help individuals and businesses transform their negative Wikipedia content into more balanced, accurate, and positive representations of their public image". I won't link to this content, since I don't want to advertise their business. I'm not accusing them of extortion, but they are clearly advertising a business that openly violates Wikipedia's rules. Their website has a FAQ section including these two questions:

Do You Pay Wikipedia Editors/Reviewers/Admins?

Most of our works are in-house and within the guidelines of Wikipedia. We do 100s edits everyday motivated only by the desire to improve Wikipedia. Unfortunately, this isn’t always possible. Sometimes we have to compensate certain people to get things done.

Do Editors Have To Disclose That They Are Paid?

As per the policy, yes! But once a qualified paid editor disclose their identity, any changes they make are likely to be deleted or disputed. Hence, there is no incentive to disclose that information. However this is decided on case by case [sic].


— Reputn Agency

Their potential customers should be informed that all paid editors, including paid administrators, are required to declare their status as part of the Terms of Use, not "case by case." The paid editor's employer, client, and people with other relevant affiliations also must be declared.

The scam begins when paid editing companies look for promotional articles or drafts which are in the process of being deleted or rejected. They then send emails to the article editor/subject saying that they can save the article by getting around Wikipedia rules – but it will cost them, often in advance. The scammers can be patient, just like the vultures they are, until the articles are eventually deleted or rejected. Many of the discouraged article subjects will then take up the scammer's offer, but that will be a mistake. The scammer can't deliver on their promise that the article won't be deleted again. In many cases it's not even worth the effort to try. They'll just take the money and disappear.

Is the editor who wrote the article to blame for trying to work around Wikipedia's rules? Of course, if they've been able to understand all of Wikipedia's inscrutable and inconsistently-enforced rules on the matter, they share some blame. But they are being played by the scammers, con artists, who actively seek the opportunity that Wikipedia so readily provides. Con artists look for people who are willing to skirt the rules, and wheedle them into full-on rule breaking, taking advantage of their optimism or their discouragement as needed. And who among us doesn't sometimes want to skirt the rules, or just step a bit over the line? Nobody is ever 100% honest 100% of the time.[2]

The above description is just about the plain old white-bread scam. The extortion begins when the jackals get tired of waiting for their payday, and move to speed it along by voting in deletion discussions, ripping the article up with unhelpful edits, or by rejecting a draft article by themselves. It reminds me of the old cartoon where two vultures are sitting on a branch and one says "Patience my ass. I'm going to go kill something." No editor deserves that type of treatment from Wikipedians. No editors should be swindled out of thousands of dollars to try to reverse such treatment.

What can we do about it?

We need to understand that eight years of extortion on Wikipedia is much too long. We need to understand that nobody deserves to be scammed. The UPE firms carry the most blame for the scam, but we have created the environment where the scam thrives. The whole Wikipedia community will bear some of the responsibility for the scam until we eradicate the scammers.

We need to warn the targeted victims. I posted a scam warning in 2017 after discussing this grift with two victims. They were both taken in, with emails similar to those apparently used in the Orangemoody scam two years earlier. That warning page now gets about 100 page views per day. It needs to get more exposure, especially to new editors who don't know their way around our back pages. We need to put it in the right places where new editors will see it. Can you post this message at the top of your talk page?

If you are an admin or somebody who thinks that your name is being used without your permission to promote paid editing, please consider putting the following at the top of your user page.

This editor does not accept paid editing work. If somebody claims that he/she is me and is soliciting paid editing work, then they are impersonating me, and likely scamming you. Please forward the evidence to legal@wikimedia.org.

Individual editors can make a difference, and The Signpost can do its part. But we need a bigger, more organized effort to get the word out to the mainstream press. The Wikimedia Foundation is the usual place where the movement as a whole communicates with the mainstream press. They should do more. Working with the victims of the scam with patience and understanding is not only the right thing to do, but is the key to getting good information on the scammers. The WMF and checkusers can help by keeping track of the network of paid editors who have used this scam. Keeping this paid editing scam hidden from our editors and readers only perpetuates the scam.

We should also understand how much we usually agree on, despite all the mistakes we all make in the heat of editing. We should all understand the power of assuming good faith and the powers of an apology and of forgiveness.


  1. ^ [1][2][3][4][5][6]
  2. ^ How many times do you lie in a day? Don't lie to yourself on this! Scientific American, based on self-reporting recorded in diaries, says that Americans lie on average two times a day.
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Most known UPE articles have been deleted, but 888casino is one that was retained for whatever reason. I pulled it from a list I compiled of one prolific UPE editor. It looked like this after they created it; note especially the long "accolades and awards" section, which is typical and listed at WP:Identifying PR.
I have a bunch of lists like that. I used to do a bunch of work identifying conflict-of-interest editing before joining The Signpost. If you want to see more recent examples, go over to the conflict-of-interest noticeboard and search for "UPE", there's plenty. ☆ Bri (talk) 19:33, 26 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • The user page "I don't do paid editing" flag is cool, but ultimately meangingless. There have been a number of paid editors with similar comments on their user page that also had no trouble finding work, as paid editors have found ways to explain the need for secrecy and denial to their clients. Accordingly, while it is probably better than not having that flag, it neither means that the person concerned doesn't do paid editing, nor does it prevent them from getting jobs if they are looking. It is a difficult mess. - Bilby (talk) 11:10, 27 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    • I have mixed feelings on the user page flags. On one hand, it's a way to raise awareness on the scams—though far less visible than the warning that your bank may put on their website telling you to be vigilant about scammers pretending to be them (and with time, they become background noise and are no longer noticed). On the other, it's almost shifting the burden onto editors who are being joe jobbed to have to defend themselves. This is a volunteer project, and volunteers shouldn't be kept up at night wondering if their username and hard work is being misused to scam people out of their money, tarnishing their reputation in the process. Frankly, if even Jimbo fell for the scammers, we have a much bigger problem that user page flags won't fix. —k6ka 🍁 (Talk · Contributions) 19:22, 27 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]
      • I agree that some flags on user pages is not the ultimate answer to this very serious problem, but it is not entirely useless. As @Bilby: wrote "it is probably better than not having that flag". So why not do it?
      • I consider doing something about the extortion problem to be a moral imperative. We have to try to stop it, or just admit that Wikipedia is never going to be anything approaching a credible source. Scammers are putting in bad articles, deleting (better) articles, and if you come to edit Wikipedia somebody is going to try to rip you off. There are little things that I can suggest, but ultimately the things that get done will be done either by the WMF or by our elected/appointed representatives. I do think that a lot of flags on a lot of active user pages could have a good effect on them.
      • There's one similar case that I'll point out. The U.S Congressional Cemetery in SE Washington, D.C. is something of a national treasure. A couple of decades ago. It was becoming a center of crime - drug dealing and prostitution - with violent crime seemingly just around the corner. The local neighborhood started coming up with some simple answers, maybe just to protect the investment in their homes. They formed a "Friends of" group and ended up managing the cemetery that the true owners (an inner city church) had essentially abandoned. They organized some clean up events, did some minor lawn mowing. And started a dog walking group. The dogs, surprisingly enough, were a major victory. Fido fights crime! They got a short appearance on C-SPAN. The cavalry (Air Force personal on their time off, actually) showed up with lawn mowers unexpectedly. Then they got a $1 million grant (from Congress of course). At that point, it looks like now, the ultimate victory was inevitable. So don't write off doing little things. We've got to start somewhere. Smallbones(smalltalk) 23:55, 27 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • Something editors who haven't been here for 15+ years may not know, but it used to be that Jimmy Wales would habitually raise an issue like this thru email, often with the subject line "Personal & Confidential". If he had communicated to Bradv like that in this case, there would not have been any controversy & he might have kept his privileges. Sometimes old, established ways are best. -- llywrch (talk) 19:39, 3 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]

lists of paid editing articles

There's a lot of different types of articles written by UPE. Here's one with the bunch of awards (like Bri focused on) right after a Percepto editor completely rewrote it (page down to the top of the actual article). But I've written many Signpost articles on these guys, there are pages or blocked editors linked there. I'll fill in the links as I find them:

Smallbones(smalltalk) 21:25, 26 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

The Nygard was a great before/after! Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 08:31, 27 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • Excellent piece. Minor point, "To the outside world, it might have still seemed that he was the embodiment of Wikipedia." Oh, I am entirely confident almost all the outside world knows nothing of this business. Those who have heard of Jimbo Wales continue to assume that he is Wikipedia's owner, president, chairman, whatever. We have had a bit of a storm, and we are nervous for the future, but thus far it's all in our own little teacup. Jim.henderson (talk) 20:46, 27 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Convenience break

  • I see this was toned down a bit from the draft version, but I still feel it misses the point. While I agree that we should work to raise awareness of these scams, to make it clear to one and all that Wikipedia articles are not for sale, what happened here is that a wealthy person was perfectly ok with working with people who claimed to have corrupt admins on their payroll. So, they knew they were dealing with trashy people, but they figured their money would buy them what they wanted, so they did not care. They only became upset when the scam that they willingly participated in turned out to be targeting them as well as Wikipedia. So (this goes to the point in the above comments) they reached out to the person they thought was the boss of the whole operation to complain that their attempt to buy their way in had not succeeded. And Mr. Wales fell for it and made a ridicualous accusation. I've seen the evidence, and it is so bad, so obviously, completely, laughably fake. The screengrabs I saw were most likely created on a private wiki used for faking things, to an experienced eye it obviously was not en.wp at all, and obviously not Bradv at all. I get how it could've fooled an out-of-touch businessman for whom money is all that matters, but I don't get how it could possibly have fooled any experienced Wikipedian, let alone literally the first person to ever edit Wikipedia. Wales was the one who critically failed to assume good faith here, not just in the tone of his remarks, but in his apparent lack of any skepticism about these claims, assuming the absolute worst from the get go, and having to be pressured over a period of several days to please share the supposed evidence with the Arbitration Committee, the body the community elected to deal with, among other things, admin misconduct. One would think the first assumption one would make was that this couldn't be real, and a few moments of actually looking into it would have easily confirmed that. To be clear: if this had any substance to it at all, I would be at the front of the line calling for Brad's head. This was on the level of people who cold call phone numbers claiming to be from the Internal Revenue Service and demanding a back tax bill be paid by Apple gift card in the next 30 minutes or the cops are coming to arrest you, it was that stupid. Beeblebrox (talk) 17:46, 30 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • @Beeblebrox: thanks for bringing your views here. I don't think that my article misses the point, just that you and I have different points to make. You believe that Bradv is an honest respectable person, and shouldn't have his honesty questioned. Please note that I never questioned his honesty, and I was quite surprised when people (not you) started accusing me of this. My point is that (almost?) everybody in the discussion agreed that there was a scam, including extortion, but nobody had any suggestions on how we could deal with that huge problem.
  • I do disagree with you about "what happened here is that a wealthy person was perfectly ok with working with people who claimed to have corrupt admins on their payroll. So, they knew they were dealing with trashy people, but they figured their money would buy them what they wanted, so they did not care. They only became upset when the scam that they willingly participated in turned out to be targeting them as well as Wikipedia." That way of dealing with extortion is exactly the opposite of the approach we need to take. Let's say there was a situation where the police were collecting protection money for the mafia from a business owner. The business owner gets angry that neither the mafia nor the police are actually protecting him from anything, so he reports the arrangement to a higher level of the police.
  • So what should the higher level say to the extortion victim? Definitely *not* the following "you've been bribing the police to pay the mafia. You are guilty of bribery, you've been breaking the law!" Technically, that may be true, but it won't stop the crime by dealing with the ultimate victim that way. A better way to stop the crime would be to get the police officers' names and properly investigate that part of the case. (In the analogous Wikipedia case it looks like somebody was impersonating the police). Only then could you begin to get information on who in the mafia was responsible.
  • The part of the article where I mentioned that nobody is 100% honest is very important. In classic con games this is very important. As the grifters say "You can't cheat an honest man." They will put an ordinary person into an unusual situation where the rules aren't very clear and push, tempt, or trick them into being dishonest. Then when they take the money and run, the mark finds it very difficult to report the crime. In other words, the grifters are counting on the victim or the police to say "I (or you) can't report this; I was (or you were) being dishonest." So 90%(?) of the crimes go unreported. To get the crimes reported you have to sympathize with the victim, knowing that anybody can be scammed like this.
    • The very first thing we have to do is to make clear rules about paid editing and let the world know about them. I hope the WMF is listening! *Get the word out* covering it up doesn't help!
    • Next we have to gather information about the scammers (rather than just about the victims). You get the info about the scammers from the victims.
    • To gather that information, we need a clear reporting mechanism with somebody on the receiving end to ask the right questions. Maybe those folks should be specially trained for this, which might suggest that the T&S folks do it. But in any case, if you don't ask the right questions you won't find the right answers, so why bother going through the charade?
    • Then something has to be done. Perhaps this might just be a year-end report on how many victims have come forward. Hopefully it can be more than that, but something has to be done at this point.
  • Otherwise, the only option I see is to tell the victims to call the authorities. There's a list at the end of the article Confidence trick, so I don't see a problem giving them those contacts. We might even prepare a packet of information on what we know about the scam in general. I know that some editors will object to this advise, based perhaps on "No legal threats", but I'm not making any legal threat here. I'm just saying if we see a victim of a crime that involves our website, we just say "it's a shame that we can't help you more, but maybe you should contact the authorities." If there isn't anybody on-Wiki or at the WMF that can handle the situation better than that, I'll suggest that the WMF contact the California State Attorney General and just ask them. "We've got an extortion racket going on on our website. Can you help us in deciding how best to handle the overall situation?" I'll bet that the AG has a special office that handles con games and they have seen organizations in a similar position and will have some suggestions. Hope this helps. Smallbones(smalltalk) 22:37, 30 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    I think the key difference in how we formed our opinions on this matter is that I actually saw this person's conversations with the scammers. Unless Jimbo shared that with you as well, I assume you have not.
    This business only seems suddenly urgent to people who aren't involved in combating UPE. This is going on all day, every day, although this particular case does appear to involve larger sums than most. The committee has been contacted by numerous people targeted by such scammers, and we advise them that it is an attempted scam and not how Wikipedia works.
    I don't see how the state of California can help these people. I do like the idea that Google, which has a fairly cozy relationship with the WMF, might be able to help with SEO-type options. Perhaps give the WMF free "sponsored" placement at the top of certain search results.
    Where I think we have a fundamental difference of opinion is that you seem to somehow blame the volunteer community for not doing enough. The volunteer community is doing what it can. Those in the know, know, that this sort of thing is being actively combated every day by dedicated volunteers, but by the same token it is the community's responsibility to detect UPE, remove the paid editors, and review and possibly delete material generated by them. It is not and never has been the community's responsibility to police the entire web for people making dishonest claims about Wikipedia. Beeblebrox (talk) 15:53, 1 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]



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