I'm just a bit agog at the idea that this article became "advertising" when
Burger King made the connection using Google Home. Since its very first
edit, it has been an advertisement for this product. It may not have been
intended that way, but that is the reality. Now it's almost 4200 words
long - probably the longest writing on this single product anywhere outside
of the Burger King home offices - and we're pretending that it isn't an ad.
I know it is terribly disillusioning, but an awful lot of our articles are
advertisements. There have always been LOTS of paid editors on English
Wikipedia. It has never meant that the editor was editing primarily in a
promotional manner - in many cases they were facilitating the ability for
others to include promotional materials, and I've spotted what in
retrospect were obvious paid edits going back to 2001. There are people who
I've identified as likely paid editors who were instrumental in our early
discussions about notability. There were people who "worked with" external
organizations to get access to their commercial repositories of images and
information - with huge financial benefits to the owners of those
repositories; sometimes this was innocent, with the editors trying to gain
access to hard-to-find material, but the end result was the same.
The article is an advertisement. It was one from its first edit (which
included product prices) and it is one today. It's good copy, but it's
still an ad. I'll guarantee this isn't the first or last time that a paid
editor made significant changes to the article. And it's just like
thousands and thousands of other articles that turn consumer products into
"encyclopedic content". A 300-word discussion of Burger King's most
notable product would be appropriate in the main article, or even in a
daughter article about Burger King's products. But as it stands, we have
literally hundreds of thousands of words about various Burger King
products: lists, articles about individual products, summaries, advertising
campaigns, etc. These are all advertisements. Don't blame Burger King for
leveraging exactly what we're doing ourselves.
Risker/Anne
On 14 April 2017 at 12:39, Gabriel Thullen <gabr...@thullen.com> wrote:
> This advertising campaign is particularly interesting, it appears that this
> is the first time we can talk about an exploit (as is said in computer
> security). It has been done once so it can be done again.
>
> What worries me here is that an advertising campaign like this one, mixing
> TV advertising and content editing on Wikipedia is not a last minute thing,
> done on the spur of the moment. IMHA, the agency responsible for these ads
> must have experienced wikipedians working for them. These guys know how the
> community usually reacts. There is a lot of money involved and they know
> that they will have to get it right the first time the ads are aired.
>
> This looks like a bait and trick, and we were all fooled by it (by we, I
> mean the wikipedia community of editors). The bait was the minor
> grammatical errors in the new introductory sentence. An experienced editor
> got tricked into correcting these missing spaces and such, and the text
> itself gets a "stamp of approval", and the edit done by a new account will
> no longer show up as the last modification done to the article.
>
> These paid edits were made on April 4, the article started to be vandalized
> one week later, on April 11. But it looks like the campaign did not create
> the expected buzz because Google reacted quickly (just under 3 hours) and
> Google Home stopped reading out the Whopper article at the end of the
> advert.
>
> The damage has been done. Theverge.com claims to have done such a
> modification on Wikipedia, to quote them "as did we, in a test yesterday".
> We will probably see more of this.
>
> Gabe
>
>
> On Fri, Apr 14, 2017 at 5:39 PM, Dariusz Jemielniak <dar...@alk.edu.pl>
> wrote:
>
> > On Fri, Apr 14, 2017 at 5:23 AM, Gnangarra <gnanga...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > >
> > > > but they didnt spam, nor did they introduce any false hoods, or
> remove
> > > > controversial content, they just put a description of the Whopper for
> > the
> > > > opening sentence.
> >
> >
> > I agree with James on this one. They "described" their product in a very
> > flattering way, unnecessarily introducing marketing jargon ("known as
> > America's favorite", "00% beef with no preservatives", "no fillers",
> "daily
> > sliced" etc.). It is spam and in the future, near rather than far, we
> need
> > to start seriously thinking how we can combat such content
> > attacks/hijacking. There are some similarities to our work with
> > anti-harassment, but I hope we'll be able to develop a more dedicated
> > approach to this problem, that the Burger King manifestation is only a
> > single example of.
> >
> > dj
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