It seems you missunderstood me, I did not say they were for hire. But they were after money. And they got money by convincing students they can get internationaly accepted and sought for MBAs, while they were worthless in reality. And wikipedia was promoting that fraudulent school for 4 years, repeatedly deleting sources exposing the scam.
That was organized. And maybe they found new projects to work on after the old got exposed too much, or indeed freelance, sell out their wiki skills to other malicious actors. At the moment it is all not really clear to me.
This person made thousands of other legitimate changes, it seems a stretch to say someone would do all that just as a marketing tactic, that is a whole lot of effort for questionable results. I mean, how many people go to Wikipedia for college recommendations? How many people are going to attend a school they otherwise wouldn’t because they looked it up on Wikipedia? I’m sure it’s not zero, but we can’t be talking about many.
The article I linked claimed, that indeed quite a few persons in rural india believed wikipedia. Also labour in india is cheap, I doubt he did it himself, but payed someone to do it.
In general, many people do trust wikipedia. And PR companies get payed much more, to get some information inside.
Looks like parent reads "for hire" in the more specific "mercenary" meaning, and not in the very generic "old enough to be employed" sense you seem to use.
