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EDIT : nevermind, wrong assumption, see replies.

I'm not sure there's a problem here. The article seems to imply the guy actually edited wikipedia home page to promote his client.

For what I understand of how "did you know" section works, it's not the case : it's automatically collecting recent additions (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Recent_additions/2012...).

It means that, worst case scenario, he only wrote a lot of new pages about Gibraltar. That's still an issue if those page are advertisement-like (which I did not checked if they are), but certainly not the same thing as spamming home page on purpose.

Also, he may as well have respected neutrality guidelines when writing those articles (even if it's a hard task, if you earn money from the person you're writing about).

The real problem is mostly : does others people have read those articles and checked them ? It's the good old wikipedia problem : only pages that attracts a lot of editors can be considered balanced enough, with or without PR, with or without money.



> For what I understand of how "did you know" section works, it's not the case : it's automatically collecting recent additions

This is incorrect. New articles for 'did you know' have to be nominated, and go through a (somewhat opaque) review, approval and queue process - see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Did_you_know#The_DYK_...


What's more, if you follow the actual on-Wikipedia discussion of this, the person in question had been using his position on the English Wikipedia to push Gibraltar-related DYK entries through the review and approval process. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Did_you_know#Pot...


Thanks for placing the edit note at the beginning of your comment. It's impressive discussion forum etiquette and very thoughtful, since it saves readers like me time. Cheers.


The article states he was using more than just the "did you know section" (see below) to promote his client. And given his position, I'd be pretty surprised if he didn't realise what his writing was doing on the front page.

"Roger Bamkin ... appeared to be using Wikipedia's main page "Did You Know" feature and the resources of Wikipedia's GLAM WikiProject (Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums) initiative to pimp his client's project."


"did you know" section do not automatically collecting new articles. Any article listed has first been through the processes of a user summarizing it in once sentence, submitting it for review, and then have it accepted.




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