Chapter 15
Traverse Mountain, a newbuild development south of Salt Lake City, is a quiet and unassuming place. It doesn’t lie between any two towns, so apart from a visit to a major outdoor activity outfitter located off Interstate 15, the only reason to be driving there is if you are going there. It posed an unlikely threat to an internet encyclopedia, and yet that’s how Wikipedia saw it, one day in 2007. It was an October evening: the scrub oak dotting the hillsides at the east end of Traverse Mountain was turning from green to orange and, in some spots, to brown. Bright orange pumpkins were beginning to appear on the front porches. The pickup trucks were leaving the outfitter’s parking lot, loaded with gear for the annual deer hunt. Everything was is it should be, yet when Cory Hogan tried to edit the Wikipedia article on Dick Cheney he was confronted with a notice telling him that he was blocked from editing. The notice, by an administrator called David Gerard, said “Favourite open proxy of Judd Bagley/Overstock.com”.
Judd Bagley is a neighbour of Cory, and is not altogether surprised about the block. For a long time he has been expressing concern, both on and off Wikipedia, about the activities of an editor calling himself ‘Mantanmoreland’, who he believes to be Gary Weiss, an obscure blogger, occasional Forbes columnist, and former writer for Business Week magazine. He believes that Weiss, as Mantanmoreland and as many other alternative sockpuppet accounts, is using Wikipedia for promotional purposes, creating an article about himself and campaigning in support of the controversial stock market practice of ‘naked short selling’.
It seemed as though commercial forces were at work. “How does Weiss make a living?”, asked Bagley. “His two books were commercial flops so there’s no way he’s surviving off royalties, much less an advance on a future project. He blogs once or twice a month for Portfolio.com, max $100 a pop. Every quarter he gets a 500 word column in Parade Magazine, max $1,000 each. And that’s it. Who, but someone getting paid for it, would work so obsessively at injecting misinformation into five articles related to financial fraud on Wikipedia? I mean he had to really, really work at it. Has there ever been a more determined and evasive sockpuppet in the history of Wikipedia?”
People taking a critical look at Wikipedia often ask the same question. “How many of these articles are biased by people who are either personally involved with the subjects, are the subjects, or are being paid by a third party?” The question should be, which parts of Wikipedia have not been touched by this kind of bias?
Sooner or later, Wikipedia was bound to attract commercial interest. Market forces, and Wikipedia’s weird system of governance, have created this state of affairs. The claim that Wikipedia is ‘exceptional’, that the normal rules of human interactions don’t apply to it, is misleading. Wikipedia mirrors the real world and real human behaviour, right down to the desire to make money. If anyone can edit, without traditional editorial controls, then experts will be driven out, and the project will be overtaken by those who are pursuing an agenda. Or a dollar.
