With Wikipedia, we can tell these stories ourselves. This is an article from the Nature Careers Community, a place for Nature readers to share their professional experiences and advice. Guest posts are encouraged.
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Sign up for the Nature Briefing newsletter — what matters in science, free to your inbox daily. Advanced search. Skip to main content Thank you for visiting nature. You have full access to this article via your institution. Download PDF. However, Wikipedia works in a very different way than the rest of the internet.
These paid writing services tend to promise the articles will stay up for a long time and be of a certain quality. However, there is no guarantee the article will not be deleted or changed in a significant way by other editors. All Wikipedia articles are open for anyone to edit and improve , in most cases even without an account. If you are approached by a person or organization offering to create an article about you or about your business for pay , be aware that these services are strongly discouraged by the volunteer community who write the articles on Wikipedia, and that you are paying for something that is usually developed by volunteers.
If someone is being paid to edit Wikipedia, they are required by the terms of use [1] to disclose that fact on their user page. You can look at their user page to ensure that they are disclosing their paid editing status. The volunteer Wikipedia community is often strongly critical of paid editing, especially when the companies are openly advertising exaggerated services. Accounts found to be making promotional edits or making these kinds of edits for pay without disclosure are blocked from Wikipedia by the community.
Your best bet for creating or requesting content related to you, your business, or someone you represent is to first have a look over the policies, guidelines, and other useful guides on Wikipedia that are free to everyone.
These sidebars include links to help and information pages. However, using anonymous accounts for blatant misrepresentation and puffery - known as sock puppetry - is often spotted and the offending content challenged or removed by other editors. Blatant self-promotion is frowned upon by the community and viewed as a conflict of interest. Anyway, as you don't control the page, less flattering information may soon be added by others.
But examples of Wikispam, as it's sometimes called, are "speedily deleted" according to the website. You don't need to log in to the site to read or edit articles, but setting up an account and registering allows you to create your own pages, upload content and edit without your internet protocol IP address - the number that identifies a mobile phone or computer on a network - being visible to the public.
The Wiki administrators, who number around 1,, can usually identify the IP address of someone editing articles and this can be tracked to a rough location, enabling them to spot suspicious patterns of behaviour. Offending accounts can be suspended, without individuals necessarily being identified.
If the IP address is different - you use a different computer or phone than the one you used before and, if you're being really sneaky, move location to do your editing - there's no reason why you can't set up another anonymous account and carry on as before. And there are plenty of services allowing internet users to hide their IP addresses anyway, for example, by using an encrypted virtual private network.
Someone going to great lengths to hide their IP address is sometimes enough to arouse suspicion among the site's administrators. And patterns of behaviour - from the adoption of similar usernames to a focus on specific topics and types of edit - can reveal a lot about motivations and personality. Multiple accounts can often be tracked to one individual - we're never as anonymous as we like to believe.
But any open and collaborative system will always be open to abuse.
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