British PR agency edited Wikipedia articles for the benefit of its clients.

In general, it is not a secret that many “optimizers” and their sympathizers try to use known resources to promote their own, or to promote the resources of their clients. Wikipedia is one of the resources that is attractive enough for all sorts of Internet actors, including those who are eager to include secret or explicit advertising in the text of the article itself on Wiki, or at least put a reference. The other day, Wikipedia editors found out one of the largest PR agencies in Britain, Bell Pottinger, in such behavior.

This agency, or rather, its employees, used many articles of the online encyclopedia to create a positive image of their clients and their products. Wiki editors are currently conducting a major review, trying to see all the articles this agency is related to. The company's management has already stated that yes, the articles were edited, but the company did not commit anything illegal. The head of Wikipedia believes that the employees of Bell Pottinger violated the unwritten code of ethics of PR companies, which does not approve such actions.
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Well, it can be said that the founder of the Wiki clearly belongs to rather naive people - after all, Wikipedia is not used for its own purposes only lazy (just look at some articles, links to them, and you can quickly come to the same conclusion). Yes, of course, editors (bona fide) are trying to remove absolutely “Jeans”, but it’s not so easy to cope with veiled advertising.

As for Bell Pottinger, the agency’s employees for many of the changed articles were marked “Edit Protection”, i.e. tried to protect the changes from further editing. An internal investigation has already begun inside the company, the purpose of which is to find and punish the perpetrators. Actually, it is hardly believed that such an illustrative action will lead to any meaningful results.

Via FT