this post was submitted on 23 Jan 2026
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Wikipedia's TOS bans this kind of activity, and it's pretty effective at detecting it. This has been going on elsewhere for over a decade, and I know of at least one reputation-laundering firm that has gone bust because of Wikipedia reverting everything they tried to plant.
It bans some versions of this, but it can't ban all of it. The obvious way is fully banned and hard to get away with: pay someone to delete unflattering things about you on Wikipedia. But, you can do a much more costly, slower, but much more likely to be acceptable version: you can buy a newspaper and arrange for that newspaper to write flattering articles about you. Since those articles qualify as a primary source, you can then have someone update Wikipedia to include things from that article using the article as a primary source. That doesn't delete the unflattering things, but it pushes them down the page and surrounds them by flattering things. If you're a billionaire, you'll find a way to get the articles edited in a way that is permitted by the Wikipedia rules.
I don't know about how they're good at detecting it.
Look up at the story of David Woodward spamming his own bio on all Wikipedia languages.