The Wikipedia Arbitration Committee, has decided that Wifione manipulated the Wikipedia site of an unaccredited business school in India by deleting links to numerous media reports alleging it scammed students into paying hefty sums for worthless degrees.
For four years, that Wikipedia page was a primary marketing tool of the Indian Institute of Planning and Management (IIPM), which at one time boasted a network of 18 branches and tens of thousands of students. It lured students with the promise of an MBA and partnerships with international universities in the United States and Europe.
However last September, the High Court of Delhi ruled that those promises were misleading and that IIPM was not accredited to confer any degrees.
The problem is that the Wifione account, which the Arbitration Committee has now banned indefinitely from editing the site, had been active since 2009 editing the online encyclopaedia in its own image.
The account sounded like a good Wackpedia admin. It offered to do administrative donkey work, said the right things about how inspiring 'the project' is and was unfailingly polite."
Once the account was an administrator it was assumed to be one of the good guys. As anyone who has had any dealings with Wackpedia will tell you, their word is law and if they tell you that Mike Magee does not exist, or can't be an expert on Intel and Tantra, than it must be true. If the Everywhere Girl is popular everywhere but they have not heard about it, then she must be deleted.
The only difficulty was that Wifione's primary purpose from that point appeared to be to monitor IIPM's Wikipedia page. If criticism of the business school appeared, Wifione would use its influence to remove it.
Even after it was revealed as a total scam, Wikipedia believed its administrator be perfect and continued to mislead its readers.
"My parents re-mortgaged their farm to pay for this degree," one former student was quoted as saying. "I'm just too scared to tell them it was a fraud. It's better they just think I have an MBA. It would break their heart."
Many of the articles Wifione removed from IIPM's Wikipedia page were from Careers360. In 2011, another magazine, The Caravan, interviewed the site and published a highly critical investigation. The link to this, too, was removed from the Wikipedia page.
Reporters who investigated the site and exposed it were attacked on Wikipedia. For example one hack was falsely accused of losing libel cases. The Wikipedia page also now emphasized a link, praising IIPM, to a newspaper called The Pioneer. It turned out the article in the link was an advertorial (paid content designed to look like a news story).
The Wikipedia Arbitration Committee believes Wifione was at one time operating over 60 so-called "sock-puppet" accounts, fake users run by the same person that can be used to out-vote rival editors who want to make a change. Members even found evidence of two sock-puppet accounts threatening editors with violence if they didn't back off, according to a Wikipedia editor.
So while Wikipedia could not get its act together to take on the problem, poor students from rural areas of India, where Wikipedia was often the only source of information they could use to research which business school to attend were losing their farms.
In 2013, IIPM got an unexpected boost for its page. A new initiative launched by Jimmy Wales's Wikimedia Foundation offered free access to Wikipedia from mobile phones. The program, Wikipedia Zero, launched in India and other parts of the developing world, including Thailand, Myanmar, Morocco, Ghana and Malaysia.
Of course Wikimedia Foundation is apologetic but won't be offering compensation. After it all it was not its fault that its editorial system was designed to defend their admins what ever the cost and that because of the system it created, it allowed the scam to go for years.
Fortunately for Wackpedia, this happened in India, if it happened in the US it would be facing class actions and be made to think about its choices. But what are a few Indians who are too poor to sue eh?
