Over on another thread, I was asked about Schwartz PR (note, correct spelling).

Their HQ offices are in Waltham, Massachusetts. Recall a few years back when the Wikimania 2006 was held in Cambridge, Massachusetts? In the months running up to the conference, Schwartz PR lent some pro bono promotional & marketing assistance to the Wikimedia Foundation.

I immediately noticed that Schwartz PR (or, Schwartz Communications) wasted no time in posting on their corporate website that, among their clients, was the Wikimedia Foundation. (That's how I even noticed this whole to-do, in the first place.) Then I looked up and found their User account on Wikipedia. I also looked up their corporate "article" within Wikipedia, and (if I recall correctly) it was very clear (from the user name) that a company principal had authored it. At the time, I was in the very formative stages of conceptualizing Wikipedia Review as a paid editing service, and I was thinking that -- "Hey, if they offered some pro bono work and got a special deal within Wikipedia, maybe I should do some pro bono work for the Foundation, too." I decided that a phone call to Schwartz's Rob Skinner would be useful to find out exactly how much effort they put into the Wikimania project.

Skinner as much as told me that it was a very tiny amount of some local pre-event boosting among the Boston tech field. Not much at all.

But they had parlayed that into listing Wikimedia as a "client" on their own website, and getting this special account on Wikipedia (that they didn't even seem to know how to use effectively).

Well, it didn't take me long (after Jimbo bashed Wikipedia Review) to start pointing out how hypocritical was the Wikimedia governance, that they'd give a little "tit for tat" to those firms that give them services for free, all in defiance of several WP rules against multi-user role accounts, corporate accounts, COI editing, etc. All I had to do was mention the favoritism on a few Wiki-community pages, and the Hive did the rest -- they had the Schwartz Communications article AfD'd in days.

That's about it.

EDIT 1: I should probably also mention that the Wikimedia Foundation tax Forms 990 for the relevant period(s) leading up to and including the Wikimania 2006 stated that the WMF had received donated services (line 82a), but they elected not to attach a cash value to these items (line 82b).

EDIT 2: My data banks remind me that this edit was apparently humorous enough for me to e-mail it to someone in October 2006. I suppose a Wikipedia administrator might have access to the now-deleted edit and could contemplate re-posting it here?

EDIT 3: I had a few things to say about PR firms and Wikipedia, back in late 2006.

Bumping thread, so that a Wikipedia administrator might see the item in red above.

I can see the deleted revisions, but I can't figure out which revision you were trying to link to there (when admins click on the link to a deleted revision, we get the same error screen the rest of you do, except that we have a link on it that says "View or restore X deleted edits"). None of those edits seem to make use of the 80691541 that we're looking for - instead, they all use a twelve digit code in the form YYYYMMDDXXXX. If you can remember anything at all about the edit, I should be able to retrieve it. Or a more savvy admin could figure out something that I'm missing about revision labelling.

From SC's web page:



Imagine the mischief that sentence could hide.

How many edits were there to the article, in total? Can you see the name of the editor for each edit? I think it would be one of the edits executed by Schwartz PR, or by an IP address that geo-locates to the Boston area.

Can't you just browse through them, one-by-one, until you find one that's self-flattering or conflicted or funny in some way?

Greg

My best guess would be that you meant a revision in which an I.P. (which appears to geolocate to Atlanta, though I'm not very good with this stuff) removed a proposed deletion tag with the summary "keep, we must keep those who bribe us".

The only edit by [[User:Schwartz PR]] (using wiki notation solely to distinguish the account from the company) was to correct a typo. There were several by I.P.s, and I haven't run whois on all of them, but none of their edits strike me as especially funny.

"keep, we must keep those who bribe us"

...is pretty damn funny.

I hadn't been near Atlanta at that time, though, so don't look at me.

There's no comment anywhere close to "Keep, we must keep those who bribe us" in the history. Sorry to ruin a good story with facts.

Um, here's the (admin only) link.

Apparently I can't read.

I think there should be a [[Schwartz Communications]] article again. There's lots of sources. Anybody else agree?

May The Schwartz Be With You …

Ja Ja