In August 2006, a company called Wikipedia Review was launched to help people and companies promote themselves and shape their reputations on Wikipedia. “If your company or organization already has a well-designed, accurately-written article on Wikipedia, then congratulations—our services are not for you. However, if your business is lacking a well-written article on Wikipedia, read on—we’re here to help you!”55 Wikipedia Review offers to create a basic Wikipedia stub of three to five sentences about a company, with some links, for $49. A “standard article” fetches $79, with a premium service ($99) that includes checking the client’s Wikipedia article after a year to see “if further changes are needed.”56
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Wikipedia’s reaction to Wikipedia Review was swift. Jimbo himself blocked the firm’s Wikipedia account on the basis of “paid editing on behalf of customers.”57 The indefinite block was one of only a handful recorded by Jimbo in Wikipedia’s history. Wales talked to the firm on the phone the same day and reported that they had come to an accommodation. Identifying the problem as a conflict of interest and appearance of impropriety arising from editors being paid to write by the subjects of the articles, Wales said that Wikipedia Review had agreed to post well-sourced “neutral point of view” articles about its clients on its own Web site, which regular Wikipedians could then choose to incorporate or not as they pleased into Wikipedia.58 Other Wikipedians disagreed with such a conservative outcome, believing that good content was good content, regardless of source, and that it should be judged on its merits, without a per se rule prohibiting direct entry by a for-profit firm like Wikipedia Review.
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The accommodation was short-lived. Articles submitted or sourced by Wikipedia Review were nominated for deletion—itself a process that entails a discussion among any interested Wikipedians and then a judgment by any administrator about whether that discussion reached consensus on a deletion. Wikipedia Review participated wholeheartedly in those discussions and appealed to the earlier “Jimbo Concordat,” persuading some Wikipedians to remove their per se objections to an article because of its source. Wales himself participated in one of the discussions, saying that his prior agreement had been misrepresented and, after telling Wikipedia Review that it was on thin ice, once again banned it for what he viewed as spamming Wikipedia with corporate advertisements rather than “neutral point of view” articles.
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As a result, Wikipedia Review has gone into “hibernation,” according to its founder, who maintains that all sources, even commercial ones, should be able to play a role in contributing to Wikipedia, especially since the sources for most articles and edits are not personally identifiable, even if they are submitted under the persistent pseudonyms that are Wikipedia user identities. Rules have evolved concerning those identities, too. In 2007, Wikipedia user Essjay, the administrator who cleaned Seigenthaler’s defamatory edit logs, was found to have misrepresented his credentials. Essjay had claimed to hold various graduate degrees along with a professorship in theology, and had contributed to many Wikipedia articles on the subject. When Jimbo Wales contacted him to discuss a job opportunity at Wales’s for-profit company Wikia, Essjay’s real identity was revealed. In fact, he was a twenty-four-year-old editor with no graduate degrees. His previous edits—and corresponding discussions in which he invoked his credentials—were called into question. In response to the controversy, and after a request for comments from the Wikipedia community,59 Jimbo proposed a rule whereby the credentials of those Wikipedia administrators who chose to assert them would be verified.60 Essjay retired from Wikipedia.

I'm going to be a bit naughty and reproduce the Wikipedia Review paragraphs for readers as they do a good job in clarifying the episode. Greg, you've entered the history books!

In response to the controversy, and after a request for comments from the Wikipedia community,59 Jimbo proposed a rule whereby the credentials of those Wikipedia administrators who chose to assert them would be verified.

Does the book also mention that this proposal was totally rejected by the Faithful?