Wikipedia leeches? The promotion of traffic through a collaborative web format

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Citation: Ganaele Langlois, Greg Elmer (2009) Wikipedia leeches? The promotion of traffic through a collaborative web format. New Media & Society (RSS)
DOI (original publisher): 10.1177/1461444809105351
Semantic Scholar (metadata): 10.1177/1461444809105351
Sci-Hub (fulltext): 10.1177/1461444809105351
Internet Archive Scholar (search for fulltext): Wikipedia leeches? The promotion of traffic through a collaborative web format
Tagged: media studies (RSS), new media (RSS), spamdexing (RSS), Wikipedia (RSS), information society (RSS), information politics (RSS), information ecosystem (RSS), search engines (RSS), bad actors (RSS)

Summary

This paper is, in some ways, inspired by a comment by Seignethaler:

"At age 78, I thought I was beyond surprise or hurt at anything negative said about me. I was wrong. One sentence in the biography was true. I was Robert Kennedy’s administrative assistant in the early 1960s. I also was his pallbearer. It was mind-boggling when my son, John Seigenthaler, journalist with NBC News, phoned later to say he found the same scurrilous text on Reference.com and Answers.com." (Seigenthaler, 2005)

Mirror websites commercialise by

  • simply adding ads to content
  • add non-Wikipedia content, also serving ads
  • use content to improve search engine rankings:
    • spamdexing "webpages filled with Wikipedia content are created for the purpose of attracting traffic from search engines, but users are actually redirected automatically to another page full of advertisement." so "the content literally disappears to make way for sponsored advertising"
    • mirrors with query words in the URL
    • metatag stuffing

Ironically, this "freezes content and renders it static". Commercial entities can appropriation free content more easily with dynamic production techniques. Authorship is delegated to machine processes, shifting from using tags/categories to use of whole sentences.

  • People use (and trust!) search engines for finding things
  • Manipulation of ranking results
  • Search engines are commercial entities, based on advertising, causing some conflicts of interest and paradoxes, for instance making money off of spamdexing (which undermines them)

Search engines can be undermined by spamdexing while making money out of them; "search engines cannot be considered as filters or mediators of content, but need to be acknowledged as commercial actors playing an important role in the informational politics of the web."


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