 | WARNING!
To all AfC participants: You may be the target of paid editing scams. If you have been contacted or solicited by anyone for payment to get a draft into article space, improve a draft, or restore a deleted article, such offers are not legitimate and you should contact paid-en-wp wikipedia.org immediately. |
The scam may work as follows:
- A paid editing ring might file for an article's deletion, decline an article proposed at Articles for Creation, or wait until the article has been declined by an actual AFC reviewer.
- A paid editor will then contact the author of the article and propose that they can recreate the article for a one-time fee and protect it from deletion for a monthly fee, or approve the draft and ensure its "safety" in the article space.
- If the article is again deleted or declined, as is often the case, the original author will not be able to get a refund.
- Some of the scammers falsely claimed to be Wikipedia administrators or employees of the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF).
Bona fide reviewers at Articles for Creation are all volunteers and will never ask anyone for payment to get a draft into article space, improve a draft, or restore a deleted article. If someone contacts you with such an offer, this is a scam. To report it, please send a copy of the email, including headers, to paid-en-wpwikipedia.org.
What you can expect
- Paid editors are not employed by the Wikimedia Foundation or by the Wikipedia community. They have no authority beyond that of any volunteer editor.
- Paid editors are obligated to follow Wikipedia's conflict of interest management process of disclosure and peer review.
- Paid editors are obligated to disclose their employer, client, and related affiliations on Wikipedia if they are paid or expect to be paid for editing; there is no confidentiality for the client.
- If paid editors cannot provide you with a link to an on-Wiki paid editing disclosure, they are violating our rules. Some paid editors create "sockpuppets" for each client they work with and try to hide their paid editing. Edits by sockpuppets can be deleted without discussion.
- Paid editors cannot simply copy material from your website and put it in an article without a written release from you.
- Edits by paid editors should be peer reviewed to ensure compliance with Wikipedia's policies and guidelines before being submitted, and their edits will be reviewed afterwards through the course of normal editing by the Wikipedia community.
- No editor can guarantee any outcome in Wikipedia – not that an article will be kept or deleted, nor that any content will remain or be deleted, nor that any tags will remain or be removed.
If you receive a solicitation for paid editing services that contradict any of the above, the paid editor is misleading you. Before considering employing a paid editor you should read WP:Paid editing disclosure and WP:Conflicts of interest and ensure that the paid editors are following these rules. You should also make sure that you have the paid editor's complete contact information, in case you have a business dispute or complaint.
We ask that you report any attempted paid editing scams to paid-en-wp wikipedia.org.
The Wikipedia community consists mainly of volunteers. As much as we would like to assure you that we will catch any scammers and get your money returned, that may be impossible. Your report of any scams related to Wikipedia will however help us minimize the effects of future scams.
In serious cases of fraud, you might also consider making a report to the police or other authorities.