Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2023-04-03/Disinformation report

The financial sector of the economy has taken a beating over the last few weeks. Three of the larger US mid-sized banks, Silicon Valley Bank (SVB), Signature Bank and Silvergate Capital collapsed or closed their business in March. They had all been important sources of dollars for cryptocurrency traders. The run on SVB was the "largest bank run in modern U.S. history".

Outside the US, Credit Suisse, one of the thirty most systemically important banks in the world, had to be bailed out by another systemically important Swiss bank, UBS, with the help of the Swiss central bank.

Fortunately, the threat of bank runs seems to be over. The US stock market even went up in March. But the finance sector has one eternal problem – the only product it can sell is trust. Bank depositors need to trust that they can get their money back at a moment's notice. Stock market traders should know that buying stocks is risky, but they need to trust that they will be treated fairly by corporate management and when the time comes to sell the stocks. Without trust, there is no financial sector.

So should we trust banks? Do they lie to us? This article examines this question from a special Wikipedia point of view. On the English-language Wikipedia, do banks follow Wikipedia's rules on paid editing? Or are the articles about banks riddled with falsehoods placed there by sock puppets? I examine the articles about the thirty most systemically important banks in the world, as listed by the Financial Stability Board.

The answers are not uniform for all thirty banks. On average, each of the bank articles examined has been edited by 17.5 socks. The range is very wide however. The article on France's Groupe BPCE was edited by only one blocked sock, the lowest number. The article on America's Goldman Sachs was edited by 55 blocked socks, the highest number. So it appears that at least some of the world's systemically important banks might have been breaking our rules.