Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2023-07-03/Disinformation report

OceanGate's Titan submersible was "an accident waiting to happen".^[1] On June 18, Titan imploded. Its wreckage – and the remains of its five occupants — sank to the bottom of the sea. OceanGate's management heard an assessment that Titan was not fit for use in January 2018 from David Lockridge, their employee who had the ultimate responsibility for ensuring the safety of all crew and clients. Lockridge was soon fired, and Oceangate began a series of advertisements on Wikipedia a month later.

This Signpost investigation shows that suspected OceanGate employees inserted text directly from OceanGate's website more than eight times. When this text was deleted by a Wikipedia administrator, OceanGate added more advertising material. This new text was deleted by a well-known Wikipedian because it was promotional and apparently added by an undeclared paid editor (UPE). A third attempt to add a large amount of promotional material, which increased the article size by more than ten times, was reverted by another administrator.

Of course, Wikipedia's revision histories do not allow us to be completely certain of an editor's true identity. For example, Joe's enemy Sue can just make an account called "Joe12345", make a scene, and blame it on Joe (in an appropriately-named "Joe job"). Nonetheless, the duration of the advertising campaign, and the amount of text added to the article, makes a Joe job seem quite unlikely.

This article builds on a revelation by Annie Rauwerda in her Depths of Wikipedia Tik Tok account. She shows the edit history of the OceanGate article had a series of edits by DanaOceanGate that were RevDeleted because of copyright violations.