Submitted by Heywood_Floyd in Tech

One of the biggest problems with Wikipedia since The Popularity began has to be the paid editing of articles on corporations, private colleges, the bios of any living person, and so on. As with most things Wikipedia, paid editing breaks their rules on conflict of interest but it happens so much, all the ever-shrinking army of editors do is ban the most egregious cases.

One such case is Wifione. He/she/it/they was banned a month ago or so for being a sockpuppet army of paid editing, though knowing socks, Wifione will re-emerge with another lame pun for a handle and a slightly-different IP. So who were "they"? One of my sources thinks Wifione was possibly a former Wikipedia admin called "Nichalp" who was also "Zithan" and the Zithan account was a paid editor (which was banned in 2009, and Nichalp lost IP oversight privileges.) Whatever the username, the paid editor was allegedly a University of Mumbai electronic engineering graduate named Nicholas Alphonso who now lives in Australia. He started appearing online in 2002 at the age of 19, possibly using a college computer. But there are complications with that claim of ownership, because it turns out Wifione had more predecessors, all of them from India. But first, who were they allegedly working for?

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