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I am Britishfinance. I came to WP in early 2018 because I was sick of reading misleading taxation articles and had the time to see if I could fix them. Only after about 6 months did I finally grasp how to write in a WP-way (e.g. summarizing verifiable high quality independent secondary sources), and had to re-write most of my earlier stuff. I caught the bug and started doing WP articles on a wide range of subjects, and getting WP rights and tools. In June 2018, I came across the WP:BLP of Martin Shanahan, the CEO of IDA Ireland, which had been tagged by a senior WP admin, Kudpung, as being a WP:COI. As I tried to fix it and remove the WP:PROMO elements (it read like a brochure), I met some aggressive editors, who it would be subsequently revealed worked for IDA Ireland, and who made some nasty allegations about me on the Martin Shanahan Talk Page. They got banned, and I left the article. However, in April 2019 an Irish technology entrepreneur Paddy Cosgrave, tweeted that the IDA had been caught manipulating the BLP of their CEO , and it was picked up by the Irish and UK media. The IDA "spun" the story to journalists that they had to hire editors to combat my "negative" edits and that I was a "paid agent", however, the reality was that they had been using hired editors (probably for some time), to edit WP articles relating to Irish tax (and their CEO). The IDA's misinformation inspired vandalism of Irish tax-related articles E.g. , and a WP ANI case (which cleared me of WP:PAID), and some nasty reddit threads (showing some used WP:SOCK accounts to vandalise these WP articles). Cosgrave then set up a fake-Facebook campaign highlighting issues with Ireland's tax system that linked to some of my articles (e.g. QIAIF, and Section 110 SPV). Cosgrave's campaign was exposed and led to further articles on me ; some included tax experts who seemed to have no issues with the WP articles (E.g. Mark Gorman, Partner Anderson Tax Dublin). Eventually, the Washington Post reported on the affair: "Politicians, policymakers, and the legal-finance profession responded vigorously and tried to discredit the Wikipedia articles. But none of these critiques have challenged their substantive truth". One of these articles (which I overhauled, not created), Leprechaun economics, was cited by Paul Krugman (major high), while another of these articles (I also overhauled, not created), Double Irish arrangement, was cited by the Council on Foreign Relations as the "best source" for the topic.
While stressful, it showed WP works; where the fact-base supports (e.g. quality independent secondary sources), so does the community. However, the IDA/reddit trolling on Irish tax-related articles will carry on. (POSTSCRIPTi: Even more surreal, the above appeared in the Irish Sunday Business Post; albeit with "IDA editing") (POSTSCRIPTii: The affair made it to The Signpost here) |
