The brilliance of Wikipedia is that a it's free—slogan: Because Wikipedia is such a great, quick, incredibly accessible source for the world, much is at stake for the companies, products, and people catalogued on the site, which has nearly 5 million articles in English and millions more in dozens of other languages.

And sometimes, as an investigation by The Atlantic reports, those with interests in how they're described on Wikipedia resort to paying freelance writers, PR firms, and assorted Wikipedia "experts" to make adjustments to the site. For example, there are celebrities and politicians who would prefer that scandals they have been tied to would disappear, or at least be toned down in Wikipedia entries. Businesses understandably want to have their products and services painted in the best light too.

But the editing done at Wikipedia is supposed to be done with no money changing hands. If it was paid it would be a different site.

Yet the practice of paying for Wikipedia editing has been chronicled for years—in by the International Business Times , for instance, up through The Atlantic's new report about "The Covert World of People Trying to Edit Wikipedia—for Pay. How much are people paid to massage clients' Wikipedia pages, or to write them from scratch?

There's no set rate. He also said that many of his clients are big shots: A Wikipedia entry will be flagged if the tone is clearly biased, or if it is lacking in verifiable, reliable sources. So it's not like these editors can write whatever they want without some checks and balances.

How To Make Money Using Wikipedia | Smart Earning Methods

What makes the services of these writers worth paying for, then, is the ability to walk the tricky line of sculpting the content in the favor of your client without going too far and getting busted. After all, as Dariusz Jemielniak, author of Common Knowledge?: Investing Why Amazon's Whole Foods Deal Will Hit Costco the Hardest.

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