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Wikipedia Pages of Star Clients Altered by P.R. Firm

LOS ANGELES — Even by her own account, the supermodel Naomi Campbell’s 1994 album “Babywoman” didn’t amount to much.

“At least I tried,” was the best Ms. Campbell could say of the R&B recording, which was critically drubbed and sold poorly in much of the world (though Japan loved it), during an interview with Kenya’s Daily Nation in 2001.

Yet Ms. Campbell’s Wikipedia entry has been brushed up, to eliminate a potentially embarrassing reference to “Babywoman” as a “critical and commercial failure.”

And that edit helped prompt claims last week that Sunshine Sachs, a powerful public relations firm that represents Ms. Campbell and others, has played loose with Wikipedia’s standards and recently violated the site’s updated terms of use agreement, by employing paid editors who fail to disclose their conflict of interest on the website.

Based in New York with offices here and in Washington, Sunshine Sachs has specialized in crisis communications and the representation of Hollywood clients who have included Ben Affleck, Leonardo DiCaprio and the Hollywood Foreign Press Association and its Golden Globe Awards.

In an email on Friday, Ken Sunshine, a founder of Sunshine Sachs, acknowledged that several staff members had violated the terms of use by failing to disclose their association with the firm. Mr. Sunshine said a key employee in his web operation was not aware of Wikipedia’s new terms. All employees who edit on Wikipedia have now disclosed their affiliation with Sunshine, he added.

“We think the rules are important, and will make sure we are always in compliance moving forward,” he said.

While Hollywood public relations firms are always vigilant about the reputation of clients, many large communications companies have become wary of direct intervention on the web. As the Wikimedia Foundation’s new terms of use were being formulated last year, several dozen large publicity firms, including Ogilvy & Mather, Edelman and FleishmanHillard, pledged to observe the foundation’s policies against covert editing.

Their stance was consistent with a growing wariness among professional communicators of hidden online maneuvers that might ultimately be discovered by investigators. “Most big firms try to stay away from Internet reputation management where employees go in, because it leaves a trail,” said Ross Johnson, a communications consultant based here who has worked with Sitrick and Company and PMK-BNC, both of which have a Hollywood presence.

Wikipedia, a crowd-sourced, group-edited compilation of information, has formally required such disclosure since June 16, 2014, when its sponsoring Wikimedia Foundation tightened practices. The move followed repeated controversies over self-interested editing on the site, including a 2012 controversy that resulted in Wikipedia’s ban on 250 user accounts associated with Wiki-PR, a consulting firm.

Even before the terms of use were tightened, the Wikimedia Foundation strongly discouraged paid advocacy editing by public relations firms and others. In October 2013 statement, Sue Gardner, the foundation’s executive director at the time, said paid advocacy “violates the core principles that have made Wikipedia so valuable for so many people.”

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A public relations firm that represents the supermodel Naomi Campbell erased a Wikipedia mention of her panned R&B album.CreditKrista Schlueter for The New York Times

Since the crackdown, the wikiwars have been relatively quiet. Or they were until last Tuesday, when Wiki Strategies, an independent consultant that advises clients on ways to patrol their Wikipedia presence without violating the rules — and therefore has a competitive interest in spotting violations of the sort Sunshine Sachs acknowledged — posted a report from a paid researcher.

In it, Jack Craver, a researcher and freelance journalist who was hired to examine the Sunshine Sachs posts, described traced edits in several Wikipedia pages — before and after the new terms of use were put in place — to accounts associated with Sunshine Sachs, which also represented the subjects.

The celebrities involved included Ms. Campbell, the actress Mia Farrow and the singer Sarah Brightman. The changes were traced to a number of user names. But the most prominent fixes were made by an editor with the user name Alexdltb, whom Mr. Craver determined, using social media tracks and other web sources, to be Alexander De la Torre Bueno, a Sunshine Sachs employee.

It wasn’t all guesswork. Pete Forsyth, a Wiki Strategies partner, had been tipped by someone — Mr. Forsyth declined to be more specific about the tipster — who sent him a Sunshine Sachs email that in April of this year told recipients: “We’re here to help your clients edit their pages!”

The email, a copy of which was provided to The New York Times and which Mr. Sunshine acknowledged had been sent by an employee, identified 10 clients who had already been helped and cited Mr. De la Torre Bueno as a key member of the Wikipedia cleanup team. “Sunshine Sachs has a number of experienced editors on staff that have established profiles on Wikipedia,” said the email. “The changes we make to existing pages are rarely challenged.”

Asked whether paid advocacy editing remains common, Mr. Forsyth said, “I don’t think that’s something that really can be known.” He said that Wikipedia’s insistence on protecting the anonymity of contributors is at odds with its concerns about conflict of interest.

Samantha Lien, a Wikimedia Foundation spokeswoman, said in an email of the claims of editing by Sunshine Sachs: “Though we’re not familiar with this specific case, we will look into it, as we would with any cases that may present violations to our terms of use.” Ms. Lien said the group had seen no evidence of “consistent, organized, or large-scale abuses” of the disclosure requirement since it went into effect.

In his email on Friday, Mr. Sunshine said he believed than any edits to client pages, whether for Ms. Campbell or others, before the June 2014 change in terms of use were within the then-existing rules. (Mr. Sunshine, who acknowledged that Mr. De la Torre Bueno was responsible for fixing client pages without disclosure, declined to make him available for an interview.)

Mr. Craver’s post said that many of the changes actually proved helpful, by updating factual information, rewriting poorly worded sentences or fixing broken links.

But many of the changes occurred after the new rules were put in place. A log of edits showed at least 18 changes this year to an entry about Ms. Farrow.

In one of those changes, for instance, an entry describing a visit to Ecuador deleted the words: “Farrow’s activities in Ecuador, however, garnered negative publicity.”

“The conversation surrounding crowd-sourced information is tricky and ever-evolving,” Mr. Sunshine said in his email.

“Our aim is to ensure that information published about our clients is factually accurate and appropriately sourced.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page B3 of the New York edition with the headline: A P.R. Firm Alters Wikipedia Pages of Its Star Clients. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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