page_title: Conflict-of-interest editing on Wikipedia
section_title: The North Face
hierarchical_section_title: Conflict-of-interest editing on Wikipedia / Incidents / 2010s / The North Face
caption_attribution_description: Português: Foto aérea do Parque da Guarita em Torres-RS, Brasil.
context_page_description: Conflict-of-interest editing on Wikipedia occurs when editors use Wikipedia to advance the interests of their external roles or relationships. The type of COI editing of most concern on Wikipedia is paid editing for public relations purposes. Several Wikipedia policies and guidelines exist to combat conflict of interest editing, including Wikipedia:Conflict of interest and Wikipedia:Paid-contribution disclosure.
  Controversies reported by the media include United States congressional staff editing articles about members of Congress in 2006; Microsoft offering a software engineer money to edit articles on competing code standards in 2007; the PR firm Bell Pottinger editing articles about its clients in 2011; and the discovery in 2012 that British MPs or their staff had removed criticism from articles about those MPs. The media has also written about COI editing by BP, the Central Intelligence Agency, Diebold, Portland Communications, Sony, the Vatican, and several others.
  In 2012, Wikipedia launched one of its largest sockpuppet investigations, when editors reported suspicious activity suggesting 250 accounts had been used to engage in paid editing.
context_section_description: In May 2019, marketing agency Leo Burnett Tailor Made revealed they had been hired by outdoor clothing company The North Face to replace images of outdoor destinations with photos containing the company's apparel, in an attempt to get its apparel to appear at the top of Google results through search engine optimization. Following media coverage, the photos were all removed from articles and some modified by Wikimedia Commons users to remove or obscure the branding. The Wikimedia Foundation condemned the stunt, stating in a press release: "when The North Face exploits the trust you have in Wikipedia to sell you more clothes, you should be angry. Adding content that is solely for commercial promotion goes directly against the policies, purpose and mission of Wikipedia".
  After Wikipedia volunteers blocked the accounts involved for breaches of Wikipedia policies on paid editing, The North Face posted a response as a reply on Twitter, stating that they had ended the campaign and that "We believe deeply in Wikipedia's mission and apologize for engaging in activity inconsistent with those principles." Leo Burnett Tailor Made also issued a statement, stating that they "found a unique way to contribute photography of adventure destinations to their respective Wikipedia articles while achieving the goal of elevating those images in search rankings" and that they had "since learned that this effort worked counter to Wikipedia’s community guidelines." The community of Wikimedia Commons started a process to delete the images. After half a month of discussion, all the images were deleted on copyright grounds.
  The campaign was described as "wildly misguided" and as having "egregiously violated just about every principle you can think about with respect to trying to maintain consumer trust" by Americus Reed, a professor of marketing at the University of Pennsylvania in an interview to The New York Times.
caption: Guarita State Park was one of several articles affected by a covert advertising campaign. The article's previous main image (above) was briefly replaced by one prominently featuring a man in a North Face jacket.
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