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
[1]
[2], 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.
[3]
[4]
[5]
[6], 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
[7]
[8]
[9]; 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)
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