By Konveyor Belt
In 2013 we discovered a number of administrators from India who secretly had conflicts of interests and were using Wikipedia for PR. Today, we reveal another.
Who is Tinucherian?
Wikipedia administrator Tinucherian’s user page proudly identifies him as Cherian Tinu Abraham, an Indian software engineer from Bangalore. He created his account in 2006 and quickly became very prolific, racking up tens of thousands of edits in his first few years. He also quickly collected user rights, culminating in his successful RFA (Request for Adminship) just three years into his editing career. He was also a member of the BAG (Bot Approvals Group) and the board of Wikimedia India. All these accomplishments and more are touted on his user page.
The recipe for a perfect Wikipedia career? Perhaps, if he had stuck with it. Through October 2009, the month he became an admin, Tinucherian had 46,655 edits. Since then, he has had 4,112 – most of them coming within a year after his RFA. Since the beginning of 2011, he has made just 1,269 edits. These days, there are regular spans of months where he makes no edits at all.
His bots stopped editing in 2011, and he was removed from the Bot Approvals Group for inactivity in 2018. In reality, his last BAG-related edit was on October 22 2009, the day after he became admin, but there was no way to remove inactive members before 2018.
Wikimedia India no longer lists him as a member of the board, though it is unclear when this took place. In any case, it no longer matters since Wikimedia India was deregistered by the Wikimedia Foundation in 2019.
Of course, there are many reasons why Wikipedia editors might become inactive, whether it be changes in their personal life or finding more rewarding hobbies. But the timing of the slowdown coming right after passing RFA is interesting, and we leave it to the reader to draw their own conclusions.
It definitely wasn’t because Tinucherian was burdened by admin work. His admin logs show just 223 logged actions since he became an administrator. When discounting test actions he made in his own userspace to learn the tools, that amount shrinks to 188.
Head of Global PR uses Wikipedia for global PR
However, one thing he has had time to do as an administrator is edit the Wikipedia pages of companies he worked for. In May 2019, he joined information technology company UST as the head of global PR. Later that year, he began editing their Wikipedia page, expanding it. Over time, he continued to watch over the article, adding references, removing negative information about layoffs, and even removing a maintenance tag that described the page as “containing] promotional content”. In terms of article content, he is responsible for 10.8% of the text in the article.
This seemingly isn’t UST’s first rodeo with promotional editing. Users Hariknair and RajTheGladiator also took a special interest in UST, making their only edits to the article. Fabiorahamim, another frequent editor to the UST page, links his LinkedIn on his user page. According to his LinkedIn, he works for CyberProof, a subsidiary of UST. Stevejross – their username sure resembles the name of Stephen Ross, one of the founders of UST. IP address 203.99.42.158, who heavily edited the article, is owned by UST.
But it’s also not Tinucherian’s first rodeo either. In 2008, he worked for Juniper Networks according to his userpage. He made many edits to that page as well, being responsible for 29.5% of the text there. Funnily enough, Juniper Networks later actually hired a paid editor, CorporateM. He went about it the officially sanctioned way, making a draft of proposed changes and posting it to the talk page for an uninvolved editor to add to the article. He later took the article through a successful Good Article review. The uninvolved editor who made his requested changes, Guy Macon, is responsible for 11.6% of the text in the article, less than Tinucherian. CorporateM’s disclosed paid editing and good article review only built on the undisclosed paid editing of Tinucherian, a fact likely unbeknownst to CorporateM.
If you take a look at the list of pages created by Tinucherian, the last article he created (in 2016) was Magician Philip (T–H–L). It was a redirect to Philip Tiju Abraham (T–H–L), which got deleted after an AFD in 2018. Philip Tiju Abraham is Tinucherian’s brother.
It’s not the case that Tinucherian was ignorant of Wikipedia’s conflict of interest (COI) policies. He had been employed at UST in the past and had disclosed his conflict of interest to UST in 2014. His edits at that time merely consisted of adding references for already written statements. When he was rehired in 2019, that ethical code slipped away. Seemingly emboldened by past success and his position as an administrator, he began making much more substantial changes.
The Cover-up
Recently, an IP user attempted to raise this issue, adding a tag to the page to mark it as promotional. Tinucherian reverted this addition, using rollback to do so, a right included in the administrator toolset. The IP reverted him back, accusing Tinucherian of having a conflict of interest in both the edit summary of that edit and a follow-up message on Tinucherian’s talk page.
The edit summary and part of the message were quickly suppressed, removing them from the public record. The IP address was reported to the dreaded ANI (Administrators’ Noticeboard/Incidents) for the crime of revealing Tinucherian’s COI. Even though Tinucherian had publicly linked his name on his user page and disclosed his COI on the talkpage, it is still forbidden to put two and two together and make four.
At press time, Tinucherian has not faced any consequences for his editing. Leekycauldron of the Arbitration Committee, which handles cases related to private information, has reached out to him by email for unknown purposes. Will Tinucherian resign? Will he be desysopped by the Arbitration Committee? Or will nothing happen at all? Either way, you won’t find out about it from Wikipedia.
Wikipedia continues to struggle with PR
So what can we make of this case? At first glance, this might seem like rather small potatoes. Tinucherian did disclose his conflict of interest way back when. Despite being an admin, he didn’t use any of his powers on the page until this past week. However, he never disclosed his COI on Juniper Networks. And Tinucherian’s status as an admin does confer special privileges. A new user editing the page would be unlikely to want to challenge an administrator on anything. Even most established editors would think twice. Wikipedia recognizes this effect, stating that administrators are held to a higher standard than the average user.
Overall, I think this shows that Wikipedia continues to have a problem with PR editing. UST is pretty obviously a PR article written mostly by paid editors, whether in conjunction with one another or not. Juniper Networks, despite being a “Good Article”, is also mostly PR, both disclosed and undisclosed. The era of the big busts of organized outfits like Orangemoody or Wiki-PR may be over, but individual PR editors remain. The case of Tinucherian shows that they can even be editors in a position of power.
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