BPP’s PR agency has been blocked from Wikipedia after attempting to edit the university’s entry on the website.
The open-collaborative online encyclopedia had previously warned a user from the BPP internal PR team.
The university’s PR agency, Gerard Kelly & Partners has been banned from editing Wikipedia pages after it attempted to change parts of its Wikipedia entry.
A user with the name of BPP’s head of brand Natalie Procter was initially given a warning in 2018 for removing content and templates on Wikipedia without valid reason. The edits were removed, with the original posts added back in.
She was again called out by Wikipedia in October 2020 for continuously adding promotional and advertising material to the BPP’s page. Procter has been warned she may be blocked.
GKP’s account was blocked indefinitely in November for editing the BPP page. GKP requested to be unblocked and this was declined.
A BPP spokesperson said: “As part of a periodic review of BPP University’s entry in Wikipedia, we added some relevant citation templates including the granting of indefinite taught degree awarding powers (TDAP) under the Office for Students (OfS) new regulatory framework.
“We consider these changes to be minor, constructive edits or as Wikipedia describes, ‘uncontroversial changes’. We also felt that some additions to the page from other users were factually incorrect, and these inaccuracies have now been logged with Wikipedia. We apologise that we did not propose changes to the ‘article discussion/talk page’ and, will ensure we follow Wikipedia’s guidance on this in the future.”
A GKP spokesperson added: “In future, and as advised by Wikipedia, we will request any changes through the article talk page using the edit request template. We have explained the circumstance to Wikipedia and our block has already been downgraded subject to us complying with rules surrounding paid contribution disclosure which we fully agree with.”
Organisations in the legal sector have had trouble navigating the world of online marketing before. In 2014, Irwin Mitchell found itself on the wrong side of Google, which removed the firm’s domain names from its organic search listings as a penalty for hyperlinking to its sites via numerous blog and forum posts.
