This probably happens quite a lot. Not every subject in Wikipedia will have a vigilant editor.
There was an article about ships owned by a major commodities trader dumping poison in the ocean, and they got their PR company to edit the article. I'm quite confident this is actually true because someone (inside) alerted me to the guy's name used to edit Wikipedia, and then showed me the PR company's people page.
Hard to see what can be done about this though. If someone is being paid, they have a lot more time to cleverly word their story. In some cases legitimately, in others not.
That's actually a good example of the strengths and weaknesses of Wikipedia. A pretty terrible opening paragraph, and a jumble of snippets of poorly-integrated information - but organised into sections covering a series of issues, and a lots of links and references that give a very good overview. Compared to a Google search (sans Wikipedia), or britannica.com it's brilliant.
Yes it's a problem, but perhaps less than you might think.
First, in most cases PR spin has a "smell". Spotting that in an article an editor may dig into the edit history - where the story will be pretty clear of which links are removed, wording changed etc.
There are about half the editors that there were a few years back, but many will work on a very wide variety of articles, and in many cases spotting and resolving "spin" issues doesn't require special expertise - and just highlighting that spin is going on can be useful in itself.
Pro-tip: When reading anything on Wikipedia it's often useful to check the associated "Talk" page for any ongoing controversy, and the "History" page to see what the article said 6 months ago.
In essence the controversy was a number of sites working to get some ad dollars. I never bothered to figure out how to fix this, luckily some volunteer did.
I don't understand what you're trying to say here. Are you trying to say that calling a milk and coffee ice cream drink a MooLatte is not racist and that the product was not quickly withdrawn from the market?
The Wikipedia page for Dairy Queen mentions the MooLatte drink. Previous versions of the page mentioned the controversy about the name. The current version of the page doesn't. Since there are plenty of online sources talking about the name it seems to meet notability requirements, so the fact that the information has been edited out might be evidence of a problem.
There was an article about ships owned by a major commodities trader dumping poison in the ocean, and they got their PR company to edit the article. I'm quite confident this is actually true because someone (inside) alerted me to the guy's name used to edit Wikipedia, and then showed me the PR company's people page.
Hard to see what can be done about this though. If someone is being paid, they have a lot more time to cleverly word their story. In some cases legitimately, in others not.