The foundation that supports Wikipedia's volunteer editors announced this week that it is suspending more than 250 accounts accused of being paid "sock puppets" who may have manipulated articles on behalf of clients.

“It looks like it is manipulation on a scale and a level that we haven’t seen before in the encyclopedia,” Sue Gardner, Wikimedia Foundation’s executive director told The Wall Street Journal. “There has never been an investigation of this scope, scale, duration and seriousness.”

In a post on the Wikimedia Foundation site, Gardner said they are currently assessing "all the options" to continue monitoring the situation.

"Editing-for-pay has been a divisive topic inside Wikipedia for many years, particularly when the edits to articles are promotional in nature," Gardner said. "Unlike a university professor editing Wikipedia articles in their area of expertise, paid editing for promotional purposes, or paid advocacy editing as we call it, is extremely problematic. We consider it a 'black hat' practice. Paid advocacy editing violates the core principles that have made Wikipedia so valuable for so many people."

The announcement is an unusual move for the online encyclopedia as Wikipedia prides itself on self-governing where the community will often weed out unattributed or biased edits to articles.

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www.politico.com/blogs/media/2013/10/wikipedia-suspends-accounts-suspected-of-editing-