Wikipedia and Corporate Participation
It should come to no surprise that when companies have their pages in Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia edited by people, that their communications departments have a chance to play, too.
Wikiscanner, made by Virgil Griffith, has enabled a way for users to research the history and activity of the edits made to various articles, including the IP addresses who edited them.
Wired’s Threat Level ran the story and let their readers find rather interesting edits made among many companies for their financial interests. NY Times has now raised their eyebrow to this questionable activity, too. Maybe soon, Wikipedia will be taken more seriously.
Can’t we all just get along?
I’m probably the last person that would be defending Exxon or the MPAA for editing their own pages, but these companies have a corporate responsibility to play fair when it comes to user-generated communications. While at face value, they are “correcting wrong information,” their own financial and/or political interests end up corrupting Wikipedia. If you don’t like what someone has to say, participate in the talk section.
However, users shouldn’t jump to the conclusion that a company’s IP automatically means the edit is just propaganda. All information has to be questioned and verified, not just a company. Maybe there was more to a story than a former contributor once thought, this is where a company’s comm. department can help fill in the blanks and confusion.
If a company’s PR team is sweating, there’s really no need to. Just behave and understand that Wikipedia is a fully-disclosed entity, since that preserves the quality in their content. Maybe it’s been said before, but your own Wikipedia page should be read as if it was from an encyclopedia, not an advertisement. Using superlatives are the easiest sign that flags bias. However, using them in conjunction with quoted material is generally acceptable.
Is it just me, or do you think PR folks sometimes don’t understand the Web?
Stumble it!
August 28th, 2007 at 2:41 PM
I think the argument has been a bit one-sided. A lot of editing has been done to present oneself in a positive light in an effort to offset something slanderous. It’s all POV, so everyone, most of all the subject of the article, has the right to weigh in.
When it comes to an open source anyone can edit with anonymity, there can be no discussion of “ethics.” It’s preposterous to hold anyone’s behavior to ethical standards when their participating in something (Wikipedia) that is unethical intrinsically. Admins often take sides in disputes and preserve slanderous content (i.e. a reference to one netizen as a “kook” was defended by admins because they cited as an authoritative source some ridiculous vote in a Usenet news group). And one admin created a user box for some editor he didn’t like and defamed him in that user box. The admin in question, who calls himself Calton, admitted in a de facto livejournal entry that before Wikipedia was born, his hobby was writing negative reviews in Amazon.com of books whose author blogs he didn’t like. And we think there is any ethics attached to Wikipedia?