Last week's rather disturbing story on the front page of PR Week [paywalled] has created something of a furore amongst us PR folk. Apparently, Wikipedia's founder Jim Wales is threatening to ban PR agencies from contributing to the esteemed site. Wales insists:
"There's a huge conflict of interest. Contributors cannot be paid for what they are doing."
It appears Wales spokeout after it emerged US firm MyWikiBiz had been banned from editing client entries in 2006, and also that Microsoft had been paying a blogger to amend its entries.
All essential PR bloggers have had pertinent comments to make on the subject (I personally cannot see what is wrong with PR people editing Wikipedia entries - after all, that is rather the raison d'etre of the whole thing and as long as one adheres to the guidelines, a PR person editing is no different to Joe Schmo editing) but there is one very interesting point to make that is actually listed in Wikipedia itself, under the Jim Wales entry:
"In late 2005, Wales was criticised for editing his own biography page on Wikipedia in a way some characterized as "revisionist history."In particular, Rogers Cadenhead drew attention to logs showing that Mr. Wales had removed references to Sanger as the co-founder of Wikipedia".
Interested parties can read the entire entry on Jim Wales themselves. One rule for one, one rule for everyone else?
When you say... people can 'read' Jim Wales' entry... what you mean is people can read/edit Jim Wales' entry ; )
Posted by: Simon Collister | February 08, 2007 at 14:27
That's how Jimbo rolls, Razorkitty. The self-editing of Larry Sanger out of the picture is just the tip of the iceberg. What about the many violations of the "External Links" policy, where Wikipedia gladly fosters over 3700 outbound links to Wikia.com -- which is owned by, guess who? Also, note that Jimbo's Wikia.com partner, Angela Beesley, often edits "her" article about Wikia within Wikipedia. No conflict of interest there?
Posted by: Gregory Kohs | February 07, 2007 at 22:05