Todd Defren on PR Editing Wikipedia
Todd Defren has kindly mentioned me at his blog – PR Squared – regarding whether or not PR practitioners should be allowed to edit the Public relations entry at Wikipedia.
First of all, thank you, Todd. Your article was very interesting. I am flattered by your endorsement, too. Not sure I’m worthy, but grateful for your kind comments.
Looking at the PR entry at Wikipedia, I see it has had 75 edits (or attempts) since October 1. Most have been reverted.
However, I wouldn’t touch that entry with a 10-foot mouse pointer. The ideal behind Wikipedia is great. The reality of Wikipedia is sometimes irrational and always unpredicatable. There is legitimately valid information in there. But, to assure you are getting valid information users must fisk out the details on every entry. Wikipedia cannot possibly have enough editors to keep up with all those articles.
For Wales to suggest that the editors of Wikipedia do not have any “conflict(s)-of-interest” or “agendas” is hard to fathom. First, the editors are anonymous, for the most part. Most of the attempted edits are identified solely by IP numbers. Those with authority to roll back the changes are identified as Raul654 (Mark Pellegrini) and GraemeL (no identity provided), for example.
Wales may know who they all are, but we sure don’t. Are we just expected to trust Wales? He doesn’t trust all of us. Why should we trust him? There is no way for the casual observer, and I doubt even Wales, to identify all of the editors at Wikipedia. And, we’ve seen enough stories about false entries and the process of having them fixed, or removed, before. That’s another topic, but something Wikipedia has never fully resolved. I don’t think that one can be resolved under their present practices, either.
On the one hand, I have seen Wales reference court documents allowing Wikipedia information to stand as evidence. On the other hand, I’ve seen him suggest that people shouldn’t take everything in Wikipedia as fact. Well, which is it? You can’t have it both ways.
You’d think, with all of this anonymity, the site would be a haven for Strumpette, for example. However, “Strumpet now on the spam blacklist” appears in the history of edits on the PR entry (Source and the evidence of Strumpette’s anonymous self-promotion within Wikipedia. Also see: “You’ve already been warned three times about linking to your own sites.”) Someone tried to make an anonymous reference to Strumpette in the entry. These edits came from the same IP – 207.229.142.248 – as we’ve seen in various blog spam and attacks – 207-229-142-248 (dot) hnc-bsr1.chi-hnc.il (dot) cable.rcn.com. Now that is funny. Gee, wonder who that might have been?
If someone were to ever try and create an entry or edit an entry, for a client or themselves, I believe they should sign their name. Their real name, not “Lord Zorg” or some such nonsense. Go ahead, call me naive. I know.
Finally, if Wales and the editors think their site hasn’t been “played” by people with agendas already, they are the most naive people on planet earth. There are currently (as of this writing) 1,441,783 entries in Wikipedia. Is anyone, with a straight face, going to suggest that all of the information in there is sans opinions and agendas? Please. It can change in an instant by just signing up and creating an account. How many edits are made a day? Can the editors really keep up with all of that? I doubt it.
Now, for the punchline. Todd kindly singles me out as an example of a potential editor for the PR entry. Guess where Jimmy Wales went to school? Auburn University. Yep, he has a “Bachelor’s degree in finance from Auburn University and started with the Ph.D. finance programs at the University of Alabama that he left with a Master’s in finance.” (Source) Small world, huh. I am actually proud of the fact that he is an AU alum.
Now, all this being said, I would still be very happy and grateful if Jimmy Wales would agree to come back to Auburn and speak to our classes. I’d love to have him help us learn about Wikipedia and all of his other projects. I believe he is a smart man with many great ideas. I’ve written about him before. I’ve written to him before. Never heard back.
Robert,
Great comments and common sense insight (which is noteworthy given how uncommon common sense is).
While I have and do link to Wikipedia, I only do as a last resort. It takes too much effort to validate the information there, as you alluded to.
I had a post about Wikipedia in September and received great feedback from MyWikiBiz’s Gregory Kohs’ — especially about information on how many links there are from the non-profile Wikipidia to Wales’ for-profit Wiki.com venture. A bit hypocritical.
However, Wikipedia, while important, is not the be-all, end-all for online search results. Besides, as I noted on Todd’s post, if enough people wanted to, there is at least one competitor to Wikipedia we can use:
http://internet-encyclopedia.org.
Mike
Robert,
Quick question: just how naive are you? I know you’re a sheltered professor and all but do you ever get off campus?
Curious.
- Amanda Chapel
Well, Anonymous, not naive enough to believe that your agenda is sincerely about helping PR, rather than helping yourself. By the way, I added the “Anonymous post by…” for clarification on your comment.
I’ll say it again, if you wish anyone to sincerely believe your continued diatribes, use your real name. At least we may then judge your bitter and abusive denunciations based upon your own credibility.
You’ll note, I hope, that I’ve allowed your comments through. I do this even though they were grabbed and marked as spam. That means, since I use Akismet and Spam Karma, that others regard you as a spammer, just like Wikipedia. I’ll also note that you attempted to post the same comment twice – from two different servers: 85.25.4.93 (Germany – echo111.server4you.de) and 207.229.142.248 (Chicago). That, Anonymous, is the tactic of a spammer.
I’m not naive enough to think that you will begin following the principles of open and fair communication – especially transparency. But, miracles can happen.
I wear around my neck the medal of St. Jude Thaddeus. The same medal has been there for about 25 years. I wear it as a rememberance of those that serve people with disabilities. However, it is also worn by many in the hope of resolve for desperate, forgotten, impossible or lost causes or situations. I fear you may be one, yet I’ll continue to hold out hope for you.
Mike, thanks for the comment. I have read your post. Very good.
It is interesting to note the contradiction of Kohs (who I believe is the one that outed Strumpette’s violation to Wikipedia – see “Linking to self-written blog”) and his business which may be posting to Wikipedia (now anonymously?) for clients. His comment laments thinking open edits under his company’s name (or his client’s name) would be accpeted, and are now rejected.
And Jimmy Wales pledges his full support for keeping Strumpette out: “You have my full support here.–Jimbo Wales 23:48, 1 October 2006 (UTC)” Then, Kohs points to the links-out supporting Wales’ own for-profit efforts.
Are any of us really suprised to see marketing efforts to exploit online sites for their own benefit? I’m not. It is inevitable.
From Strumpy to MyWikiBiz and so many others, I doubt there is a resolution to all of this. And, that further minimizes the trust people may place in what they read online.
Kohs pointed out to GraemeL that Strumpette was self-posting external links to her own website, only because GraemeL had earlier (independently) removed them once before. Nothing that major to point out someone trying to re-do something they’ve already been told not to do.
Meanwhile, there’s a right way and a wrong way to try to get your external link posted into Wikipedia. Strumpette, unfortunately, didn’t take the time to calm down and ask me my advice, and she kept posting, and GraemeL reverted, and she re-posted, and he re-reverted, until . . . the domain of strumpette.com was perma-banned.
Since then, the staff at Strumpette and I have come to a peace accord, since we both realize how the Wikimedia Foundation is treading on really thin ice in how it’s executing the GNU Free Documentation License. That license was not meant to arbitrarily exclude the contributions of commercial authors — in fact, it was meant (take the example of Linux) to ENCOURAGE paid-for editing on an equal footing with voluntary editing. Wikimedia is accepting hundreds of thousands of dollars from donors who are led to believe that Wikipedia is the encyclopedia that “anyone can edit”, but an out-of-control cabal of leaders has personally decided (without a vote of the Board of Directors, or the Arbitration Committee) that commercial interests are to be censored from the “anyone can edit” rule. Sounds like an Attorney General’s office will be getting involved soon, based on the buzz I’ve heard.
Gregory, thank you for the comment.
I don’t know whether or not you post anonymously, for clients, to Wikipedia. Do you? Or do you use an account with their name on it? How do you post to Wikipedia for clients?
I find this whole story interesting, if only for this reason.
We have a site (Wikipedia) filled with anonymous editors (both internally and externally) where an anonymous author (Strumpette) is posting anonymously and interacting with a person (you) that perhaps posts anonymously (or with a 3rd party screen name) to this anonymous attempt at an encyclopedia.
I look at that and convoluted as it sounds, it seems to be on point. So, how can this kind of site ever work and be reliable? Oh, it gets traffic – to be sure. But, think of the
deceptionmisinformation, of all kinds (intended or not), that is going on there.It amazes me. And it doesn’t.
Robert, the MyWikiBiz business model was designed (in concert with Jimmy Wales) to craft articles to be posted ON OUR OWN WEBSITE. Then, independent, trusted, non-paid editors can “scrape” that content from our site and post it into Wikipedia. In August, Wales called this a “mutually beneficial” arrangement.
However, in early October, he flipped his lid for some reason and summarily deleted an article about Arch Coal, Inc. that had been so scraped into Wikipedia by a noted independent contributor to Wikipedia. The Wikipedia community challenged Wales (itself an amazing thing!), and the article was restored. Some additional Wikinerds went to work on the article, essentially adding a section that reminds the reader that Arch Coal sometimes blows the tops off mountains to get at the coal, and that this damages the environment. (Imagine that, a coal-mining company that damages the pristine landscape?)
Not content, Wales blocked the MyWikiBiz account, and added a little diatribe about my firm on my company’s own User page in Wikipedia. (Yes, editing another user’s own page is considered vandalism, unless you’re Jimmy Wales.)
And you ask if we’ve gone underground or not?
Probably to your surprise, we are STILL trying to get this worked out amicably with Wikimedia Foundation (not Jimmy Wales). The lunatics are running the asylum at Wikipedia, but we’re hoping for a more constructive resolution with Wikimedia’s executive director and super-lawyer, Brad Patrick. He has been, to date, very “open” to the idea of the possibility that MAYBE a commercially-interested party can actually contribute to the betterment of Wikipedia.
It amazes me, too.
Thanks, Gregory. I must say, I’m impressed. Looking at the comments within that long discussion, I see that you were completely transparent as the editors were all (it seems) able to track the edits directly to you (or MyWikiBiz). That’s impressive.
It is interesting that the rules seem to roll one way or another in Wikipedia depending upon who is doing the edits.
To me, the only way they can be successful and deliver reliable content is to restore some of the ideas from Nupedia. Multi-layered review and approval processes would help a great deal. But, with their current setup, I doubt that is possible.
How about a 7 step review process with #7 being the final review. If they could create something where they state that in the bottom or top section, it would help with reliability.
Something like: “This page was last modified 02:23, 2 November 2006. Currently, this article has reached the fourth level of review. The most recent review was by J. Smith. See discussion page.”
Have J. Smith point to their user page and they must be transparent, not anonymous with complete listing of their credentials. The “credentials” can be anything, and do not have to be academic. But, then everyone knows (a) who did the review and (b) why we should trust the process. The discussion page should be complete and lack the oft’ used Wiki-speak that we see in Wikipedia all too often.
Wikipedia has let their own internal culture overwhelm their stated ideal of being an open community where all can edit and participate.
I don’t suggest this will be a complete answer, but it is a start.
Robert, you’re coming awfully close to describing the OTHER Wikipedia co-founder, Larry Sanger’s project: Citizendium.
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