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Microsoft PR Paying to "Correct" Wikipedia
Unpaid Schill writes "Over on the O'Reilly Network, there's an interesting piece about how Microsoft tried to hire people to contribute to Wikipedia. Not wanting to do the edits directly, they were looking for an intermediary to make edits and corrections favorable to them. Why? According to the article, it was apparently both to let people know that Microsoft will not 'enable death squads with their UUIDs' and also to fight the growing consensus that OOXML contains a useless pile of legacy crap which is unfit for standardization."
This is not new behavior. Remember when Microsoft tried to hire "individuals" to perform "grassroots" work including writing letters to the Department of Justice and letters to the editors of papers around the country concerning the anti-trust trial? Look, I have friends at Microsoft and there are truly some brilliant folks up there, but what the hell is the marketing department doing? Are they *that* ethically challenged? Or is it that they are *that* desperate to be cool and loved? How about a policy of honesty and if there is something that you want, then why not have your Microsoft PR department make the edits? Is that too obvious? It would certainly present other ethical dilemmas, but at least it would be more honest than hiring supposed "impartial" third parties to do your work for you.
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Wouldn't either side of these debates violate the neutral point of view policy of wikipedia? Aren't all of those opinions supposed to be deleted?
Developers: We can use your help.
I know, it's crazy. It's almost as if the submitter is trying to stay neutral and let you make a decision for yourself.
2^4 * 3 * 20929
... if the average Wikipedia author is as biased as this article summary. "Corrections favorable to them?" Corrections are corrections! In TFA, you'll see that there are errors in the OOXML article (as there are in many of them) and Microsoft enlisted a pretty unbiased guy to find them. If anything, one would expect him to be biased against OOXML and for ODF considering that only free time has kept him from contributing to ODF.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
Isn't this the same company that had dead people lobby Congress to avoid being broken-up during the anti-trust years?
This is the tip of the iceberg as it is rare, Halloween Documents not withstanding, to know the real extent of Microsoft's ongoing disinformation campaign.
Were public opinion to turn around and evaluate many of the existing technologies on their own merits, without being told by the media that they are too dumb to use something like Suse 10.2, Mandriva or Ubuntu, it would hit Microsoft very hard, provided, of course, that there was an OEM there with enough balls to offer preloaded computers with another OS.
So Microsoft fights and will fight to the death for mind-share. This is the single most important thing that drives Microsoft. Once computers,operating systems and office suites are demystified, a process which could be greatly helped by open standards such as ODF,and people are no longer afraid to lose their valuable data in a transition to a different product, Microsoft either innovates in real valuable and tangible terms or begins to have to tap its reserves, which huge as they are, would "only" carry them for another fifteen years at their current size.
Pragmatism as an ideology is not particularly pragmatic in the long term. Keep it in mind when you dismiss Free Software
Unlike Microsoft, Apple has an entire army of iZealots who work for free. No wiki or message board stands untouched by their version of iTruth!
I didn't see any problems at all. MS would have no reason to expect this guy to be slanted in their favor. His interest is in correcting errors of interpretation, of which it appears some exist.
Regardless of how you feel about MS and its attempts at spin control, let's not loose sight of the really important thing here---OOXML is a bad standard. Its many flaws are well documented. Try any of these links to find out about some of them: http://www.grokdoc.net/index.php/EOOXML_objections
As a linguist, the pathetic language encoding (which ignores the ISO standard) is particularly galling:
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archive s/004065.html
Except that they can't. They're forbidden by WP:COI from editing their own article - under penalty of change reversion and/or blocklisting.
For a site about things like basic rights, Slashdot users sure do like to censor "dissent".
...as well as review sites.
Trying to "pay" them off to write something favorable for them - giving incentives such as notebooks, advertising dollars, free software, etc...
They do this to promote Vista, Zune, and the XBox. Their goal is to try to create a fanboy circle of consultants, gamers, and audiophiles, which will automatically do this for them. But the initial seed is through the media.
I don't know what definition of trust you're using, but just because you can predict someone or something's behavior does not mean you can trust them.
If my exgf is a slut, and every time I get back with her she cheats on me, I know that her behavior is predictable and she has one primary goal. She is predictable, but definitely not trustworthy.
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Are you a retard or a shill? Seriously. What kind of naive fool would you have to be to think that the PR department of a major corporation really wants "non-partial" editing of its wiki entries? That they are going to *pay* for? And this corporation in particular, which has a well-known history of controlling press and PR about itself very tightly. I'm not surprised they're hiring someone, but don't insult anyones intelligence by suggesting that they'd be just as happy to hire someone to write negative entries. They're attempting to correct what they see as negative spin.
Nice one. In reality it was to correct information in Wikipedia that is just plain wrong.Well, nothing that he wrote in his article is "just plain wrong". Even his very first statement - the standard *does* define those sections, it does *not* provide implementation details, and while they are "optional", it's nitpicking at best to claim that they aren't a weakness in the standard and the inability for third parties to implement them is a problem.
The article in its current state doesn't say anything about "implementing the entire 6000 pages or MS will sue" and I don't feel like digging through the history in an attempt to find where he might have seen it. It's worth noting that the MS covenant only applies to conforming implementations, and there may have more been made of that fact in older versions of the article.
His final "inaccuracy" isn't anything of the sort, it's an accurate statement that he feels is unfair. He actually spends more time talking about this one than about any of the previous "inaccuracies", which might give you some insight into how he might edit the article. His stated reason for believing it to be unfair is factually inaccurate, too, which again indicates exactly how well researched and unbiased his opinions are likely to be.
A smart society will place limits on what any corporate entity can do. The accumulation of wealth for wealth's sake without clear benefits to society as a whole is not something that most societies should reward.
Corrupt corporations corrupt everything they touch and the bigger they are, the more pervasive their effects on society is. To a certain extent, this anything-goes bullshit that one often hears in Slashdot is a clear example of the real pernicious effect that massive corporations are having on our collective culture.
Pragmatism as an ideology is not particularly pragmatic in the long term. Keep it in mind when you dismiss Free Software
So maybe the idea came from the top?
If you are willing to compromise it for money, it is a preference, not a moral or ethic principle.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Here it is: an open and apparently straight admission of what happened, by the guy who did it. You may not agree with him or his motives, but he had the cojones to step up and own his actions.
Doug: in the interests of complete disclousre, it might be worthwhile to mention what Rick was paid.
You might bring up - and this is a purely hypothetical point, because you're going to be going into the lion's den asking for fairness here - the fact that anyone who develops open source or code at all is ideologically in competition with Microsoft in some way, shape, or form.... Thus your competitors are obviously the only ones interested in editing the page in a completely negative manner at the moment. Unless your product is really that bad - I won't insert the proper dig here.
Point is, you should have a fair shake. That's not to say that the article - as I read it five minutes ago - is not pretty impartial as-is, IMHO. As soon as the legitimate beef came up, it became a pretty skeleton'ish thing with a (hopefully) intelligent attached 'talk' section that goes through the entire debate in all its horrifically standards-excited glory. Ergo, you got what you wanted and didn't even have to pay El Blogosphere for it. That's on time and under-budget if I ever saw it.
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