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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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... 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!
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.
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.
She's completely trustworthy, you have just misplaced your trust. If you trust in her to be faithful, you made the mistake of mis-evaluating her actions. If you trust she is gonna cheat on you, you have accurately nailed the behavior and can develop contingencies for dealing with that behavior.
Trust is just a projection of your expectations in relation to your perceptions.