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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."
The tone I was getting was that he was in favour of real corrections, cutting out the plain untruths that the Wikipedia entries are garnering. If he does this in the name of truth & correct reporting, I'm all for it. Bear in mind you'll be able to track what changes he makes and if you don't think they're accurate, you can make your own edits back.
Marketing is all about this kind of stuff, fake individuals that are invented to love whatever crap you're pedaling. There was a pretty hilarious 'sony fan' blog that was posted recently. The Simpsons I remember had an episode that touched on this with the dog character they added to Itchy and Scratchy. Usually the marketing department fails at meshing cool and product placement, resulting in a transparent poser character that may as well have been a traditional ad. Even the viral marketing campaigns usually produce individuals who are quite fake because of their bizarre over enthusiasm.
The trouble with this though is its akin to paying one of the guys at websters to change a dictionary entry for you. People don't expect those to have any signifigant bias.
Apparently, someone in Microsoft got the idea to "pay some outsider to make corrections to Wikipedia pages we care about", *and* got internal funding for it.
If you have ever worked in a moderately sized organization, you will know how difficult it is to get anything slightly unusual through the bureaucracy. Yet a clearly outside-the-box proposal like this apparently got through. Presumably, it is even encouraged. That would never have happened in any of the organizations I worked in, except maybe for the small 3 employee upstart.
At least said third party has explicitly stated that he's being paid by Microsoft. And at least Microsoft has not barred him and others they are paying from doing the same. How much more honesty can you ask for? If Microsoft told a bunch of PR people to edit Wikipedia, they'd probably not have told anyone, and no one would've known Microsoft was paying PR people to subtly skew articles in their favor.
Third parties are usually where corporations finds impartiality, even if the third party receives a cheque from the company on a monthly basis. Most other industries use a third party for impartiality--e.g. auditing in the financial industry, security audits, etc. are essentially asking a third party to review existing data for disrepencies. Why can't Microsoft do the same with their products and/or standards?
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
Somewhere, deep inside the twisted corridors in Redmond, some person must have actually thought of the idea to hire third parties to edit Wikipedia. He must also have presented it to his boss (unless it was some boss who thought of the idea himself), who in turn must have ordered someone to carry out the plan. Shouldn't an obviously unethical plan such as this have been stopped at some point in this chain? Shouldn't that boss figure have some kind of conscience which should have stopped him from doing this? Another problem may be the current inability (real or imagined) of "peons" in a corporation to themselves stop such plans when being ordered to carry them out. Generally, I believe that the lack of personal responsibility for actions being carried out "in the name of a corporation" is the real culprit.
Also, aside from the ethical standpoint, must they not have realized that this would leak out?! I mean, this cannot be considered positive PR, right?
If the Wikipedia articles in your area of expertise were of low quality, filled with anti-Microsoft spin, and clearly violated Wikipedia policies, would you accept money from Microsoft to clean them up. The mandate would be to correct technical mistakes, and make the articles follow Wikipedia policies.
In other words, being paid to do something you would gladly do for free, if you had the time?
Well first of all, corporations are only accountable to their shareholders, not to anyone else.
Actually this isn't the problem with corporations today. The problem is that employees are not responsible for the companies actions. Instead, corporations are now "people" who are responsible for the actions that the employees take. There's an obvious disconnect there; the "person" responsible is not the person actually doing the crime.
Corporations typically have a hierarchical structure just so that somebody can be held accountable. If a corporation does something illegal then the person behind that decision needs to be tried for it, not the corporation. If the company hires somebody to do something illegal then the person authorizing that is responsible and the people who knew about it are accessories and the people who found out later and did nothing are accessories after the fact.
This is the real problem today. For example, Microsoft gets convicted of criminal restraint of trade and there are absolutely no personal consequences for the people authorizing it and perpetrating it. There are plenty of people in MS who knew of this and would not have allowed it to happen if their own butt was on the line.
There's an interesting view emerging that it's actually more accurate to view a corporation as a self-aware entity. The reason that corporations routinely engage in behavior that would be considered obscene by a human being is not that there just happen to be a few "bad eggs" in positions of power, but rather that the structure of a corporation encourages and extracts bad behavior from otherwise reasonable human beings.
There are endless examples of this, and an intriguing discussion in Wade Rowland's Greed, Inc.. It's convenient for corporations to blame "bad egg" individual employees, because people can be easily replaced, and ignores the reality that the true root of the problem is systemic.
I should buy some cement.
Technically you are correct - corporations are non-thinking entities made up of thinking humans. However they are a perfect example of the whole being greater than the sum of its parts. Of complex, sometimes unpredictable behaviour arising out of systems with relatively few, simple rules.
Anybody that has worked for or with large corporations knows that they have a unique "culture" that is different from one to another. This culture largely survives changes of individuals within it. It is hard to identify where the culture "comes from". There is no single source of it - in some corporations you could replace the CEO and his direct reports and the culture would not change in the short or medium term (or ever cf: government).
One analogy would be the human brain. Many brain cells - individually very simple - governed by few simple imperatives generating very complex behaviour which is hard to pin down to any single brain cell (or even small group of cells).
"Mob rule" is another example of this kind of thing - where behaviour arises that exceeds that which any of its individual elements would necessarily countenance.
Here's a thought...
If evolutionary pressure was enough to select for "morality" and "ethical behaviour" in individuals, could it be that over time, these new entities will eventually evolve these traits as well?
Okay, I think I'm probably more qualified than most people to comment on the state of Wikipedia's Microsoft articles, considering that I've personally started a couple dozen articles on Windows-related stuff, and I have more than 1,000 Microsoft-related articles on my watchlist. I work a bunch on Mac OS X articles, too... I don't really consider operating systems to be a worthy subject of religious advocacy; they make for a great hobby, sure, but that's about it. All I care about is making sure that the subjects are presented accurately and without bias in either direction.
Wikipedia articles are edited by people from Microsoft on a regular basis. Most of the time it's simple stuff, like fixing spelling mistakes, updating links, and putting some newly published information in about future releases. (This is one example of an MS employee edit to the Office Open XML article. Pretty harmless.) It's quite rare that someone at Microsoft adds in unabashed "pro-Microsoft" stuff, and when they do, I or other interested editors remove it entirely or tone it down. But, I have yet to see any kind of co-ordinated efforts to astroturf Microsoft Wikipedia articles... if anything, it's just individuals who are proud of their work and want to write about it... you can tell, it doesn't have that shiny PR veneer on it. I've had to remind a few Microsoft employees to stay within the encyclopedia's neutrality and verifiability policies, but it never turns out to be a problem; almost everyone who's new to editing Wikipedia needs to learn that.
Frankly, I see far more crap by juvenile pro-Apple zealots, like redirecting the Windows Vista article to Mac OS X and other such time-wasting noise. That's a reflection of the kind of uphill battle Wikipedia has to fight against vandalism.
Shit, after 7,000+ edits to Microsoft-related articles, maybe Microsoft should be offering to pay me to keep Wikipedia clean of anti-Microsoft crap, since I assuredly work harder at it than some dude with an O'Reilley blog. I wouldn't take their money for it though... or if I did, I'd make a public display of donating it all to the Wikimedia Foundation. They need the money more than I do.
If Microsoft wants to pay someone to write more into the OOXML articles, that's fine, I don't care -- but there's no damned way they're getting material inappropriate for Wikipedia past me & the other regulars. You can be sure of that.
> on time and under-budget
:-)
The Wikipedia page is already much better, so I think that's a results-oriented way to look at it. It will be interesting to see whether others agree with your analysis.