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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.
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?
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.