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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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That would be because respondants have had over 4 years to respond to the OASIS specification. Since it's already a standard that has been reviewed by the industry, the ISO committee can choose to adopt it on a fast-track as a way of putting their own stamp of approval on it.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Microsoft has *always* been better than Linux.
Beat 'Em and Eat 'Em
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'm available for hire. Please send me a Ferrari notebook, Office 2007, and a contract to sign away my soul. Did I mention I also blog?
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 that a good thing? I would prefer people who submit stories to be like this; Give me the information and let ME decide, for myself, if it is good or bad.
Love sees no species.
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.
Is this acceptable and ethical?
There is A LOT of Anti-MS behavior and FUD out there. Therefore, MS is contracting PR agents to "fix" this publically available (and incorrect(?)) (mis-)information.
I don't see a problem provided they don't alter the FACTS.
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
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.
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!
...was ticking along one day, and I realized wikipedia is not going anywhere, and that corporate entities are going to want to have a very "respectable" write-up just to maintain image, to play up positives and downplay negatives. And so I envisioned this pitch: "Ensure your wikipedia entry is acceptable and not compromised by rumour and hearsay by subscribing to my service for $29,99 a month. My team of wikipedia nerds will ensure the integrity of your company's entry is maintained to the highest possible manner in accordance with veritable truth. For an extra $50 a month this truth can be considered as flexible as a gymnast."
....would extend your Windows license for a few days.
You mean it runs out???
Apparently, someone in Microsoft got the idea to "pay some outsider to make corrections to Wikipedia pages we care about", *and* got internal funding for it.
If you have ever worked in a moderately sized organization, you will know how difficult it is to get anything slightly unusual through the bureaucracy. Yet a clearly outside-the-box proposal like this apparently got through. Presumably, it is even encouraged. That would never have happened in any of the organizations I worked in, except maybe for the small 3 employee upstart.
I have a problem with Wikipedia.
Everything must be in neutral POV for it to be acceptable, however sometimes an objective POV is better.
I would like to see a wikipedia branch which offered different perspectives upon an article.
It would be good to see the Microsoft POV on themselves and how the public perceives them.
It would be good to know the facts about Manchester United football club, but since I support them I also don't mind reading about extra detail, where the best pubs are, bitching about the opposition and all other stuff someone who doesn't follow won't be interested in.
With microsoft I might want to see the party line on events actions and (for instance) the reasons behind those, I might want to be an investor who is looking more closely about the accounting details or a ravid linux fanboy wanting the conspiracy theories.
I would want to set my preferences like slashdot moderation groups and see the wiki-content I want.
All of this is available and is constantly created and destroyed in daily edit wars about POV.
liqbase
... spam that promises to pay me big money if I forward the spam to friends and relatives and edit wikipedia regarding and biased for M$?
Oh how the good ol'days can return....
Still waiting for my first big check from years ago...
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.
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?
Wikipedia does a VERY good job at keeping hold of user input.
It does not throw it away.
Currently there is a whole goldmine of good information buried inside the wikipedia history files.
It has been edited out of view because somebody did not agree with the content.
Why not just moderate these phrases instead of hiding them?
Sure, theres lots of drivel and spammy vandalism, but that might actually be of interest to someone.
We write a hell of a lot into our keyboards, we are infinite monkeys at our keyboards and I sense there is another work of shakespeare hiding away within our collective edits.
liqbase
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".
So the author is not a Microsoft fanboy/drone/borg/whatever.
So we can assume that the author knows what he is talking about, assuming he isn't lying (and he writes for XML.com so he probably isn't lying).
And after more "I'm no MS fanboy" bits, the author states that he received the Microsoft offer letter and:
Sounds fair enough.
The guy who knows what he's talking about finds an error rather quickly...
That one just amuses me, given the Slashdot submission which says:
Or to bring out the key points:
Well, they're not trying, they're doing.
Even the skeptical author of TFA stated that they seemed to want non-partial editors.
Nice one. In reality it was to correct information in Wikipedia that is just plain wrong.
Microsoft annoys the crap out of me, I use a Mac and before that used Linux for 6 years, but when Slashdot has stories like this it just makes us all look like assholes.
...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.
:(){
>>It doesn't matter. What they're doing is underhanded and shady.
Howso? From TFA:
"I think I'll accept it: FUD enrages me and MS certainly are not hiring me to add any pro-MS FUD, just to correct any errors I see."
Wow -- that sounds shady AND underhanded. No wait -- not even close. He admits he's been hired, AND he is only going to correct errors. Wow. Sounds EVIL.
>>1. There is public information Microsoft doesn't like.
No, this is public MIS-information that Microsoft doesn't like on a PUBLIC forum. They have every right to correct those errors, but they've gone one step further and hired a third party to examine the validity of the articles and correct any errors he finds.
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
Wow, AC has my vote for President!!!
I will second this without anonymity!!
It's all about priorities.
Nothing interesting to say...MUST...NOT...REPLY...ohtheheckwithit.
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.
Note, this talks about material which, simultaneously: (1) violates Wikipedia's policies by being unsourced, and (2) is also defamatory. It also only applies to removing the offending material, not replacing it with other material.
That seems different from what was at issue here, a paid agent of an involved party rewriting material related to the involved party on that party's behalf and to make it more favorable (even if, supposedly, only by correcting "errors") to that party: that seems to fall squarely into the area strongly discouraged by the COI rules.
I consider this a "killer issue" for ISO (but i'm not on any of the national standards bureaux so rest assured
I quote this from groklaw: http://www.grokdoc.net/index.php/EOOXML_objection
To be, or not to be: isn't that quite logical, Slashdot Beta?
I'm no fan of the corporation either, but oversimplifications of history accomplish nothing.
The function of the corporations in early American society was a matter of heated dispute. As of 1780 there were only 7 chartered business corporations in the United States. That number increased dramatically after the turn of the 19th century once the courts and legislatures recognized the legitimacy of private, for-private corporate entities. Ambivalence about the role of the corporation in early American law resulted from tension between those who insisted that corporations serve the public interest and those who believed that the public interest was inherently served by the chartering of private corporations and the creation of wealth that would presumably result therefrom.
On the one side of the debate were anti-mercantilists, Jeffersonian Republicans and artisans who believed variously that corporations were monopolistic in nature; that they the accumulation of vast quantities of capital in private hands characteristic of the corporate form was inconsistent with the civic virtues of a democratic republic exemplified in the American Revolution and would undermine democratic republicanism; and that corporations could be used to dominate markets, driving down the cost of production and thereby reducing demand for artisinal goods. On the other side were those who believed that corporations were a matter of necessity in order to promote the aggregation and investment of capital. In a society of relatively equal wealth distribution, as in the early years of the republic, capital must be drawn from large numbers of small investor/share-holders rather than from individual financiers or aristocrats as could be done in Europe. The structure of the corporation and its ability to centralize management and control represented the most efficient means of operating investments and therefore of developing the American economy, proponents argued.
While demands that corporate charters be granted only in the public interest, and that liability extend to shareholders were common in the early law of corporations, these rules which seemed rooted in longstanding English mistrust of the anti-social corporate form yielded to the demands of the market and of laissez-faire capitalists. These historical developments represent another unfortunate triumph of utilitarianism over tradition in American law.
While I agree with the core sentiment of what I believe you are saying, there are some things that need to be realized.
Our society and governments and laws say otherwise. You have to follow the laws,
True, unless the laws cannot be enforced upon you. Law enforcement by its very function requires the ability to exert force of some sort to manipulate an entity to comply with the law when they don't choose to. If you have unbelievable resources, no physical entity to imprison, and the possible fallout of a negative impact on the local economy due to severe punishment - you become effectively ungovernable.
You ARE accountable to the rest of society! Get that through your perverted thieving head!
Well, they are supposed to be, but we are seeing more and more that they actually aren't. The consumer body has not chosen as a whole to respond uniformly to unethical business practices. As long as the consumer keeps passing the resources to these companies, they will continue to be empowered to exhibit this behavior.
I don't know what economic idiot taught you hallucination you uttered, but it is WRONG. It's not only wrong, it is wrong because it is universally recognized by honest and civilized people as being evil, stupid, counter productive.
Economics is what is keeping the flow of money going the way it is going. Wrong or not, the money is doing what is is doing. While terms like ethics and morals are often introduced into economic discussions at different points, they quit being relevant when the source of economic power is being supplied by those who don't care about such things. Share holders push for maximum profits and consumers willingly hand over their money in exchange for the supplied goods or services.
We may have to contend with the fact that "honest and civilized" either doesn't exist in the numbers it once did or has a different meaning altogether now.
Here's a hint number two-don't even approach that level. Stop being a greedy pig. Stop putting accumulation of monetary profit at the top of your list of what is important. Break the cycle of greed.
You're right. Don't let greed lead you. But people are strange things and money makes life easier. Its real easy to fall into the pit of greed with perfectly noble intentions.
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.
The premise of this thread is a lie. Nobody ever contacted Rick and asked him to "make edits and corrections favorable to" Microsoft. Also, nobody from Microsoft PR contacted him. I am the person who contacted Rick, and I am a technical evangelist specializing in the Open XML file formats. And here is what I asked Rick to do:
"Wikipedia has an entry on Open XML that has a lot of slanted language, and we'd like for them to make it more objective but we feel that it would be best if a non-Microsoft person were the source of any corrections ... Would you have any interest or availability to do some of this kind of work? Your reputation as a leading voice in the XML community would carry a lot of credibility, so your name came up in a discussion of the Wikipedia situation today."
... feel free to state your own opinion."
"Feel free to say anything at all on your blog about the process, about our communication with you on matters related to Open XML, or anything else. We don't need to "approve" anything you have to say, our goal is simply to get more informed voices into the debate
I understand and accept that longwinded discussions of lies and their theoretical ramifications is a fascinating hobby for some, but since it's 100% my own personal actions that you're talking about, I just want to be very clear: the premise of this thread is a lie. Wikipedia's definition of "Microsoft (sic) Office Open XML" is not fact-based, and I think it would be a good thing if there were more participation by persons like Rick who are knowledgeable and interested in the actual facts of file formats, and less participation (or at least less influence) by those with specific agendas based on specific corporate interests.
Call Microsoft evil if you must, but in this case it's Doug Mahugh you're talking about. PR didn't know I contacted Rick. Hell, my own manager didn't know, although it seems likely he knows by now. You're talking about my actions alone, so I think my opinion is relevant. And in my opinion, the premise of this thread is a lie.
- Doug
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.