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How PR Subverts Wikipedia
Daniel_Stuckey writes "We all know that Wikipedia can be subverted—it’s an inevitability of an open platform that some people will seek to abuse it, whether to gain some advantage or just for a laugh. Fortunately, the Wikipedia community has strong mechanisms in place to deal with this, from the famous cry of [citation needed] to the rigorous checks and standards put in place by its hierarchy of editors and admins. In recent months though, Insiders have encountered something altogether more worrying: a concerted attack on the very fabric of Wikipedia by PR companies that have subverted the online encyclopedia's editing hierarchy to alter articles on a massive scale—perhaps tens of thousands of them. Wikipedia is the world's most popular source of cultural, historical, and scientific knowledge—if their fears are correct, its all-important credibility could be on the line... Adam Masonbrink, a founder and Vice-President of Sales at Wiki-PR, boasts of new clients including Priceline and Viacom. Viacom didn't respond ... but Priceline — a NASDAQ listed firm with over 5,000 employees and William Shatner as their official spokesman — did. Sadly, Priceline didn't choose to respond to us via Captain Kirk; instead Leslie Cafferty, vice president of corporate communications and public relations, admitted, 'We are using them to help us get all of our brands a presence because I don't have the resources internally to otherwise manage.'"
Capitalism! Freedom of the press belongs to he who owns one!
This problem will only be solved after the workers have expropriated the bourgeoisie and established their proletarian dictatorship!
UNITE with the Campaign for a Free Internet because today, our future begins with tomorrow!
See, Wikipedia started like that, too. But very soon, our Internet Congress would be populated by corporate fucktards, and not long afterwards, anybody with a clue would be outnumbered and banned from the internet. Also, any mechanism that you create to ban folks from the internet will be used for governments for censorship. Great intention you've got, but that road leads straight to hell.
Not sure that this is really new. The page for C++, for example, is regularly scrubbed of any critical material. At the moment, there is just one negative sentence, indicating that "C++ is sometimes compared unfavorably to [some other languages]". Whether that is an unbiased and appropriately detailed statement of the totality of current objective C++ criticism is left as an exercise for the reader.
There is no point placing any stock in [citation needed]; these are PR companies. If someone challenges what they are adding to wikipedia with citation requests they will issue a press release, get questionable "newspapers" (i.e. trade papers, promotional puff periodicals etc.) to pick up the press release (normally it is verbatim) and then back slam that on the wikipedia text as a citation. A lovely circular piece of work that ensures the promotion continues.
One way to minimise their PR efforts is to create significant Streisand effects on their work. But some PR companies are so desperate that they would probably even be delighted with that.
This is a terrible idea! You just read an article about PR firms editing articles about science & history. Facts are the least democratic things of all!
Do you want people to vote on science? How many people think Relativity is just E=mc^2? They ignore all the import aspects about it. If there wasn't a maximum speed (speed of light), then kinetic energy (KE=mv^2) would go to infinity and create unlimited energy.
Do you want people to vote on History? Well, they did, and the Holocaust only killed Jews. The other 5 million killed for handicaps, homosexuality, and others don't count. There were even 3 more genocides in the 20th century alone: Pol Pot's Cambodia (the educated), Serbia (muslims), & Rwanda.
I don't want popular opinion to warp reality anymore!
OK I giggled a bit.
Wikipedia: verifiability, not truth; consensus, not truth; time available to engage in edit wars, not truth. objectivist power-mongering, not truth.
OK, it's a fair introduction to some non-contentious subjects... although even e.g. where it's supposed to be good, like mathematics, I'd much rather go to Mathworld or a topic-specific repository (e.g. the MacTutor history of mathematics archive) for something written by people who are both knowledgeable and able to write... so, to refine my point, it's a fair introduction to trivia where a series-specific Wikia hasn't already been created.
But what's really going for it is that it appears at the top of search engine results. And most people aren't using the Internet for anything important, which means anything resembling an answer is good enough.
How do you get banned from the Internet? It's literally impossible at this point in time.
Of course if you have a Facebook account (and I wager you do) you're helping "them" to create exactly what you just said, a bannable Internet.
So STFU.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
> Wikipedia needs to embrace that companies want to get their products on a website with that much traffic
No we don't. It's one of the most successful web sites on the planet, and arguably the most successful example of collaboration in human history. Why would we possibly want to change that?
Well, maybe...
The old UDP system wasn't as badassed as proclaimed. It was fairly quickly subverted by simple dint of getting another ISP account.
Netcop me over something that offended you in USENET? Hah - fuck you, I'm back on in less than two hours courtesy of an AOL floppy, some other uni's server which left their dial-in lines wide open (and lookie here - anon logins!), or one of a zillion other means of getting in. Seriously - it wasn't all it was cracked up to be, and get even less powerful as ISPs started popping up out of the woodwork. By 1999, even the little rural corner of Arkansas I lived in gave me a choice of at least 10 different ISPs (be they local and otherwise), not counting the UofA alumni accounts, the local government dial-ins (which also had a fun little generic login for awhile) and etc.
Now - fast forward to today. In the age of free wifi damned near everywhere, 3/4/whatever-G mobile devices, and IP assignments that are almost as disposable as toilet paper squares?
Yeah, good luck with that. Can't even call it by MAC addy, and until/unless an RFC is universally implemented that will simultaneous destroy any hope of privacy, you're kinda fucked...
Sorry 'mano, but we've been hearing/hashing similar arguments since the days when Uni/.mil/BBS dominated things.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Reality is just as subjective as the rest. There is no reality per se, just the account you can make of it. And this is subjective, and no two persons will tell the same story. Nobody knows that better than the police: Ask 3 eye witnesses about the facts and you immediately get 3 different versions.
Write boring code, not shiny code!
Wikipedia needs to embrace that companies want to get their products on a website with that much traffic
No we don't. It's one of the most successful web sites on the planet, and arguably the most successful example of collaboration in human history. Why would we possibly want to change that?
Exactly. It really annoys parts of Corporate America that they can't get their way on Wikipedia. That's a good thing.
I've encountered paid editing a few times. Carnival Cruises really, really wanted to make all the references to their various disasters (the Costa Concordia sinking, the Costa Allegra fire, the Carnivale Tropicale fire, the Carnival Splendor fire, the Carnival Triumph fire (ship adrift for four days), etc.) go away. Big editing battles. Finally the paid editors were kicked off.
There are a few individuals with promotional editors for their own bio articles. Michael Milken, the "Junk Bond King" who did time in a Federal pen, tried very hard to keep himself from being labelled as an ex-con. Nassim Nicholas Taleb has had people trying to keep the poor financial results of his hedge fund out of the article. Vivek Wadwa, who's heavily into self-promotion, put his grad students on pumping up his reputation, and seems to have an in with Jimbo Wales. It's an ongoing headache, but usually the good guys win.