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.'"

Comments

Re:Internet democracy

[PRMan]

And you have situations where a moderator will simply leave out information. For instance, the article on catapults (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catapult) insists that catapults were invented by the Greeks, despite them being listed in the Bible much earlier (2 Chronicles 26:14-15):

14 Uzziah provided shields, spears, helmets, coats of armor, bows and slingstones for the entire army. 15 In Jerusalem he made devices invented for use on the towers and on the corner defenses so that soldiers could shoot arrows and hurl large stones from the walls.

Now, you may or may not believe the miracles in the Bible, but historically and archaeologically it's a VERY accurate book. If it says that Uzziah had catapults in those days then he almost certainly did. But the moderator has purposely excluded this clear reference rather than letting people decide for themselves. Hope you like censorship, because that is what power-mad moderators are increasingly turning Wikipedia into.