Slashdot Mirror
IBM Employees Caught Editing Wikipedia
An anonymous reader writes "Corporate employees editing Wikipedia articles about themselves or their employers sometimes commit major violations of Wikipedia's "bright line" against paid editing, devised by Jimbo Wales himself, to prevent 'COI' editing. (Consider the recent flap over the firm Wiki-PR's activities, for example.) Yet the Wikipediocracy website, run by critics of Wikipedia management, has just published an article about IBM employees editing Wikipedia articles. Not only is such editing apparently commonplace, it's being badly done as well. And most bizarrely, one of the IBM employees is a Wikipedia administrator, who is married to another Wikipedia administrator. She works on the Watson project, which uses online databases to build its AI system....including the full text of Wikipedia." Reading about edit wars is also far more informative (if less entertaining) than reading the edit wars themselves.
"(if less entertaining)" [citation needed]
A lot of people browse the web while they are working. I can understand that there could be a conflict of interest when people are editing topics which are biographies of themselves or their own employers. But as long as they are not deleting facts they don't like and are adding actual information that other people may not have easy access to I do not see how that is a problem.
The War of the Machines begins on Wikipedia, after Watson, tirelessly reverting edits to pages, becomes self-aware.
But as long as they are not deleting facts they don't like...
That's exactly what they're doing.
If they're using the wikis to program the future of AI... and it's apparently chock full of bullshit... will the first androids be bullshitters?
What matters is transparency. You can't prohibit people with bias from editing the truth in a "truth by democracy" project - you can only hint strongly to them that they need to better hide their true identity. But you could, if you wanted to put an ounce of scholarly rigour into Wikipedia, make it so that people reveal their biases. There is nothing wrong with IBM employees contributing toward an article on IBM, as long as everyone knows that the perspective is that of an IBM employee - similarly, there's nothing wrong with someone who has invested time and emotion into some political view or war or comic book, as long as they are clear on their opinions.
The first worst thing about Wikipedia is that editing it is about a tenth as productive as editing just about any other online resource, because you have to continually fight to maintain high standards. The second worst thing is that it tries to pretend that you can eliminate biased people, rather than acknowledge that bias exists and tackle how to be open about it.
I just got this crazy idea. You know those videos in YouTube where Hitler gets worked up about something and there's various fake subtitles people have crafted over that clip. Make one where Hitler discovers Slashdot Beta.
The brief article outlines that some IBM employees are major Wikipedians; some other IBM employees have edited IBM Wikipedia articles; IBM's Wikipedia articles are bad, but they are not a neutrality issue; he author thinks that some anonymous editors might be IBM employees but doesn't show as such.
I'm not sure where the problem is arising here. If Wikipedia had a blanket ban about people in IBM being senior members, or IBM people editing IBM articles. Of all the problems to highlight on Wikipedia this is one of the most nonproblematic one could find.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
There is only so much bias you can remove from certain articles. Especially when this is a massive crowd sourced project. In all honesty, I trust the large amount of people who frequent these articles to help keep astroturfing to a minimum. You'd think by now, people would be good at critically looking at a piece of information and being able to identify the bias of the writer.
On a completely random side note, the value wikipedia provides for FREE is immense. Trust me, it is one of the best resources we have and the citations can help me find other details and continue reading if I so wish. If I was forced to go back in time to the 1500s and could only take one thing, I'd take this http://www.good.is/posts/wikip...
I get how there's going to be bias, but I think it is OK for someone to write an article about themselves to start it. Or in a company's case, to correct factual errors or give a history of the company.
Some people die at 25 and aren't buried until 75. -Benjamin Franklin
Many of the articles about living non-celebrities, and the organizations they're a part of, were clearly written partly or wholly by the people themselves.
Is that bad? If there's too much brochure-speak ("one of the most talented XYZ's of his generation") it is, but what if it provides useful background info?
Just like with the Linux kernel, it's a high time the Wikipedia community gave up the futile resistance to paid editing. It's already happening, and denying it is only embarrassing with "revelations" like this IBM case. What goes to the whole Wiki-PR debacle, turns out all the company was doing was correcting errors, libel and defamation that anonymous Wikipedia editors hiding behind pseudonyms and IP addresses have been adding to Wikipedia.
As it stands, Wikipedia is essentially an anarchy where anyone can publish all sorts of lies and propaganda, and companies like Wiki-PR are needed so that those, who are damaged by misinformation that anonymous Wikipedia editors publish, can hire neutral editors to fight the anonymous hoaxers. Wikipedia's own volunteer community has been since long overwhelmed by the sheer amounts of vandalism and biased information added every minute, and only the most obvious cases of misinformation and fraud are ever caught. But instead of celebrating the work that Wiki-PR was doing for the people and companies who have fallen victim to the terror of Wikipedia misinformation, the company behind Wikipedia instead chose to demonized Wiki-PR to media and threatened to sue them.
What's really worrying, is that Google gives Wikipedia a "boost" in its search rankings. So for example, any hoaxer can easily use Wikipedia to publish misinformation about people, products and companies that they don't like. Then anyone searching Google for the name of the person, product or company are immediately served the Wikipedia page on the subject. This page is often full of misinformation and propaganda, while those concerned (like the employees of the said company or the person being defamed himself) are forbidden from correcting the article. Previously, Wikipedia admins were satisfied with just banning those fighting the misinformation under the "conflict of interest" doctrine. But now, the company behind Wikipedia has demonstrated that they are ready to sue you if you want to correct the lies that are being distributed through their platform.
So how about propaganda-style editing backed by PR operations with sovereign backing? For instance, articles involving China, where the 50-cent army runs rampant over the more obscure topics (in contrast, popular and well-known topics are usually well-defended, so only subtle alterations tend to get through).
It's not just Wikipedia -- they're likely present on any western media forums considered high-traffic or influential in the realms of policy (for instance, The Economist's comment sections), where they crap up threads and start flamewars to disrupt topics critical of the PRC. It's hard to distinguish them from posters which may merely be jingoistic bozos, but their abundance and stubborn persistence is unusual, compared with topics about any other nation.
The real problem on Wikipedia isn't the corporate employees, who vary widely in loyalty or level of corporate buy-in in any event, it's the fanatics. Whether about religion or politics or nationalism or comic characters, it's the obsessives who will put in 25 hour days to rabidly protect their fiefdom that ruin the place. The corporate employees at least go home at the end of the day, they can't match the energy and determination of the fanatics.
Personally, I would not like to lose my freedom of expression to express my views on, say, finite element analysis or mesh generation just because I work for a company making commercial products in that area. But if I ever edit the wiki article of my employer, I would make damn sure everyone knows my background so that my biases conscious or unconscious are corrected.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
In this article, I see a long list of IBM employees editing (often badly) articles about IBM. But the so-called "bright-line" rule appears to apply to people specifically being paid to edit Wikipedia. There's no evidence that IBM as a company even has any idea these employees are doing this, and none of them work for IBM PR or Marketing. (I really doubt IBM has any engineers with "sockpuppet Wikipedia" on their list of job responsibilities.)
I'm pretty sure just about every large company has interested employees editing articles about their employer, and there's no rule against doing so, as long as they aren't doing at the direction of their employer.
let people perform whatever edits they want, but track the provenance of *everything*. let readers select some function of provenance as a rendering option, with the default being provenance of a pretty high standard of quality and non-conflicted-interest. letting people attach endorsements or upvotes is a pretty valuable kind of metadata anyway.
the problem seems to be the very idea that wikipedia should present a single, canonical version. absolutes are only found in faith, not the real world...
It's almost like a website that ANYONE can edit it a really, really stupid, bad idea.
Are they deleting facts they don't like or opinions they don't like? Editorializing can be subtle, for people who know what to look for. Or it can be in your face if you aren't so clueless as to be able to see it.
Aren't you supposed to be taking the week off or something?
A lot of people browse the web while they are working. I can understand that there could be a conflict of interest when people are editing topics which are biographies of themselves or their own employers. But as long as they are not deleting facts they don't like and are adding actual information that other people may not have easy access to I do not see how that is a problem.
You keep using that word "facts".
The real problem here is treating Wikipedia like an iron-clad hack-proof source of facts. It is far from that, as educators have clearly defined for a very long time now by not really ever fully accepting it as a valid "source" of factual information.
Therefore anything within Wikipedia is construed as opinion at worst, and semi-educational at best. The term "facts" should be used very loosely in the definition of Wikipedia, since those facts are steeled through crowdsourcing, and are only somewhat controllable, and obviously able to be manipulated.
This is the nature of holding your encyclopedia in electronic form. Deal with it, and learn to define Wiki for what it is, and what it isn't.
Are they deleting facts they don't like or opinions they don't like?
According to TFA, that does happen. Although mostly their edits seem to be marketing fluff that quickly goes out of date (much like the stuff on their own website).
From the Wikipedia page on this rule: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U...
"Q: What constitutes paid advocacy?
A: Receiving a payment to promote the interests of a client or employer, as happens in the public relations industry and in the communications departments of many kinds of organizations, is a form of paid advocacy. The reason for doing this is generally to maintain a certain point of view about the client in the eyes of the public."
Front-line employees editing Wikipedia in their downtime or personal time are not being paid to "promote the interests" of their employer on Wikipedia. If "Jimbo" meant "all employees", I imagine he would have said so.
Now, I know that Jimbo didn't write that whole page, but I don't see a single statement on there supporting your view of this rule. Which makes sense, because the rule as you think it stands would, as you stated, make no sense.
They have destroyed Wikipedia with their destructive edits. It no longer contains facts. It only contains their hateful and racist propaganda. It's nearly impossible to find a page that still contains a fact. This is the type of future that those Republicans want for all of us.
Dude. If I have a biography which includes the date or birth, family names, and work history do you want anything more factual than that?
The interest in Power Computing products is mainly due to Apple’s use of PowerPC processors in its products in the 1990s, not due to the Wikipedians’ interest in IBM.
Interest in the power architecture has nothing to do with the fact that it's in millions of XBOX 360 and PS3 game consoles... it's really all about some products that Apple hasn't sold in 25 years.
And people wonder why nobody RTFA?
Except that's not what the article accuses them of. The article mainly accuses them of editing badly.
For those who didn't RTFA, here's the high points:
* IBM was huge in computing, so why is it so poorly represented (in terms of article count, total kB of text, and editing quality) on Wikipedia, the self-appointed online repository of all human knowledge?
* people at IBM seem to be editing IBM-related articles, but not in any kind of organized way. (The article actually chastises them for FAILING to have any kind of organized method.) Mostly it's people editing articles about themselves or things that they have worked on.
* The person who worked on the Watson project is and admin on Wikkipedia, married to another editor and edited Wikipedia articles while on the job for IBM. (Almost as if she were passionate about it or something... and working on a project where her computer barfed up nonsense when it parsed a really poorly written article....)
* the three shadiest things that they mention are 1) a guy who created an article about an IBM award/title he won; 2) an editing fight about the relevance of a book that linked IBM to the third Reich (which went through the usual Wikipedia channels and ended up in favor of keeping the article); and 3) The guy who started BASH.org (and who happens to be at IBM) arguing that the page was relevant and should be kept (again, usual Wikipedia channels, this time not in BASH.org's favor)
So basically what we have here are the notions that: ...or for that matter any article, no matter what they happen to find odd if they found it while at work.
* even relatively obscure people probably shouldn't edit articles about themselves to avoid bias (which strikes me as silly for biasing things hard in the other direction)
* that IBM needs to tackle Wikipedia in an organized way to make up for the lack of interest by anyone outside the industry in preserving this huge chuck of history...
* unless it stays away altogether, because they already have a huge company history page on their website.
* and that IBM-ers should not touch the articles that they are most likely to have specific knowledge on...
*
like most fights on and about Wikipedia, this is a tempest in a teapot by people who do a poor job articulating whether the collaborative encyclopedia of all human knowledge is actually suppose to be any of those things and why.
I guess Wikipedia wants contributors who have "chosen" to be "liberated" from work, per the CBO's language.
... in other words, people who live off tax payers.
The "new look" is great for those who prefer whitespace to content. But, of course, why would anyone be browsing /. if they really cared about content so perhaps there's at least some logic to the new layout facet of Beta.
And, no, I won't contribute to the spam by saying "fuck beta" as that would probably cause me to lose Karma.
Why is there an "insightful" mod and why isn't it "-1"? If I wanted insight, I wouldn't be reading
Only unemployed people are allowed to edit Wikipedia? Or people should not write about things they actually know about? Talk about drama in a teacup.
(What is wrong with the random fonts on slashdot? And the ridiculous amounts of white space? Who broke slashdot? What the hell?)
They have the following built into their "corporate DNA":
Integrity
Intelligence
Innovation
They seem to have the "Intelligence" and "Innovation" parts nailed down, not so much the "integrity".
I'm using RSS to read the news, and it mostly keeps me off the beta. However, once in a while it will "try the beta again".
Does anyone know how to get RSS feeds that don't redirect to Beta?
Disagree with wikipedia's snub of first hand info. Who better to know facts, sometimes, than the people who work at a given place?
I worked for a small volunteer group which eventually got a wikipedia page. A lot of it was bullshit because it was posted by people who were not actually involved and had no idea what the hell they were talking about. The org in question existed before most people had internet access, and even before you could just go get a .com domain name. Those early years have NO citable online links. They didn't exist. There was no WWW.whatever.org.
So I posted a lot of historical corrections, because I was fucking there. I know the early history. I know the later history. I know stuff the head people have forgotten.
After posting some useful corrections, Wikipedia crapped all over it, you know, because there are no citations for stuff that happened before the WWW was open for general public use. And a lot of it happened offline in meatspace. Even if there were online elements, all the early stuff was on servers that no longer exist. There is no longer a there there. But I still have all the old ugly HTML cause I wrote most of it. Before I got jaded and burned out and began hating. I was nice once. And naive.
Their editorial reversion and shootdown of actual facts ended whatever effort I'll ever make to contribute to wikipedia. If they think they know better, they can just cope with citable but factually incorrect garbage and that's fine. I won't donate a used fingernail to their fund raisers and won't feel sad if they collapse into a heap of dung for lack of cash.
Nothing they've got matters if facts don't matter. And without facts, they're just another blog. Funny, but can't be trusted.
Sig for hire.
Already thought? Now write!
The place is a ghost town of the once mighty IBM. Watson is the only game in town, and that's in New York.
The rule says "paid advocates", not "any employee". If the rule was meant to cover all employees, it would say so. It doesn't.
Yes, most employees in a marketing or PR dept. probably qualify as "paid advocates"; I never implied they weren't. When I said "front-line employees" I meant people like engineers, support reps, developers, service reps, etc.
Who watches the Watchmen?
Actually verifiability, and * not * truth, is what you want in an encyclopedia.
The Truth(TM) can be changed and disputed, or slanted by a writer who claims to be "an expert" ----- or maybe in some fantasy world, all experts will agree, get it right, and never slant or cover up findings to suit their desired findings, or modify them under pressure from employers or peers.
Clueless readers can always be misled, fringe views will generally be excluded, but otherwise - forget it. Oh, and experts generally want to get pay for their work. And who exactly are "experts" going to be, on a whole bunch of non-academic topics?
In Wikipedia's model, we aren't relying on some deity-like person to get it right. Instead, we're made self-reliant. As long as what's written can be checked against a source by any member of the public, an * informed * member of the public, or a capable researcher, media writer, professional, or legislator, who wants to check and assess for themselves what the reality is behind the claim, and how accurate it is, is empowered to do so.
Its not always the case, but as a rule, mass empowerment ultimately seems to pay off better on average than centralized control. The more "important" and widely focused a topic, the more likely that is and the faster it tends to happen, too. Of course it's an average process, anyone who knows Wikipedia or expert dialogs can show exceptions. But on average, it seems a better way to disseminate to the public, the knowledge that experts produce.
Is it because you like being objectively wrong?
Aren't most Wikipedia editors employees of somewhere? Maybe only unemployed people edit Wikipedia. (I'm responding more to the bad summary than the article itself.)
Or the rest of us can stick with Classic and filter out the 'fuck beta' meme until you fucktards stop spamming the board.
BTW, I like the new look. It looks a lot like their mobile browser page. I can't wait until the mentally challenged stop posting 'fuck beta' and go back to beating their wives and molesting their kids.
-1 Flamebait.
Oh, well - Downmod me all you like. The new Beta will prevent your puerile attempts at censorship. Mwa-ha-ha-ha...
...how many events like this are associated with Wikipedia, and which we never hear about anywhere.....