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.

Comments

Wikipedia is utterly broken anyway.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Edit, but disclose

[qbzzt]

This is pretty much IBM's policy. We're allowed to post about IBM, provided what we post is:

1. Non confidential (I can't tell you about the time machine we're building in the basement in Austin)
2. Not damaging (I am not allowed to be defamatory, for example - although I will say all of HP's employees who are black with yellow polka dots are habitual liars)
3. Clearly stated to be the opinion of a specific IBM employee, rather than the IBM corporation

It would be silly not to let IBM employees, for example, post about mainframes. A lot of the world's mainframe expertise is at IBM.

Disclaimer: I am an IBM employee, but these are my own opinions. They do not reflect the opinions of the IBM corporation in any way, shape, or form. Considering that IBM is not a natural person, I'm not sure if it even has opinions, beyond "money coming in good, money going out bad".