Microsoft tries to ‘edit’ Wikipedia
By Gareth Powell
On the wires Associated Press has the story that Microsoft offered to pay for Wikipedia edits. This is not an end-of-the-world crime and a bit of background might help.
Wikipedia is the splendid web encyclopedia site which was started by Jimmy Wales (seen here) and is a great and good thing and about five times more comprehensive than, say, Encyclopedia Britannica.
Now I have to get a bit personal. I was associated with a satirical magazine in Britain called Private Eye and the entry concerning its early years had, I thought, some errors. So I wrote a very polite email, explained my involvement, pointed out the three major errors I thought existed. Two were corrected immediately. One, which is arguable, remains as it was.
A civilized way of making sure the entries are correct. This is the way founder Jimmy Wales and his team of volunteers wants it to be and their attitude is to be applauded.
So when Microsoft approached an Australian writer who is also a blogger and offered to rattle the swill pail if he changed technical articles on Wikipedia it was getting it very wrong. That is not the way it works. Not the way to behave. Microsoft has put up the very, very weak excuse that IBM had done it first.
Jimmy Wales said, ‘We were very disappointed to hear that Microsoft was taking that approach.’
Microsoft admits it approached the writer, Rick Jelliffe, chief technical officer of a computing company based in Australia, and offered to pay him for the time it would take to correct what Microsoft was sure were inaccuracies in Wikipedia articles. These articles were about an open-source document standard and a rival format put forward by Microsoft.
Catherine Brooker, speaking for Microsoft, said she believed the articles were originally written by people at IBM which is a big supporter of the open-source standard. Intelligently, IBM has not responded to questions.
Catherine Brooker also said Microsoft got nowhere in trying to flag the purported mistakes to Wikipedia’s volunteer editors. Thus it sought an independent expert who could determine whether changes were necessary and enter them on Wikipedia. She said that Microsoft believed that having an independent source would be key in getting the changes to stick. And, in fairness, Microsoft had agreed that the company would not be allowed to review the writing before submission.
Jimmy Wales said the proper course would have been for Microsoft to write or commission a ‘white paper’ on the subject with its interpretation of the facts, post it to an outside Web site and then link to it in the Wikipedia articles’ discussion forums. He said, ‘It seems like a much better, transparent, straightforward way.’
Related:
Entry was posted
on Wednesday, January 24th, 2007 at 9:36 am
under
Read more entries by Gareth Powell.
Stumble It!
January 24th, 2007
Wikipedia is neither great nor good. It is simply a free-for-all propaganda machine masquerading as an encyclopedia. Both large companies and government organizations routinely subvert and take control of Wikipedia articles. Here’s one way it works…
Let’s say the White House wants to control the article on the U.S.-Iraq war (which, by the way, they do). They get a bunch of agents to work round the clock using several Wikipedia accounts with four or five agents per account so they have 24-7 coverage. This is not hard to do since Wikipedia will inform the agents via their accounts when an article has changed. The agents will only need to spend a little time each day making updates.
First the agents use their accounts to fix “vandalism”. Such vandalism can be created with other accounts going through rogue IP addresses. The agents’ accounts get administrator privileges for doing this repeatedly. They, in effect, build a false reputation as “good guys”. The agents’ accounts can then be used to censor any addition they don’t want the public to know. They use the excuse NPOV to keep news reports, video footage of actual events, and even references to the Manning memo out of the article. In effect, they white wash the coverage of the war.
If anyone tries to dispute the censorship imposed by one of the agents’ accounts, say account A, then the agents can control the outcome of the dispute by using accounts B, C, D, and E. It looks like more than one person is voting on the dispute, but it is actually the same person via different IP addresses or two people in adjacent desks working together.
How do I know this? I worked for the government and saw first this happening first hand. It’s a well-organized effort and is 100% effective. The people doing it are so arrogant that they think they are being patriotic by manipulating the trust of the general population. This kind of propaganda has been going on since the dawn of history, but Wikipedia takes it to a whole new level.
To put it in perspective, if Wikipedia had been around during the 1930s/1940s, all references to the holocaust would be deleted as NPOV.
January 24th, 2007
I have often wondered if this was possible. Assuming everything you’ve said to be true, why isn’t Microsoft employing the same tactics? The only thing I can think of is that it may be a lot more damaging for Microsoft to get caught doing it than for the Government, but that’s just an educated guess. Anyone else know?
January 24th, 2007
Dan,
The Iraq War article in Wikipedia looks OK to me. Suspicious in that it sounds like one author (but I could be wrong), but it has the stuff I was looking for, like the 650K death toll statistic. Aside from mentioning the Manning memo, what’s missing? I’d probably add that the reason for the war was peak oil and the efforts of AIPAC (not my assessments, I can cite these if you like)… what would you add?
January 26th, 2007
I wonder if Microsoft will be editing “The Halloween Documents”
August 22nd, 2007
Apple also appears to have had their hand in the cookie jar:
http://www.graphicstart.com/viewarticle.php?articleid=18