Microsoft has recently come under fire by Wikipedia and its founder Jimmy Wales after it was made public that Microsoft was contacting technical writers and asking them to change a Wikipedia entry on Office Open XML to favor the Redmond company.
As many of you in the search engine world know, Google and other engines favor Wikipedia results because the site is considered a massive trusted authority.
Microsoft approached Rick Jelliffe, a CTO of an Australian tech company, offering to pay Mr. Jelliffe to alter the Wikipedia entry.
Jellifee writes on his O’Reilly XML Blog entry:
I was a little surprised to receive email a couple of days ago from Microsoft saying they wanted to contract someone independent but friendly (me) for a couple of days to provide more balance on Wikipedia concerning ODF/OOXML. I am hardly the poster boy of Microsoft partisanship! Apparently they are frustrated at the amount of spin from some ODF stakeholders on Wikipedia and blogs.
Here is a snippet of the email sent to Mr. Jelliffe (thanks, Slashdot):
Wikipedia has an entry on Open XML that has a lot of slanted language, and we’d like for them to make it more objective but we feel that it would be best if a non-Microsoft person were the source of any corrections.
Would you have any interest or availability to do some of this kind of work? Your reputation as a leading voice in the XML community would carry a lot of credibility, so your name came up in a discussion of the Wikipedia situation today.
So, is this an example of the evil empire wanting to change the way users think, or an example of online reputation management gone wrong?
Neil Patel of Pronet Advertising and a Wikipedia marketing guru writes:
Because Microsoft’s past modifications did not go as they planned, it does not mean they should have resulted in trying to pay someone.
If the modifications were truly beneficial to Wikipedia readers they probably would have been accepted by the community.
So, with a delicate case like Wikipedia, perhaps Microsoft should have let the community decide on whether or not the entry was favorable to Microsoft.
Lesson, if you’re going to doctor Wikipedia listings, add links, or pay someone to do so… don’t get caught.
Ouch… If this is true I wouldn’t dare to show to work for a week if I was in there shoes!
I stil don’t get this – if a microsoft employee had done the changes then they would have been paid for their time.
So, if they ask someone else to make the changes then they are happy to compensat for their time.
The changes having been made, they are just as open to changes by other editors as any other change.
Now if they had tried to pay someone inside Wikipedia to make a change that would not then be editable, then that would be wrong – but they didn’t.
I don’t see the problem in paying someone to do some work for you, when you will profit from the results.
~ can’t believe I am defending M$!!
Wikipedia is open for editing by the public. The matter is, the general public opinion does not match Microsoft opinion, and they want someone expert in this field to write good deal about them. So they are buying him to change his opinion, not because he is convinced and wants to defend their opinion.
If all companies do this, can you imagine what harm it will bring to the Wikipedia?
Editing your own article at wikipedia? Bad idea. But it makes sense to some degree. The “neutral point of view” (WP:NPOV) is the recommended style to be used for an article. Now how neutral or unbiased are you about yourself? …. see!