Companies editing Wikipedia: busted by WikiScanner
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A recent article in the New York Times brings to the mainstream something that’s been talked about for a while now: a brilliant Web tool, WikiScanner, that automates the process of linking the IP addresses of Wikipedia change-makers to companies and organizations that might have a bit of a conflict of interest.
Anheuser-Busch, the Central Intelligence Agency, Pepsi, Diebold and more companies and organizations have been busted editing Wikipedia entries that hit a little close to the company home. That’s not necessarily a bad thing (although many say it is, actually, a bad thing), many of these WikiScanner examples are indeed questionable or biased edits.
I love stuff like this because it’s great to see this stuff exposed. I say that not out of joy for seeing other people get busted but out of joy for the future of PR and doing business on the Web. Eventually, people will realize that shady or questionable actions will get outed, and we’ll all have no choice but to rise to the challenge of doing this well, and on the up-and-up.
Wide-eyed idealism at midnight. Sweet…
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Hopefully that means that in the future, marketers and advertisers can just sit back, while we allow customers to brand companies.
Artists will compete to design advertisements, as Mountain Dew, Diesel, among others have already done. And customers will contribute to information networks such as Wikipedia to define the brand.
Although my question is does the WikiScanner know what’s “compromising”? I.e. someone from Pepsi Co. adding historical facts vs. a PR or marketing person adding brand boosting adjectives…
There’s plenty of work for marketers to do, even if this idea is taken to the extreme. Somebody, after all, still has to figure out how to let people know about the companies and products that are out there to be branded by the people, for the people.
I know many companies that utilize Wikipedia as a part of their strategy. I think it’s a great idea! What would make sense is keeping an eye on these edits to ensure everyone else will benefit from the edit.
If companies want to be blatant, they can simply turn to the Million Dollar Wiki and own their own page.
Cheers!
Doug
I’d be curious to learn more about how companies use Wikipedia as part of a strategy, presumably for some sort of marketing or PR work. I think it’s clear that “corporate editing” of Wikipedia can be risky. Are companies often actively engaged in Wikipedia’s “talk pages,” hoping to affect the content on relevant pages?