Wikiscanner, launched last Monday, allows anyone to retrieve information about anonymous editors of Wikipedia’s pages (see Wired story 14.08.07).
The results show IP addresses and, apparently, the organizations that own them.
David Brain says on his blog, sixtysecondview: “I put Edelman into the Wikiscanner and discovered that of the first 100 results, 58 were from what appear to be . . . . . . Edelman offices.”
The subject of company edits to Wikipedia keeps coming up. In January 2007, Microsoft offered freelance work to a developer to edit Wikipedia pages. That offer caused raised eyebrows.
I’ve been asked about the subject several times while working in online communications roles as have many of my associates. And now it’s come up again with WikiScanner.
That the tool shows companies edit their content is no surprise. It’s how often and the results of their edits that’s damaging.
Even if most of the edits are trivial, confined to correcting errors, on first glance at the results, it’s the sheer volume of edits from companies that discredits the content.
Editing Wikipedia and other community content is a risky activity to be involved in, but then it’s also risky to ignore it.
Why would companies want to be heavily involved in editing community-generated content? It does make sense to monitor the most popular and, with full disclosure in discussion areas, to make reasonable content changes or edits.
But if that task isn’t farmed out to agencies, then who in the company is going to do that over several languages and in several countries on an ongoing basis? It’s a lot of effort. Are the results worth it?
Shouldn’t the company’s own online channels take into account external company profiles and either work with these perceptions of the company or ignore them?
Which raises the question: what is the role of “Our history” and other soft-topic (i.e. not financial information) areas on corporate websites, especially in the light of the proliferation of online information about companies that they have little or no control over?
Wouldn’t it be far better for the company websites themselves to be, if not the authority, a primary research source for content creators and editors of community websites such as Wikipedia?
To do that, the company needs to tell its own story on its own website in an engaging way that doesn’t scream hype, marketing or spin. It needs reliable, credible and verifiable facts. The story needs to balance brand with reportage.
With that, even if the company’s website content isn’t a primary source for researchers, at least when people come to double-check what Wikipedia or other community-generated content says, they’ll be greeted by an interesting credible story that they can freely reference.
It’s the spread of those references that will establish a company’s website as a worthwhile resource. That reflects on the brand, the company and ultimately its products.
Links
- WikiScanner Identifies Editors on Wikipedia. Mashable.com. 14.08.2007
- See Who’s Editing Wikipedia . Wired. 14.08.07
- New Online Tool Unmasks Wikipedia Edits. Associated Press, on Forbes.com. 08.15.07
- Firms accused of rewriting their entry on Wikipedia The Times. 16.08. 2007
