Wrecking Wikipedia - so who is suprised?

Sunday, August 19. 2007

Wrecking Wikipedia - so who is suprised?

It would appear that interested parties have been fiddling with Wikipedia entries. What is most surprising is that anyone is surprised. This was surely predictable. Surely?

Or is everyone so in love with Social Media that they have forgotten about the venal side of human nature? People cheat to gain advantage...always have.

The really useful bit of this story is that it came to life after the invention of WikiScanner:

Dozens of similar examples of insider editing came to light last week through WikiScanner, a new Web site that traces the source of millions of changes to Wikipedia, the popular online encyclopedia that anyone can edit.

There is a really useful lesson here for Social Networks, about the necessity of making the underlying data transparent.

Sadly, it won't be long before similar parties will be doing this via 3rd party addresses, despite any attempts at voluntary rules of engagement so it will probably be necessary to have fairly strongly authenticated ID systems for contributors, and exposure plus penalties for abuse of public assets like Wikipedia.

Clearly, the tragedy of the commons is as applicable online as off....

Posted by Alan Patrick at 19:40 | Comments (2) | Trackbacks (0)

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Yeah. Wikipedia deals with this sort of thing all the time in the normal course of events, and it's easy to spot PR-speak on an article and go through the history looking up who owns the IP address that did the editing.

I must stress that in my experience (as an English Wikipedia admin and a press contact for the Wikimedia Foundation), lot of it isn't done out of underhandedness at all - it's that they think they're honestly setting the record straight, but don't know the right way to do it. And the news stories are demonstrating that "perceived conflict of interest" "the right way to do things" isn't just explicit Wikipedia rules, but implicit rules of the society we live in.

The Microsoft example from January is a good case in point - they actually tried to do it as openly as they could, but people assumed they were just spinning things. I think we got it straightened out fairly well. We don't want to take companies to the cleaners, we don't want people scared to approach Wikipedia, we want people to participate and help in a way that works and that looks good because it is good.

#1 David Gerard (Homepage) on 2007-08-20 12:11 (Reply)

David...interesting comment, I'd be fascinated to know how you spot the flacks from the genuines.

I guess my view is based on my experience that as an asset becomes more valuable, (and has a large contributor base), people are increasingly inclined to game it, and you wind up in an arms race sort of state.

Digg or Google's experience comes to mind here.

#2 alan p on 2007-08-20 17:02 (Reply)

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