Written By Kate Zimmermann | January 24, 2007 | Share This |

According to blogger Rick Jelliffe, Microsoft attempted to pay him to edit their Wikipedia pages. The story broke first on the Age:

“Microsoft has landed in the Wikipedia doghouse today after it offered to pay an Australian blogger to change technical articles on the community-produced web encyclopedia site.”

As expected, Jelliffe’s post circulated through tech blog aggregators to the mainstream news. Rather than deny the allegation, however, Microsoft employee Doug Mahugh freely admitted to asking Jelliffe to correct an XML entry,

“…we feel that it would be best if a non-microsoft person were the source of any corrections…Feel free to say anything about the process, about our communication with you, or anything else…”

For a full account of the gossip, check out TechCrunch or Valleywag’s account of the story.

In the meantime, taken in context with Wikipedia’s recent addition of rel=”nofollow” tags on outgoing links (see “Heated Point / Counterpoint Debate on Wikipedia NoFollow Attribute“), this brings into question the whole notion of “spamming” Wikipedia. If the Wikipedia community is so robust that, as one editor claims, “spam” stays on Wikipedia for a “day on average”, does it really matter if someone alters information about their company? Clearly a tech-heavy subject like XML has innumerable editors that will keep any Microsoft alterations in check.

For that matter, why are edits to Microsoft’s information by a Microsoft employee really so improper? As Scott Karp writes,

“And, it now appears that if you are a corporation that feels Wikipedia is inaccurate or slanted on a topic that is of substantive importance to your business, you’re pretty much screwed. If your employees try to change the information directly, you’ll get slapped… And if, like Microsoft, you try to engage an independent expert to make changes — completely independent and without your review — you’ll also get slapped.”

Forgive me for questioning the authenticity of Wikipedia’s “open community” in which real people with real interests, and jobs with really big companies, get slapped for trying to communicate their opinions. Perhaps the appeal to Jelliffe was underhanded, but of all “community” members, you’d think an employee of Microsoft should feel free to correct any false information about their own company.

On that note, Rexblog points out an article about Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales’ multiple edits to his own profile.

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