Some are calling it “Wikigate 07″
At least that is what the Daily Telegraph says.
Just in case you have missed the more than 200 stories on the Web, go here, or here, or here or … , to read about the world-wide brouhaha caused when
Microsoft acknowledged it had approached the writer and offered to pay him for the time it would take to correct what the company was sure were inaccuracies in Wikipedia articles.
January 27th, 2007 at 6:17 pm
There is a serious and generalized problem with the way Wikipedia is edited, and so Microsoft really has good reason to want that sort of thing. The editors of Wikipedia have fallen into a cultish hivemind suspicion of anyone with expertise and anyone who might possibly make (or lose) money based on what is said on WIkipedia. I have just done a series of blog posts concerning issues of Wikipedia and biography:
• A Proposal: SF Author Bios Should Be Moved from Wikipedia to the ISFDB Wiki
• Has Wikipedia Declared the Death of Print?, and
• How to Write an Author Bio: A Tutorial for Wikipedians & Others
The general editorial system seems to be that there is a pool of “editors” who have special priviledges as enforcers and that they can assist people to keep things in the spirit of what Wikipedia is and does. These “editors” leap in regardless of whether they have expertise in a subject area or not, and can be exceedingly rude, if not downright malicious. What seems to have evolved is a situation in which the editing of Wikipedia has become a specialized form of trolling.
But Wikipedia has huge Google Juice and people tend to believe what they read there whether they should or not. So is Wikigate 07 Microsoft’s problem? Or Wikipedia’s? I tend to think its Wikipedia’s.
But what do I know? As they told me, if I’m an expert in somthing ‘d best go elsewhere. Besides, I must be corrupt because a few decades ago I was married to a guy who helped found Microsoft’s International Sales Division.