BOSTON – When a blogger revealed this week that Microsoft Corp. wanted to pay him to fix purported inaccuracies in technical articles on Wikipedia, the software company endured online slams and a rebuke from the Web encyclopedia’s founder for behaving unethically.
The imbroglio will soon pass, but it raises a bigger question: Why is it so bad to pay someone to write something on Wikipedia?
The “free encyclopedia that anyone can edit” requires articles to have a “neutral point of view.” But most contributors surely have some personal motivation to dive into a subject, whether it’s adoration of “Star Trek” or a soft spot for geraniums.
What’s to say contributors who get paid have a harder time sticking to the golden path of neutrality? And doesn’t Wikipedia have a built-in defense mechanism – the swarms of volunteer editors and moderators who can quickly obliterate public-relations fluff, vanity pages and other junk?
That is precisely what ran through Gregory Kohs’ mind last year when he launched MyWikiBiz, a service that offered to write Wikipedia entries for businesses for $49 to $99.
A market researcher in West Chester, Pa., Kohs believed that the corporate world was underrepresented in the sprawling Web encyclopedia, which is dense with obscure topics.
“It is strange that a minor Pokemon character will get a 1,200-word article, but a Fortune 500 company will get … maybe 100 words,” he said.
Kohs, 38, said he was committed to having MyWikiBiz create only legitimate Wikipedia entries – neutral, footnoted and just on companies or organizations with a sizable presence.
Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales called Kohs to tell him MyWikiBiz was “antithetical” to Wikipedia’s mission, as Kohs recalls the conversation.
Kohs noted that he was openly identifying himself as the author of his clients’ pages.
Wales was unswayed. But he told Kohs he could create Wikipedialike entries for his clients on MyWikiBiz.com. Then Kohs could reach out to Wikipedia editors and see if they’d like to “scrape” the pages – use them as Wikipedia entries.
Kohs says he got about 10 clients into Wikipedia this way over the next few weeks.
Around that time, however, Wikipedia’s volunteer crews were tweaking the site’s conflict-of-interest policy.
Ultimately, Kohs was permanently shut out of Wikipedia. Instead he launched Centiare.com, a wiki-directory for businesses.
“I think I was rubbing him the wrong way,” Kohs said. “I probably should have just kept my mouth shut.”
Wales agreed in an interview that companies and regular people likely are surreptitiously editing their own entries, doing in secret what MyWikiBiz was open about. But that doesn’t mean the site should give up trying to prevent public-relations efforts, Wales said.
“It’s one thing to acknowledge there’s always going to be a little of this, but another to say, ‘Bring it on,’” he said.
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