If anyone’s interested in promoting a protected and permanent description of yourself or your enterprise in our wiki, head on over. It’s free, and you can even serve up ads or sell your wares. Exploit MyWikiBiz — I dare you!

If you need any proof, see the original article for Arch Coal that I wrote. Wales called it a “travesty of neutral point of view” and a “PR puff piece”. No less than five respected editors asked Jimmy, in so many words, “What the f*** are you talking about?” But mob rule prevailed, and my account was banned from the encyclopedia “anyone” can edit.

It’s a very autocratic/bureaucratic culture over there. Just look into the resignations of Brad Patrick and Danny Wool from the Foundation, and I think you’ll get the picture. It’s falling apart as we watch.

1. Wikipedia is not a repository for the colloquial knowledge. Per their guidelines, material posted to Wikipedia is supposed to be sourced from another, established media source. The fact that people assume they can put whatever information they assume they have leads to many of the inaccuracies found in the content. Beyond anyone maliciously changing content.

2. Wikipedia isn’t really as open as it seems anyway. The Wikipedia editors have the power to moderate any topic, including (or some might say especially) those that they have no knowledge of. These editors are typically active community members that have just moved up the ranks of the Wikipedia corporation.

3. Paying people to maintain a Wikipedia page is like trying to hold back the tide. The numbers are against you. Tenacious users will revert your content based on the ‘principle’ that updates were made not just by someone with an agenda, but by someone getting paid to push their agenda.

4. Accuracy can best be summed up in one word: Wikiality.

5. Wikipedia rise to prominence was due in large part to people that posted content, and then linked to that content from their site. Or found content on Wikipedia and linked to it. Now, Wikipedia is turning their back on their community (with some valid concerns about spammers) by using the rel=”nofollow” attribute on all outgoing links. Causing some bloggers to start a campaign to do the same with links pointing to Wikipedia; using thi attribute on inbound links to Wikipedia if done on a mass scale would reduce Wikipedia’s relevance to the search engines.

In short, I don’t think that corporations are doing anything unreasonable in wanting to have someone monitoring their brand presence on Wikipedia. However, I also feel that it’s not a trend that is going to be able to be outsourced. More likely big companies will hire someone internally with responsibility to monitor the page. That would essentially hide the cost of it.

Long term, Wikipedia’s model is both too open and too restrictive to acheive it’s stated goal. It’s a neat experiment though, I’ll grant them that.

I wonder if, in time, Wikipedia might end up having to take a cue from traditional dictionaries, thesauri, and encyclopedias and create some sort of review board. In Wikipedia’s case, the board would likely end up having members who are scholars, businesspeople, scientists, etc. They’d review new additions, assess them for balance and other criteria, and vote on whether additions are in or out.

I agree with Mr. Kantor that Wikipedia likely perceives its strength as a communal source of information. I also think Carson has a point — the model worked best as a free-for-all…and remains valuable until it’s overrun by commercial interests and (gah) political correctness. The increased involvement of commercial interests will likely force Wikipedia to become more formalized and adopt the same kind of advisory bodies that are used by more conventional reference sources.

My 2 cents. Might buy your kid a gumball from the machine at the grocery store…

Rather than having the polish of traditional web content that has been edited and approved by a legal department, they believe that more people will be attracted to their site for it’s “home grown” perspective.

If that is the case then they open themselves up to highly inaccuracy content validating the other points that have made here.

Today, Brand Channel named Wikipedia the 4th most known online brand. See http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070126/tc_nm/brands_global_winners_dc_1

You all bring up some interesting points.

I guess the real question is this. Say you are a new business, like YouTube and you do not yet have a Wikipedia entry. Would it make sense to hire a professional to write it for you?

Mike