Microsoft Offers Cash for Wikipedia Edit

What a laugh!

Wikipedia's inner cadre of editors are themselves VANDALS, CENSORS AND CORPORATE SHILLS.

I enjoy bashing M$ as much as the next guy, but I think that the manner in which they approached this was not as horrible as it sounds. Take this comment, for example, on Slashdot from the the M$ guy who started this whole fuss.

Are there other things they could have done? Probably. Is what they did wrong? I don't think today is the day to call for blood from M$.

I started reading this thinking that it sounded like Microsoft was up to something bad again, and my hunch was just strengthened when I realized that the "open source standard" (that's a pretty confused description of it) must be ODF, the XML document format competing with Microsoft's OOXML. Microsoft and IBM are gearing up to become a lot more active in (or, if you are cynic, try to grab control of) the ISO committee that defines these two standards.

However, when I saw the name "Rick Jelliffe" I relaxed. If you, like me, actually knew Rick Jelliffe you wouldn't be so worried any more. Paying Rick to write about these two standards for Wikipedia sounds like a great idea to me, since that ensures Wikipedia gets some well-informed coverage of the two. Rick is a highly respected XML technologist and standards creator, and very, very far from being anything resembling a Microsoft partisan. The article says Rick was surprised to be asked by Microsoft to do this, and I can certainly see why he would be surprised, but on the face of it this sounds fine.

Of course, you could have a whole general discussion about whether being paid to write Wikipedia articles by parties which have an interest in the content of those articles is acceptable or not, but this is most likely a lot less fishy than the article might make you think.

I don't have a huge problem with this given that companies themselves are forbidden from creating, editing, working, or changing entries about themselves, not even to set the record straight.

But Wikipedia is not really about the truth anyway. It's about popularism. The popular truth is what stays, even when it might be completely wrong.

Wikipedia tries to legitimize themselves by claiming a third-party will make sure the truth is being told, but that's asking the affected company or person to just stand by and hope somebody ELSE fixes it. You're not allowed to correct your own bio. You're not allowed to fix entries that malign your company.

In most cases, I think that's merely silly. But when it's a controversial person or company, I think that policy is downright damaging on an internet where a story can spread wings and circle the globe for years without the slightest regard for truth or it's origins in a self-correcting encyclopedia.

If MS or another company or person can get the truth posted, then they're correcting the record and staying within Wikipedia's "you can't fix things about you" rules.

But of course Wikipedia is not interested in the actual truth, just the popular truth. Popular truths are indistinguishable from myths.