What's going on with Wikipedia?

As I've written before, for people who want to contribute articles, I think Wikipedia can have an unwelcoming, even hostile environment. There are editors who clearly live to delete new content rather than edit new content. (These are known as "deletionists": editors who shoot first and ask questions later.)

And then there are the flame wars, the infighting among "contributors writing about controversial subjects and polarizing figures," according to a recent Wall St. Journal article.

Although Wikipedia continues to be a popular Internet destination, the site is losing editors.

"Wikipedia is becoming a more hostile environment. Many people are getting burnt out when they have to debate about the contents of certain articles again and again," Felipe Ortega, a project manager at Libresoft, a research group at the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos in Madrid, told the Wall St. Journal. Ortega analyzed Wikipedia's data on the editing histories of its more than three million active contributors in 10 languages.

So could this mark the end of crowdsourcing -- the theory that "there is wisdom in aggregating independent contributions from multitudes of Web users"?

The Journal points out that "as it matures, Wikipedia, one of the world's largest crowdsourcing initiatives, is becoming less freewheeling and more like the organizations it set out to replace. Today, its rules are spelled out across hundreds of Web pages. Increasingly, newcomers who try to edit are informed that they have unwittingly broken a rule -- and find their edits deleted, according to a study by researchers at Xerox Corp."

I could've told you that.

Look, I don't think Wikipedia is dying. But I think it is facing a crisis, even if it's akin to a mid-life crisis. Check out the interesting Journal article, "Volunteers Log Off as Wikipedia Ages."

Four Points to Consider for Corporate Reputation

Recently, Circuit City made news because of an employee's reaction to a spoof published in Mad Magazine.

You can check out the faux ad here.

I read Mad Magazine as a kid, years ago -- the exact number of years ago is not relevant; most of the usual gang of idiots from when I read it are still alive and still writing for it. (How's that for a career plateau?) And now they have a website.

As well as a bit of controversy because a Circuit City employee saw the spoof, and didn't like it, and decided to respond.

How?

Apparently 40 Circuit City stores also sell magazines, including Mad Magazine. The company could've just pulled the issue, but instead, an employee instructed all 40 stores to "remove" and "destroy"all copies of the offending issue.

That email got out, and the spoof turned into an incident. Ultimately, a Circuit City "PR guy," James Babb, wrote a self-deprecating letter of apology, noting that he had written to the editors of Mad Magazine, explaining that "As a gesture of our apology and deep respect for the folks at MAD Magazine, we are creating a cross-departmental task force to study the importance of humor in the corporate workplace and expect the resulting Powerpoint presentation to top out at least 300 pages, chock full of charts, graphs and company action plans."

The result: Mad Magazine got a significant boost because no one really has paid any attention to the magazine. (Some online posts mentioned being surprised that Mad Magazine was still publishing.) Circuit City, on the other hand, is taking a hit for not having a sense of humor and for mishandling the situation. And way more people know about the Mad spoof than would have seen it or would have talked about it if Circuit City had done nothing.

This is known as the "Streisand effect," defined by Wikipedia as "a phenomenon on the Internet where an attempt to censor or remove a piece of information backfires, causing the information to be widely publicized. Examples are attempts to censor a photograph, a file, or even a whole website, especially by means of cease-and-desist letters. Instead of being suppressed, the information sometimes quickly receives extensive publicity, often being widely mirrored across the Internet, or distributed on file-sharing networks.^[1][2]" (The term was coined after Barbra Streisand sued a photographer who had taken and posted an aerial photo of her house in a publicly available database.)

We can see the Streisand effect at play recently with Boing Boing, when Xeni Jardin, a contributor to the site, "unpublished" -- a nicer way to say deleted -- "all references to a blogger named Violet Blue," according to a New York Times article, "Poof! You’re Unpublished." The mere act of "unpublishing" became known, and had the opposite of the intended impact.

So, here are four variables to consider about managing corporate reputation:

1. What's being said?
2. What kind of reaction is being generated by readers?
3. Where is the statement appearing?
4. Who wrote it?

By evaluating each variable, you can make the decision as to the appropriate way to respond. What's important to keep in mind is the need to keep a sense of humor and the need to take emotion out of the process (this is the first mistake Circuit City made).

For example, we had a client once about whom someone was posting very negative statements. We looked at those variables, and determined:

1. What was being said was very negative and had no basis in fact. The company could have sued, and would've have had a decent case.
   
2. These posts were not generating any attention, buzz or links. In part, it may have been a topic that most people didn't understand or care about or because the rants were rambling and incoherent and filled with typos and bad grammar.
3. These posts also were published on obscure sites, with dubious credibility.
4. The person was writing deeply-felt pieces but had no credibility.
   

This last factor is not always important, however. For example, a New York Times article this week, "On Wall St., Reputation Is Fragile" by Andrew Ross Sorkin, wrote about the downfall of the lesser known of the two Steven Rattner working on Wall St. The reason: posts with all kinds of allegations about Rattner were written by the ex-husband of the woman with whom Rattner had had an affair several years earlier; the posts also contained inaccuracies, according to the Times. Yet because the posts were so widely available, Rattner, who had been called a rising star, instead resigned from his job.

In the case of Circuit City, the "who" didn't matter. I'd say the fact that it appeared in Mad Magazine also counted against taking any action; that might be different if Mad targets the ideal Circuit City customer. If Andy Borowitz wrote something similar in his "Next Month's Business News" column in Conde Nast Portfolio, I think that could be different if only because Portfolio readers could be investors or shortsellers of Circuit City stock. (However, I would have advised against taking action, even if the spoof had been published in Portfolio.)

As for evaluating the reaction the spoof generated, Circuit City could have done a number of searches to see if there were any. But disposing of a few copies from 40 stores was far from being the right call.

There are steps companies and people can take when the media gets the facts wrong. But you can't do anything with humor or with opinion.

Bottomline: if they had been asked about the Mad Magazine spoof, Circuit City should have said, "What, us worry about satire in Mad Magazine? It's an honor to have Mad Magazine poke fun at us."

For more perspective on this matter, check out the Ragan Report's article, "Circuit City redeems a PR blunder." Also, check out an interesting Wall St. Journal, "When You're Here, You're Family -- But What About a Playboy Model?: Olive Garden Has Mixed Feelings: About Its Biggest Celebrity Fan."

Yet more about Wikipedia...

I'm not obsessed with Wikipedia -- it may only seem that way. The same could be said the New York Times, which ran two articles recently about Wikipedia.

The New York Times had an interesting article, "Seeing Corporate Fingerprints in Wikipedia Edits," makes the point that Wikipedia does not like corporate meddling on sites, and that it is now easier to find out who has edited those entries thanks to "wikiscanner.virgil.gr, created by a computer science graduate student, cross-references an edited entry on Wikipedia with the owner of the computer network where the change originated, using the Internet protocol address of the editor’s network."

Interestingly, the article found "most of the corporate revisions did not stay posted for long. Many Wikipedia entries are in a constant state of flux as they are edited and re-edited, and the site’s many regular volunteers and administrators tend to keep an eye out for bias."

The second article, "Defending Wikipedia's Impolite Side," provides an interesting look Wikipedia's perspective on "being punk'd" online. The bottom line: Wikipedia isn't doing much to correct possible defamation in entries.

More advice on Wikipedia

Here's some more advice on Wikipedia:

6. Sometimes dis-contributors (see earlier posting) will delete entries from Wikipedia newbies just because they have no track record. The best way to overcome this objection is to build a track record. And the best way to build a track record is to edit pre-existing entries. The secret to that is simple: There are truly lots of misspellings and grammatical errors throughout Wikipedia -- so it is not difficult to contribute to an entry without having to have factual expertise on a topic. Just click onto "Edit This Page," and, just like MS Word, Wikipedia software uses a red underline to identify misspelled words. Once you correct them, the page goes into "Your Contributions" page. Of the more than two dozen entries, just six are new material. The rest were copy-editing changes. Which, believe me, Wikipedia desperately needs.

7. The secret to working successfully with Wikipedia and other social networks is frustratingly simple: you need to make the investment of time. Time to check out the site and learn the ground rules. Time to contribute ...by following those ground rules. And time to make sure your contributions remain, and don't get edited out by dis-contributors. Clients who want a quick turn-around and quick results are going to be disappointed because it takes time to be seen as a useful member of these online communities. If you rush into things, you'll make mistakes, and could inadvertently harm your client or cause.

8. Many contributors to Wikipedia seem to be lazy. By leaving the Wikipedia world, and doing a little searching on the Internet, I've been able to find credible sources for correct misinformation. Again, if the dis-contributors did a little digging and more copy-editing, they could actually make a real contribution to the Wikipedia world.

9. Lee Gomes, a Wall St. Journal reporter and "Portals" columnist, makes an interesting point in his recent column, "Forget the Articles, Best Wikipedia Read Is Its Discussions." Discussion pages are "where Wikipedians discuss and debate what an article should or shouldn't be." Gomes discusses issues raised on the Ireland entry (should the entry be called "The Republic of Ireland"?) or the page for kittens (an "editor was objecting to the statement that most people think kittens are cute"). While I understand discussions about subjective perspectives, some discussions about facts get heated, but could be readily solved by further research. For example, there was a debate on the discussion page for Joan Didion surrounding the term "prose stylist." The term was deleted from her entry by someone who felt that all writers could be classified as "prose stylists." (That is not the case with many Wikipedia entries, in my opinion.) Others stated that "prose stylist" is a valid description of Didion. This debate started April 2005 and continued through Aug. 2007. Part of the problem was getting a citation to back up the description of Didion as a prose stylist. I did a quick Google search, and found a reliable citation from the New York Times. Problem solved. That's an example of Wikipedians being too lazy to find information outside the Wikipedia world.

10. There's a lot of movie and entertainment information on Wikipedia, and I found that many of the articles include citations from Internet Movie Database (www.imdb.com). So that in some cases, the Wikipedia entry doesn't offer as much trivia or interesting dialog lines as IMDB. While IMDB does have user-generated content, it could do a whole lot more by letting its users know to add content there, and for making it easier to post content onto the IMDB site. I've added information to IMDB before, but it took several days before the information appeared -- which is a benefit of Wikipedia: you can see your information instantly.

Some things to know about Wikipedia

For all the hype about Wikipedia, about how thousands of people work together to improve the site and the collective knowledge it offers, the reality can be a lot different.

1. It may represent the collective wisdom of crowds, but the crowds have a problem with grammatical errors, misspellings and poorly organized entries. The site should enlist copyeditors to catch these problems. I've seen a number of entries that contained redundant information because an editor didn't review the entire piece.

2. The site tries to be neutral and objective, but Wikipedia is much more subjective and less authoritative, than it claims to be. Different contributors' personal interests often skew the emphasis of the information. One entry emphasized a minor career move while overlooking major accomplishments.

3. Despite the concept that every contributor to Wikipedia serves as a fact checker, I've seen factual errors in articles. For example, an introduction claimed the subject to be an only child when the body of the article included information about the subject's sister. Yes, I corrected the information but the article was more than 18 months' old, and should have been corrected a long time ago.

4. It may be easy to post information, but it's not so easy to keep your article on the site. Wikipedia has self-proclaimed watchdogs whose main goal is to delete entries -- sometimes minutes after the entries have been created -- even if they have no real expertise in the subject matter. One contributor's page says: "I like to specialise in clearing up Wikipedia of all the unnecessary articles, i.e. adverts and spam, which prevent Wikipedia from being enjoyed by those looking for serious information." The result: a self-selected group who should be called dis-contributors because they rarely add information and are too quick to delete entries made by others. While I understand the need to protect Wikipedia from frivolous entries, I think the dis-contributors could play an important role if they spent their time as fact checkers or copy-editors.

5. If you post information on Wikipedia, you must also commit yourself to monitoring your entries. Otherwise, the entries could be deleted or edited by others who may add irrelevant or incorrect information.