Yes the rules are changing. Microsoft and any company for that matter have a real challenge on their hands when it comes to influencing the debate and defending themselves on Wikipedia or the world of new media. Where the goal is transparency, openness and honesty, payment is frowned upon, even if you are transparent, open and honest about the point of you view you represent.

It means companies will need to work doubly hard to gain acknowledgment and acceptance of their point of view.

The company I work for had a relatively short and not very helpful Wikipedia entry. Our competitors have much longer, more detailed, and generally much better entries about themselves. I’ve wanted to fix our entry for a long time, but according to Wikipedia, I can’t. I have to sit on my hands and wait for one of our customers to decide to commit the hours to such a project — and let’s not kid ourselves, creating a good Wikipedia entry about a technical subject is not a small project.

Yet if I try to facilitate matters, then I’m bad and should be roundly criticized. I call bull. That’s only true if you subscribe to the theory that anything a corporation does is inherently tainted and untrustworthy. The world just isn’t that black and white. Companies with a legitimate interest in providing accurate information about their products should be able to do so without either sneaking around or going over hurdles that their competitors don’t have.

“Stupid is as stupid does.”

Just to be clear, I didn’t say he was stupid

Oh really?

I think he may have been acting completely rationally — and thought what he was doing was the right thing. That’s irrelevant.

No, that’s entirely relevant — if the official process can really enable a corproate entity like Microsoft to achieve its legitimate objectives, then his circumventing the process would have be entirely IRRATIONAL.

paying someone to change a Wikipedia entry is somehow justified because Wikipedia is “broken.”

No, the core issue is whether Wikipedia is, in fact, broken. I think it is.

And on PayPerPost — not even close. PPP allows advertisers to REQUIRE a positive post, have approval over the post, AND it does NOT require disclosure. Microsoft did not require anything specific of Jelliffe other than that he use his professional judgment, they did not ask him for approval, AND they asked him to disclose everything on his blog!

I find it interesting that everyone — you included, Scott — gets upset at the idea of PayPerPost paying bloggers for their opinion (positive or negative) but paying someone to change a Wikipedia entry is somehow justified because Wikipedia is “broken.”

I’m not saying the Wikipedia process is completely without flaws

But that is PRECISELY the issue. It’s easy to write off what Mahugh did as “stupid” or “foolish” or “not getting it” or “acting irrationally,” but I think the reality is more likely that his actions were a response to processes that are in fact BROKEN.

Most people don’t act with malicious intent — they make the best judgment they can under the circumstances. If Mahugh made the wrong judgment, the question is why? Again, I’m guessing it’s not because he’s some devious corporate type that we’d all love to demonize.

Factual edits can be made if evidence is presented, and the discussion pages are the place to debate whether something needs to be changed. Paying people to change things is just no way to run something that is (allegedly) supposed to be an unbiased resource, whatever Mr. Mahugh’s intentions were.

As for astro-turfing, I will bow to Wikipedia on that one — I thought the term referred to any attempt to generate “fake” grassroots support for something.

he still tried to get around the process

I’ve seen nothing that would instill any confidence in any corporate entity that there is a “process” that would treat them fairly, i.e. you’re assuming that Microsoft went around a perfectly good and fair process. Just look at Michael Rubin’s comment above yours for evidence to the contrary.

there are ways of doing so that don’t involve astroturfing

According to the Wikipedia definition of “astroturfing,” you need to be deceptive in your approach, and Microsoft specifically did NOT ask Jelliffe to hide the ball. I think the “astroturf” label is becoming a bit of a red herring.

All in all, I think it’s a LOT more complicated than you and others are making it out to be.

I did find this page, but I found other pages that contradicted the information contained here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:COI

So I went to Ask Metafilter to ask for any specific experiences people had with making edits. The link below goes to the Ask Metafilter page, but I can summarize in two words: Forget it. Even if you want to do it the right way to correct incorrect information (not PR whitewash), you’re walking into a mindfield.

http://ask.metafilter.com/mefi/54026

They get all their power from *our* links, so turnabout is fair play.