I had an ephiphany today. I saw the write up on Firefox on the main page. It got me thinking - what is to stop Microsoft, which (a) funds fallacious studies showing that its products are more stable/secure/cheaper (studies which everyone knows,are laughably wrong) and (b) has a history of astroturfing (" formal public relations projects which deliberately seek to engineer the impression of spontaneous and populist reactions to a politician, product, service, event, etc") - what is to stop them from starting large, organized astroturfing on Wikipedia?
I'm going to make a prediction. Within the next 6 to 18 months, we're goint to start seeing organized corporate astroturfing on Wikipedia. They've already started doing it to blogs (EA even went to far as to run a false blog, which posed as a beta developer for one of their upcoming games). I'm not talking about the little stuff we see already - I'm talking about PR drones register wikipedia accounts, making large contributions over a long time to a large number of articles with no attempt at NPOV, citing ludicriously biased studies, writing glowing product recommendations (or conversely, we could start seeing negative propaganda).
I think it would be a good idea to having some contigency plans in place should that happen.
--Mark