Still, someone wrote into boingboing with the following:
"I can't say who I am, but I do work at a company that uses Wikipedia as a key part of online marketing strategies. That includes planting of viral information in entries, modification of entries to point to new promotional sites or "leaks" embedded in entries to test diffusion of information. Wikipedia is just a more transparent version of Myspace as far as some companies are concerned. We love it (evil laugh).
On the other side, I love it from an academia/sociological standpoint, and I don't necessarily have a problem with it used as a viral marketing tool. After all, marketing is a form of information, with just a different end point in mind (consuming rather than learning)."
How well can wikipedia protect itself against this unfamiliar sort of systemic bias?
--------------------- Ben Yates Wikipedia Blog -- http://wikip.blogspot.com
On 8/15/05, Dan Grey dangrey@gmail.com wrote:
On 14/08/05, Andrew Gray shimgray@gmail.com wrote:
This might be of interest to some: http://www.boingboing.net/2005/08/13/bbc_punks_wikipedia_.html - Wikipedia articles (now VfDed) about a fictional popstar being added as part of a viral marketing campaign.
The talk pages of the articles concerned do a pretty good job of dimissing the notion that this was some sort of viral marketing campaign - more a series of honest mistakes.
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