Ben Yates wrote:
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?
Craig Hubley predicted this kind of thing years ago, and suggested that the response should be retaliation. For example, a policy that all favourable articles about products should be rewritten with a negative bias.
Of course, this (and for that matter, almost all of Craig's other ideas) would be completely unacceptable to the Wikipedia community, I just thought it was an interesting point.
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Spam&oldid=1348455
-- Tim Starling