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
Mark Pellegrini stated for the record:
what is to stop them from starting large, organized astroturfing on Wikipedia?
I think it would be a good idea to having some contigency plans in place should that happen.
From the back of the bottle of contingency plans: "Revert, ban, repeat."
You'll be surprised at just what a functioning Arbitration Committee can achieve. :)
-- ambi
On Sat, 27 Nov 2004 18:12:57 -0800, Sean Barrett sean@epoptic.org wrote:
Mark Pellegrini stated for the record:
what is to stop them from starting large, organized astroturfing on Wikipedia?
I think it would be a good idea to having some contigency plans in place should that happen.
From the back of the bottle of contingency plans: "Revert, ban, repeat."
-- Sean Barrett | Four parts ammonia, one part iodine crystals. sean@epoptic.com |
WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@Wikipedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
On Sat, 27 Nov 2004, Sean Barrett wrote:
Mark Pellegrini stated for the record:
what is to stop them from starting large, organized astroturfing on Wikipedia?
I think it would be a good idea to having some contigency plans in place should that happen.
From the back of the bottle of contingency plans: "Revert, ban, repeat."
Based on what I know of manipulating public perception, & the challenges of the Internet, I think we ought to look at our accumulated experience with another group: Scientology, & the related Wikipedia articles.
I have stayed away from this topic, except for the occasional peak & the minor edit or two (I find typos & bad grammar in other people's writings far quicker than in my own). However, to my knowledge none of the Scientology-related articles have turned into the no-man's land that some of our fiercely disputed articles have become.
I believe David Gerard has been monitoring the Scientology-related articles; perhaps David could offer some ideas of how to deal with possible astroturfing -- whether initiated by Microsoft or another corporation -- based on his experience.
Geoff
Geoff Burling (geoff@agora.rdrop.com) [041129 06:36]:
On Sat, 27 Nov 2004, Sean Barrett wrote:
Mark Pellegrini stated for the record:
what is to stop them from starting large, organized astroturfing on Wikipedia? I think it would be a good idea to having some contigency plans in place should that happen.
From the back of the bottle of contingency plans: "Revert, ban, repeat."
Internet users hate spam and *despise* spammers. As each of these ... creatures ... is identified, I predict they will be rapidly dealt with by natural immune response.
Based on what I know of manipulating public perception, & the challenges of the Internet, I think we ought to look at our accumulated experience with another group: Scientology, & the related Wikipedia articles. I have stayed away from this topic, except for the occasional peak & the minor edit or two (I find typos & bad grammar in other people's writings far quicker than in my own). However, to my knowledge none of the Scientology-related articles have turned into the no-man's land that some of our fiercely disputed articles have become. I believe David Gerard has been monitoring the Scientology-related articles; perhaps David could offer some ideas of how to deal with possible astroturfing -- whether initiated by Microsoft or another corporation -- based on his experience.
The Scientology articles were mostly started by Modemac or Chris Owen, who have been around the Scientology vs the Net thing for years (much like you or me, Geoff ;-) and so know it backwards.
The thing is that the articles are half-decent to very good because they were written with good NPOV and references in the first place. Thus, there was (a) a structure (b) a level of expectation set by that structure for future additions to measure up to.
Not that they're anything like perfect or even Featured Article status, but they're better than bad!
In the corporate case, obvious corporate hagiography will get a severe NPOVing and egregious cases will be VFDed.
In the case that brought this up - [[Mozilla Firefox]] - the current version is a hideous piece of open-source hagiography that needs a severe NPOV of this sort.
- d.
David Gerard wrote:
In the case that brought this up - [[Mozilla Firefox]] - the current version is a hideous piece of open-source hagiography that needs a severe NPOV of this sort.
:-)
Good catch. As for me, I *love* Firefox, and I bet most of us do: so this is where bias is likely to occur... areas where we are all in such agreement anyway.
--Jimbo
Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales (jwales@wikia.com) [041201 12:31]:
David Gerard wrote:
In the case that brought this up - [[Mozilla Firefox]] - the current version is a hideous piece of open-source hagiography that needs a severe NPOV of this sort.
:-) Good catch. As for me, I *love* Firefox, and I bet most of us do: so this is where bias is likely to occur... areas where we are all in such agreement anyway.
And in open source, it seems incredibly hard to get NPOV across to advocates. Or, worse, anti-advocates. You think the Israel/Palestine mission posters are bad ...
- d.
As someone with both [[Linux]] and [[Mozilla Firefox]] on my watchlist (I wrote a good chunk of the latter article), I find it amusing how Linux gets vandalised more often than Firefox. By the way, I'm a bit curious about where the bias is in Firefox since I wrote close to half the article, but I can see what you're getting at. Already a week or two after my rewrite POV is beginning to creep into the article (again).
John Lee ([[User:Johnleemk]])
David Gerard wrote:
Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales (jwales@wikia.com) [041201 12:31]:
David Gerard wrote:
In the case that brought this up - [[Mozilla Firefox]] - the current version is a hideous piece of open-source hagiography that needs a severe NPOV of this sort.
:-) Good catch. As for me, I *love* Firefox, and I bet most of us do: so this is where bias is likely to occur... areas where we are all in such agreement anyway.
And in open source, it seems incredibly hard to get NPOV across to advocates. Or, worse, anti-advocates. You think the Israel/Palestine mission posters are bad ...
- d.
Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales wrote:
David Gerard wrote:
In the case that brought this up - [[Mozilla Firefox]] - the current version is a hideous piece of open-source hagiography that needs a severe NPOV of this sort.
:-)
Good catch. As for me, I *love* Firefox, and I bet most of us do: so this is where bias is likely to occur... areas where we are all in such agreement anyway.
--Jimbo
You undersell just how seriously NPOV is taken by many editors. [[Talk:Internet Explorer]] shows many editors bending other backwards to shut out the slashdot hordes and treat the browser to a fair encyclopedia article.
Pcb21
I predict this won't happen. But I'm a notorious optimist, eh?
The reason I think it won't happen is that it would just be terribly good press for us, and terribly bad press for them to get caught.
I do expect it from mom and pop operations with no good sense, but large corporations are much more likely to be clueful enough to see the impossibility of getting away with it.
--Jimbo