[WikiEN-l] Dealing with corporate propagandists

[Mark Pellegrini]

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