[WikiEN-l] Viral marketing?

[Ben Yates]

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 at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 14/08/05, Andrew Gray <shimgray at 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.
> 
> 
> Dan
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