From: Mark Pellegrini mapellegrini@comcast.net
"Wikipedia's steadily increasing popularity means that within the next year or two, we will begin to see organized corporate astroturfing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astroturfing campaigns."
Prediction confirmed - August 28, 2005 - http://www.smh.com.au/news/icon/wikipedia-worries/ 2005/08/23/1124562860192.html
"However, the concern continues. One anonymous reader contacted Boingboing telling them he worked at a marketing company that uses Wikipedia for its 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 [online meeting place] Myspace as far as some companies are concerned. We love it."
Without challenging your prediction, I do wish to repeat that there is a big difference between talking about something and actually doing it.
There are all sorts of _apparent_ opportunities to get away with dishonest behavior. For example, newspaper vending machines allow you to pay for one newspaper and take two. I am sure there is some sleaze somewhere who is bragging about how he does this regularly. You might even be able to figure out a way to make money on this for a while-- say, by systematically looting vending boxes and bringing the papers to recyclers.
That does not mean that any newspaper company needs to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to redesign and retrofit their vending machines.
That does not mean that there is no danger. I'm just saying that it is a big step from saying you _could_ do something from actually doing it on a big enough scale to be a problem.
A good example of this is airline hijackings. From the beginnings of air passenger travel until the late 1960s, airliners were totally unprotected against hijacking. I am _sure_ that people said "Look how easy it would be to..." I was going to say "and nothing happened for thirty years but Wikipedia's article on "aircraft hijacking" mentions some isolated events, the first in 1931. Nevertheless, it did not become a systemic _problem_ until the late 1960s and early 1970s.
-- Daniel P. B. Smith, dpbsmith@verizon.net "Elinor Goulding Smith's Great Big Messy Book" is now back in print! Sample chapter at http://world.std.com/~dpbsmith/messy.html Buy it at http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1403314063/