Microsoft Corp. landed in the Wikipedia doghouse Tuesday
after it offered to pay a blogger to change technical articles on
the community-produced Web encyclopedia site.SAVE MONEY ON TRAVEL DEALS
While Wikipedia is known as the encyclopedia that anyone can
tweak, founder Jimmy Wales and his cadre of volunteer editors,
writers and moderators have blocked public-relations firms, campaign
workers and anyone else perceived as having a conflict of interest
from posting fluff or slanting entries. So paying for Wikipedia copy
is considered a definite no-no.
"We were very disappointed to hear that Microsoft was taking
that approach", Wales said.
Microsoft acknowledged it had approached the writer and
offered to pay him for the time it would take to correct what the
company was sure were inaccuracies in Wikipedia articles on an
open-source document standard and a rival format put forward by
Microsoft.
Spokeswoman Catherine Brooker said she believed the articles
were heavily written by people at IBM Corp., which is a big
supporter of the open-source standard. IBM did not immediately
respond to a request for comment.
Brooker said Microsoft had gotten nowhere in trying to flag
the purported mistakes to Wikipedia's volunteer editors, so it
sought an independent expert who could determine whether changes
were necessary and enter them on Wikipedia. Brooker said Microsoft
believed that having an independent source would be key in getting
the changes to stick -- that is, to not have them just overruled by
other Wikipedia writers.
Brooker said Microsoft and the writer, Rick Jelliffe, had
not determined a price and no money had changed hands -- but they had
agreed that the company would not be allowed to review his writing
before submission. Brooker said Microsoft had never previously hired
someone to influence a Wikipedia article.
Jelliffe, who is chief technical officer of a computing
company based in Australia, did not return an e-mail seeking
comment.
In a blog posting Monday, he described himself as a
technical standards aficionado and not a Microsoft partisan. He said
he was surprised to be approached by Microsoft but figured he'd
accept the offer to review the Wikipedia articles because he
considered it important to make sure technical standards processes
were accurately described.
Wales said the proper course would have been for Microsoft
to write or commission a "white paper" on the subject with its
interpretation of the facts, post it to an outside Web site and then
link to it in the Wikipedia articles' discussion forums.
"It seems like a much better, transparent, straightforward
way", Wales said.
On the Net:
The Wikipedia subjects in question:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDocument
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OOXML