CNN: Microsoft Payola to Tech Blogger on Wikipedia Backfires Click HERE to Bring Up Full Post

CNN.com, January 25, 2007:

Microsoft Corp. has landed in the Wikipedia doghouse after it offered to pay a blogger to change technical articles on the community-produced Web encyclopedia site.

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.

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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.

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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.

Payola is lawful in tech writing and promotions, but it merits scorn if received for posting in blogs and quasi-blogging community online content fora. It violates the unwritten rules of good faith and fair dealing, which are part of the "human capital" that makes them work.

I have less of a problem with payola for comments as opposed to articles, for the simple reason that comments on most blogs have adopted a pretty much "anything goes that doesn't get you banned" ethos or culture. Plus the purpose of comment sections is often for every reader to rant or riff responsively, and so I think it's more assumed that anyone, including a shill, will get his riff. Plus, since comments are responsive, the general subject matter of the discussion will usually have to stay responsive to the post, or be deleted/ridiculed as non sequiturs; a payola "plan" cannot be meaningfully hatched and executed through mere comments.

In wikis, a new commentator can outright erase old content and replace it, yielding a potential conflict and potential deterioration of the quality of the wiki as a whole. This is as true for Crabopedia (or as one Annapolis staffer called it in an email to ne before apologizing, CraPopedia ;-) ) as for any other typical wiki. The eraser power is of greater concern to me than the power to add content.