Wikipedia worries

Wikipedia worries By Rob O'Neill August 27, 2005

A series of fictitious entries have tested the integrity of the co-operatively produced online encyclopedia Wikipedia over the past fortnight.
Initially, fears centred on an entry for a fake pop star, Jamie Kane. Kane is the fictional star of a BBC online interactive game. But as the matter was investigated other encyclopedia entries have come under scrutiny.

Wikipedia, which started operations in 2001, is one of the most popular online reference sites on the web. It's operated by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation and edited collaboratively by thousands of volunteers around the world. Anyone can join and edit its entries. However, its openness may also have allowed the encyclopedia to be abused.

After investigations and publicity on the digital media website Boingboing, apologies were received from the people responsible for the false entries, one unaffiliated with the BBC who wrote the Jamie Kane entry and another, a BBC employee, who made an entry for the bogus Kane's fictitious band.

The BBC employee, who identifies himself as MattC online, said his action was not part of an orchestrated marketing campaign "nor was it intended for my page to be attributed to the BBC, which has been implied. It was nothing more than common garden vandalism for which I am sorry".
Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales says it appears the entries were not part of a marketing effort "just some guy at the BBC editing Wikipedia innocently and harmlessly. I consider this part of it a non-story."
However, the matter has not ended there. Wikipedia has now produced a page linking to other suspect entries on the site. These include an entry for a Burger King campaign that now carries a note saying the article is being considered for deletion "in accordance with Wikipedia's deletion policy" and asking for the community's views.

Last week the site carried an entry for a supposed new religion involving a deity known as the Flying Spaghetti Monster. The religion is a parody of the Kansas State Board of Education's decision to allow theories of intelligent design (the idea that the universe was created by some unknown intelligent agent) to be taught in science classes. This entry is now also being considered for deletion.
Wales says there is a community process determining if something is relevant. "Lots of things get deleted because they can't be confirmed or have no cultural relevance," he says, citing vanity pages for obscure people.
A United States digital media commentator and contributor to Boingboing, Xeni Jardin, says Wikipedia is a gigantic online reference tool that catalogues all sorts of things including internet "memes" or cultural ideas transmitted across the internet. The encyclopedia, she says, discusses these in an intelligent way and is self-correcting.

Jardin says the Spaghetti Monster entry has undergone a lot of editing by the community presenting it as a meme and a gag at various times. Dozens of edits were happening every hour at one point. The entries also each carry a discussion tab, so the process of editing and issues surrounding any entry are transparent to the user.
Jardin says many people did not object to the Jamie Kane entry but protested that it was presented as a fact, as if he existed. The entry will settle down, she says, to a factual one as the Wikipedia editing process continues.

Jardin says much of the outrage over the Kane entry was that it looked as if the site was being used for commercial gain. It now seems that was not the case.
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.
"On the other side, I love it from an academia/sociological standpoint and I don't 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)."

But as Jardin says: "I imagine quite a few Wikipedia users would beg to differ."

From The Sydney Morning Herald