You may have seen a recent study that found 60% of Wikipedia entries about organizations contained factual errors. Imagine a newspaper or other media outlet that regularly ran corrections for 6 out of every 10 stories. Put another way, it’s more likely than not that what you read about a company on Wikipedia is false. Not quite the reliable source of information anyone would turn to for authority – on anything.
For all Wikipedia’s vaunted “citizen journalism” ethos, this 60% statistic is breathtaking. PR pros have for years considered Wikipedia a scoundrel, as stories about their clients are based on otherwise erroneous information.
Say your client is the target of such a story, and the Wikipedia entry in question contains false and damaging information. As correctly noted by Marcia DiStaso, Wikipedia’s current lag time of several days for updating bad entries is way too long in today’s hyper 24/7 news cycle. (On a side note, Wikimedia Foundation Jay Walsh’s statement that “[y]ou shouldn’t edit articles if you have a personal stake in them” is absolutely laughable. How exactly does Walsh define “personal stake”? If you’re a super fan of a band, for example, does that disqualify you from editing or deleting negative but false comments about the band’s music? Where does Walsh propose drawing the line?)
Now imagine your client is a publicly traded company, and an incorrect news report – based on an incorrect Wikipedia article – causes the stock price to plunge. You try to edit the Wikipedia page but are constantly haunted by Wikipedia CEO Jimmy Wales’ admonition that “[t]here is a very central bright line rule that constitutes best practice: do not edit Wikipedia directly if you are a paid advocate.”
How such a regime constitutes fairness, in particular from a site that purports to be a democratic system to incubate and publish knowledge, is beyond comprehension. And lastly, if Wikipedia were ever to get its act together per this misguided editing philosophy, the least it could do is streamline the process. Even if you want to edit an article, good luck figuring things out as you travel down the rabbit hole.
“You may have seen a recent study that found 60% of Wikipedia entries about organizations contained factual errors.”
I have read the study itself, and noted numerous procedural and statistical errors, including most notably a biased sample and no checking of the “errors” as to whether they were in fact errors—oh, but the errors were categorized by type, so let’s not ignore that over a fifth of the reported errors were reported as “spelling”. The 60% statistic is fairly worthless, and quoting it isn’t helping anyone: it serves mainly to disparage Wikipedia (bad for Wikipedia) and to annoy Wikipedians with respect to PR pros (bad for PR pros).
“Put another way, it’s more likely than not that what you read about a company on Wikipedia is false.”
Here we descend into a further abuse of statistics. Even if we accept the 60% statistic, it only reports at best that there is *at least one* error in the articles it identifies, *not at all* that 60% of all facts on companies are false. If anything, Wikipedians should be congratulating themselves on the fact that, according to this study, 40% of articles on companies contain *no errors whatsoever*.
The remainder of this post rehashes the confusion on the true state of Wikipedia’s policies and guidelines on the matter. Let me, as an experienced Wikipedian, make this clear: PR pros and those with conflicts of interest *are* allowed to edit. However, there is a burden of care: they must follow Wikipedia’s policies and guidelines (neutral point of view, verifiability, reliable [and independent] sources, etc.) and they should be transparent about their involvement (e.g. say “I do PR for client X”) at every step of the process. If they do not follow Wikipedia’s rules, they risk getting blocked, *just like anyone else*.
The “bright-line” rule is just a best practice, a “safe zone”: if PR pros don’t edit articles directly, they avoid almost completely the risk that they may break the rules, particularly rules that they don’t understand well. However, there is *no rule whatsoever* and no ethical barrier against the direct correction of simple, uncontroversial errors such as spelling, grammar, dates of founding, et cetera.
Your post is confusing best practice with actual policy. Yes, it’s complicated—we’re working on improving that.