Today I am told a story that seems all to familiar to me. It involves an article on Wikipedia that has been ripped from the site. So as I listen more I start having some serious déjà vu. It amazes me how little has changed in two years and just how powerful Wikipedia has become. Let’s face it Google loves Wikipedia and if Google loves you the power is yours. Janet has a great post about this as well that has a nifty chart exemplifying this. So with great power comes great responsibility and this just seems yet again to be a case where Wikipedia is not being responsible.
Ok so for those of you who do not know me from Adam, I used to be the technology evangelist for the Digital Universe Foundation and part of the DU was the Encyclopedia of Earth. At the time I worked with Larry Sanger who was well let say vital to the creation of Wikipedia (this is another Wikigate unto itself) he was key in helping to craft the EoE on a wiki platform as a vetted open wiki i.e. experts in the field we called them stewards, controlled and vetted a topics information. We did this because of all the troll like behavior that exists on Wikipedia. So users could collaborate on the wiki but it was vetted first to keep the Wikiality and truthiness in check.
Now I was deeply involved in this project, I was initially a software engineer and DB guy with the project and moved into the evangelist role. So I understand some of the complexities of a wiki and absolutely understand how versions of truths can vary. I once spent seven hours on a conference call with academics debating Dublin Core and ISO standards and how our Semantic data structures should be laid out in the DU. Talk about a long debate about what the true standard of how data about data is defined… I still get dizzy. So as you might glean from this I have a touch of history with the Way of the WIki.
Now we often heard from academia that they were very frustrated with anything they tried to contribute to Wikipedia due to the vandalism and troll like behavior. Some professors found it reprehensible that college students so were so heavily using Wikipedia as the master source for information on topics. On any given Sunday you may find an explosion of growth in the population of African elephants and thus as a master source it is flawed.
Now as I have said this power comes from Google and the fact that Wikipedia pages are so organically SEO powerful. So De facto since it is now common place for most businesses to have not only an SEO strategy as well as a social media plan Wikipedia must be a consideration in that plan.
Now to the meat of the matter I have known Kent Lewis for some time and I can tell you from a personal and professional level he is aces. A stand up guy with a reputation people drool over. He is active in so many things and has always been one of the best at being open and honest. So the story he told me this morning made me mad as a hornet to think that yet again the trolls rule Wikipedia and that so many people have this unreal sense of the “facts” that come from a very powerful knowledge repository. The hidden wizards of OZ have from behind the curtain pulled the leavers and dumped an article BECAUSE of the transparent way Anvil and Attensa talked about utilizing Wikipedia.
Now I have read the article about Attensa that was on Wikipedia and did not see anything biased or commercial about the writing. As Scott Niesen points out Wikipedia had no problems with the article until the Marketing Sherpa article came out. This is just wrong. What are companies supposed to do Wikipedia holds a position of power in the SEO space and companies must pay employees or other companies to monitor and maintain SEO and social media strategies or risk becoming invisible to customers and clients when it comes to online, which is becoming more and more important. To quote Kent –
Anvil and Attensa played by the rules as best we could (maximizing our Truthiness in our own Wikiality) by providing accurate company content and balanced perspective (including competitor links on topical pages). It’s too bad the fact that the content we provided to Wikipedia users that was considered relevant and valuable yesterday has been deleted because of unrealistic and unfair rules.
Moving forward, Wikipedia needs to figure out if their current structure and process can meet the needs of the increasingly savvy and skeptical Web surfer, and do so before Google decides for them.
So Wikipedians what are companies to do when the reality of the “90-9-1 rule” let’s 1% control this repository of “truth” and even worse a fraction of that 1% – that smells a bit trollish- has the capacity to ban information. I full heartedly support your neutral aims for information and think wikipedia and the other open knowledge projects are amazing but you need to open the curtain because the hidden Wizard of OZ is an old model and this is the new Reputation Economy and transparency is an expected price to be paid.
***** For transparency and full disclosure awhile back I did some freelance work for Attensa, produced some podcasts and screen casts, but I am not doing any work for them now. It’s a small world after all.
Wikigate and my own personal flashback
Today I am told a story that seems all to familiar to me. It involves an article on Wikipedia that has been ripped from the site. So as I listen more I start having some serious déjà vu. It amazes me how little has changed in two years and just how powerful Wikipedia has become. Let’s face it Google loves Wikipedia and if Google loves you the power is yours. Janet has a great post about this as well that has a nifty chart exemplifying this. So with great power comes great responsibility and this just seems yet again to be a case where Wikipedia is not being responsible.
Ok so for those of you who do not know me from Adam, I used to be the technology evangelist for the Digital Universe Foundation and part of the DU was the Encyclopedia of Earth. At the time I worked with Larry Sanger who was well let say vital to the creation of Wikipedia (this is another Wikigate unto itself) he was key in helping to craft the EoE on a wiki platform as a vetted open wiki i.e. experts in the field we called them stewards, controlled and vetted a topics information. We did this because of all the troll like behavior that exists on Wikipedia. So users could collaborate on the wiki but it was vetted first to keep the Wikiality and truthiness in check.
Now I was deeply involved in this project, I was initially a software engineer and DB guy with the project and moved into the evangelist role. So I understand some of the complexities of a wiki and absolutely understand how versions of truths can vary. I once spent seven hours on a conference call with academics debating Dublin Core and ISO standards and how our Semantic data structures should be laid out in the DU. Talk about a long debate about what the true standard of how data about data is defined… I still get dizzy. So as you might glean from this I have a touch of history with the Way of the WIki.
Now we often heard from academia that they were very frustrated with anything they tried to contribute to Wikipedia due to the vandalism and troll like behavior. Some professors found it reprehensible that college students so were so heavily using Wikipedia as the master source for information on topics. On any given Sunday you may find an explosion of growth in the population of African elephants and thus as a master source it is flawed.
Now as I have said this power comes from Google and the fact that Wikipedia pages are so organically SEO powerful. So De facto since it is now common place for most businesses to have not only an SEO strategy as well as a social media plan Wikipedia must be a consideration in that plan.
Now to the meat of the matter I have known Kent Lewis for some time and I can tell you from a personal and professional level he is aces. A stand up guy with a reputation people drool over. He is active in so many things and has always been one of the best at being open and honest. So the story he told me this morning made me mad as a hornet to think that yet again the trolls rule Wikipedia and that so many people have this unreal sense of the “facts” that come from a very powerful knowledge repository. The hidden wizards of OZ have from behind the curtain pulled the leavers and dumped an article BECAUSE of the transparent way Anvil and Attensa talked about utilizing Wikipedia.
Now I have read the article about Attensa that was on Wikipedia and did not see anything biased or commercial about the writing. As Scott Niesen points out Wikipedia had no problems with the article until the Marketing Sherpa article came out. This is just wrong. What are companies supposed to do Wikipedia holds a position of power in the SEO space and companies must pay employees or other companies to monitor and maintain SEO and social media strategies or risk becoming invisible to customers and clients when it comes to online, which is becoming more and more important. To quote Kent –
So Wikipedians what are companies to do when the reality of the “90-9-1 rule” let’s 1% control this repository of “truth” and even worse a fraction of that 1% – that smells a bit trollish- has the capacity to ban information. I full heartedly support your neutral aims for information and think wikipedia and the other open knowledge projects are amazing but you need to open the curtain because the hidden Wizard of OZ is an old model and this is the new Reputation Economy and transparency is an expected price to be paid.
***** For transparency and full disclosure awhile back I did some freelance work for Attensa, produced some podcasts and screen casts, but I am not doing any work for them now. It’s a small world after all.