Microsoft PR Paying to "Correct" Wikipedia 355
Unpaid Schill writes "Over on the O'Reilly Network, there's an interesting piece about how Microsoft tried to hire people to contribute to Wikipedia. Not wanting to do the edits directly, they were looking for an intermediary to make edits and corrections favorable to them. Why? According to the article, it was apparently both to let people know that Microsoft will not 'enable death squads with their UUIDs' and also to fight the growing consensus that OOXML contains a useless pile of legacy crap which is unfit for standardization."
Honesty.... (Score:5, Insightful)
NPOV (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:For or Against? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Honesty.... (Score:5, Insightful)
How about a policy of let's make as much money as we can!
I mean, come on, this is a corporation, and you're complaining about ethics? Perhaps you're suggesting that they would make more money if they didn't have "unethical" policies like this... but that's not at all clear from your post. It is unclear why, in all situations, a blanket policy of honesty would be expected to maximize profits for corporations. (Let me rephrase that: this is obviously not the case.) Microsoft's goal is not to make you like them; it is to make lots of money. So far, they've been very successful at that. Probably their PR department played at least some small role in that. Don't get me wrong, I despise them too, but let's be clear that they're all doing exactly what they're "supposed" to.
No wonder there's a problem ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Same ol, same ol Microsoft. (Score:3, Insightful)
This is the tip of the iceberg as it is rare, Halloween Documents not withstanding, to know the real extent of Microsoft's ongoing disinformation campaign.
Were public opinion to turn around and evaluate many of the existing technologies on their own merits, without being told by the media that they are too dumb to use something like Suse 10.2, Mandriva or Ubuntu, it would hit Microsoft very hard, provided, of course, that there was an OEM there with enough balls to offer preloaded computers with another OS.
So Microsoft fights and will fight to the death for mind-share. This is the single most important thing that drives Microsoft. Once computers,operating systems and office suites are demystified, a process which could be greatly helped by open standards such as ODF,and people are no longer afraid to lose their valuable data in a transition to a different product, Microsoft either innovates in real valuable and tangible terms or begins to have to tap its reserves, which huge as they are, would "only" carry them for another fifteen years at their current size.
Re:Honesty.... (Score:5, Insightful)
The quotes around the work "Correct" in the summary headline is just another Slashdot spin...
Re:Honesty.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Corporations as they exist today are a mistake. A way of gathering investment money needs to exist, in order to fund things that need massive startup costs (for example, processor design). But the idea that it should be done by a pseudo-person with no sense of morality, whos only goal is to amass money and power, and with no accountability for its actions is horribly flawed.
Apple gets its truth squad for free (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Honesty.... (Score:5, Insightful)
That's just stupid.
Re:Honesty.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Its worth noting that it used to be that governments were far more restrictive about the corporate charters they would approve, and far more willing to revoke charters for corporations violating the public interest. The special privileges granted with a corporate charter were viewed more as a privilege granted in the public interest and conditioned on good behavior than as a virtual right the way they are now.
What we have now is not some intrinsic necessity for the corporate structure, a remnant of late 19th Century subservience to big business.
Re:Honesty.... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Honesty.... (Score:5, Insightful)
A slightly less rose-tinted view of history suggests that corporate charters were granted when there was an assurance that the ruling prince of the city-state, or his cronies, would get a cut.
Re:Honesty.... (Score:5, Insightful)
You did read the link, right?
This isn't some random anonymous goofball being paid to insert text Microsoft gives him; he's an (apparently) recognized figure, not especially MS-friendly, being paid to provide corrections in his area of expertise, with his reputation on the line. I'd trust that more than edits made by the PR people. He certainly made his case a lot more credibly than the Slashdot submitter made his.
I mean, I can still see where there are questions to be raised, but the write-up here is completely dishonest.
Re:No wonder there's a problem ... (Score:2, Insightful)
It doesn't matter. What they're doing is underhanded and shady. It doesn't matter how "unbiased" you think the person is, the facts remain:
This is, in irc terms, ban evading. It doesn't matter if the guy who banned you was a jerk, you're still ban evading. If they actually cared about "corrections," they'd submit a public correction request to the wikipedia editors detailing what is wrong, why, and the proposed corrections, and subject them to review.
did you read the article? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Honesty.... (Score:5, Insightful)
And murderers are doing what they're "supposed" to, after all, thats why we call them "murderers". Who decided that the profit motive was supposed to be superior to honesty? I think you'll find that fraud is not accepted in standard definitions of "free market" or "Capitalism", so where has the idea that lying for money is permissible come from?
Re:Honesty.... (Score:4, Insightful)
Absolutely. Entities that exist for a sole purpose are inherently "trustworthy" by the pragmatic meaning of "trust"...they are transparently predictable. Predictable is good.
Beyond a certain size, a corporation can no longer be anthropomorphized to an entity capable of emulating human behavior. They have no "soul", no "conscience", nor any sense of "good" and "evil". They are simply successful or unsuccessful, determined by the only metric with any meaning to them...money.
We find corporations to be useful entities, but we cannot expect them to police themselves, because it is simply not in their nature. That we must accept, while also accepting and upholding the task to monitor and contain them. If we shirk that responsibility, that's society's fault, not the corporations'.
If one wants to see what happens when a corporation attempts to police itself, one must examine any large socialist government. They are certainly not the first organization one would call upon if one wished to actually accomplish any useful work.
Is it a wise move to allow such massive accumulation of wealth and power in what basicly amounts to a sociopathic organization?
A wolf is not a sociopath; it's just a wolf. The sociopaths are the citizens who do nothing while a wolf behaves as wolves do.
Re:Honesty.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, the grandparent denounced corporations while acknowledging the necessity of a corporation-like object by saying: A way of gathering investment money needs to exist, in order to fund things that need massive startup costs (for example, processor design).
It's incredibly short-sighted to say "X sucks and should be banned", when X provides a useful service, and when no alternative is proposed. Say we banned corporations. Because of the necessity of a corporation-like object, it is very likely that such an object would quickly appear, and over time would evolve into something indistinguishable from today's corporation.
It's appropriate that you likened the argument to the argument over intellectual property. Again, IP sucks in many ways, but has useful consequences. If IP laws were repealed, and nothing replaced them, it is likely that content creators would re-create something similar to the IP system using complicated contracts (e.g., you would have to sign a lengthy agreement prior to purchasing an album at a music store).
Re:Honesty.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Being the PR department, their job description probably involves maintaining a positive PR image for the company. A fiasco such as this is them failing at their job. This is "doing their job" in the same way Uwe Boll makes movies.
I honestly can't make a call here. I'd like to assume that all marketers are terrible people lacking ethics, moral restraint, and any worth. However, not knowing any marketers personally I can't claim they are swampy morasses of evil.
This is true, although in this case they didn't perform well.
My personal preference would have been an interesting public press release regarding factual errors in the wikipedia articles, suggesting editors could check the facts for themselves and amend the issues. That way MS couldn't be said to have interfered with the objectivity of wikipedia while at the same time allowing it to be more accurate.
Not a perfect solution to be sure, but one that might show much more respect, tact and tolerance than ninja editing wikis.
While this is perhaps the case with much of marketing now, it needn't be.
For example, Nintendo. I would say that their marketing is honest. Their advertisements show a wide variety of people playing games with the new controller. Whether or not we agree that this is fun, Nintendo has worked hard at making their system fun in this way and believes strongly that this has been accomplished. The very successful sales of the system back this up.
If the system failed to sell well because Nintendo had failed in their goal to make such a system, they wouldn't be dishonest for having tried, felt they succeeded, and then attempted to share their success with everyone. However, they would be dishonest if they began/continued to make claims about their system that were divorced from reality.
OOXML and its shortcomings (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:I think companies should contribute (Score:3, Insightful)
Microsoft does this with bloggers (Score:3, Insightful)
Trying to "pay" them off to write something favorable for them - giving incentives such as notebooks, advertising dollars, free software, etc...
They do this to promote Vista, Zune, and the XBox. Their goal is to try to create a fanboy circle of consultants, gamers, and audiophiles, which will automatically do this for them. But the initial seed is through the media.
Trust (Score:3, Insightful)
If my exgf is a slut, and every time I get back with her she cheats on me, I know that her behavior is predictable and she has one primary goal. She is predictable, but definitely not trustworthy.
Re:No wonder there's a problem ... (Score:2, Insightful)
What you refer to as "public information" is actually disinformation put into Wikipedia by ODF-advocates. Who cares if they were paid directly by IBM or not? The fact is, they favor ODF and hate OOXML, and wrote the disinformation regarding OOXML in that light. That disinformation *needs* to be corrected. Or are you trying to "win" your format jihad via a disinformation propaganda campaign. IBM is certainly doing your dirty work by spreading FUD regarding OOXML, but do you really want Wikipedia to be used in that manner?)
Re:Honesty.... (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:This is crap (Score:4, Insightful)
Are you a retard or a shill? Seriously. What kind of naive fool would you have to be to think that the PR department of a major corporation really wants "non-partial" editing of its wiki entries? That they are going to *pay* for? And this corporation in particular, which has a well-known history of controlling press and PR about itself very tightly. I'm not surprised they're hiring someone, but don't insult anyones intelligence by suggesting that they'd be just as happy to hire someone to write negative entries. They're attempting to correct what they see as negative spin.
Well, nothing that he wrote in his article is "just plain wrong". Even his very first statement - the standard *does* define those sections, it does *not* provide implementation details, and while they are "optional", it's nitpicking at best to claim that they aren't a weakness in the standard and the inability for third parties to implement them is a problem.
The article in its current state doesn't say anything about "implementing the entire 6000 pages or MS will sue" and I don't feel like digging through the history in an attempt to find where he might have seen it. It's worth noting that the MS covenant only applies to conforming implementations, and there may have more been made of that fact in older versions of the article.
His final "inaccuracy" isn't anything of the sort, it's an accurate statement that he feels is unfair. He actually spends more time talking about this one than about any of the previous "inaccuracies", which might give you some insight into how he might edit the article. His stated reason for believing it to be unfair is factually inaccurate, too, which again indicates exactly how well researched and unbiased his opinions are likely to be.
Re:Honesty.... (Score:3, Insightful)
A corporation's goal is to maximize profit. While a corporation's officers have a fiduciary duty to work toward this goal, they must do it within the law. A corporation is a legal instrument and is constrained to operate within the law like the rest of us. Its goal to maximize profit doesn't give it license to commit vandalism. I mean, it's my own goal as an individual to maximize the amount of money I have myself. I can't simply cite that my goal requires me to break the law.
While there are not yet any laws against it yet, it's pretty obvious that this is vandalism of a public resource.
Look up the words: Social Corporate Responsibility (Score:3, Insightful)
Corrupt corporations corrupt everything they touch and the bigger they are, the more pervasive their effects on society is. To a certain extent, this anything-goes bullshit that one often hears in Slashdot is a clear example of the real pernicious effect that massive corporations are having on our collective culture.
Re:I'm impressed by Microsoft (kind of off-topic) (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Honesty.... (Score:3, Insightful)
But hey... A company like Craigslist comes out and says that profit is not their main motivation and company culture is more important to them, and they're described in the media as "communist". Well more power to communism in that case!
Re:Nice guys finish last (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Honesty.... (Score:5, Insightful)
I'll tell you that I've known about ten unbelievable programmers, and five of them would never have said, "I have programmed in over 20 languages." Of the other five, I am absolutely sure two are regularly unemployed and the last three aren't unbelievably famous.
Of course, you're welcome to call me an idiot all you like. I majored in Philosophy, I can take it. AND I work primarily in VBScript, meaning I have developed balls of steel from being kicked in them again and again and again.
As a side note, your resume is impressive, and if you moved you would have no trouble finding more interesting work. Not many do software development in Medford. I can think of three or four companies offhand in downtown Portland that would be completely happy to have you. A few tips on the resume:
"Minor Tech Support for legacy apps I have written," should probably not be on your resume. Don't tell anyone about things you will end up doing in your own free time. Are they supposed to pay you for it?
Life goals make poor career objectives. Pick something you'd like to do (in your and my case, "Work with a small, tight knit team to produce revolutionary technology grown out of the extensive background I have developed with a lifetime of computer work and training," might be appropriate, except I omitted the lifetime of training)
Some of your wording can be compressed. A good resume is MAX 2 pages long, and your HTML one seems to be about four.
I'd suggest dividing your resume differently - put a summary of your skills at the top, then divide it by important project.
Classes are great to have taken, but they don't mean much elsewhere. Link to source code if it's particularly brilliant, in an addendum to your resume called, "More interesting code projects."
Link to projects if possible, or make the source code available. This can be done in an Office document of any type you choose. Throw some code samples in text format on your website. Remember to document these samples a whole bunch.
Overall, your resume reads a little like a tech reference book; this is kinda bad.
As a disclaimer, I don't know what kind of companies you're applying to. Generally, you tailor your resume to the position you apply for. They want Java? Write a resume that shows all the things you've done with Java. They want C-based driver work? That's when you say, "I loves me some math." But don't complain when people pad their resume; just live up to yours in your interview.
Re:Honesty.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Honesty.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Honesty.... (Score:5, Insightful)
At your age, which appears to be around 24, I think most companies would be interested in your previous work experience so far and what you've done in the short space of time since you graduated (assuming you attended university/college).
Re:Trust (Score:4, Insightful)
She's completely trustworthy, you have just misplaced your trust. If you trust in her to be faithful, you made the mistake of mis-evaluating her actions. If you trust she is gonna cheat on you, you have accurately nailed the behavior and can develop contingencies for dealing with that behavior.
Trust is just a projection of your expectations in relation to your perceptions.
Mod parent up (Score:2, Insightful)
Here it is: an open and apparently straight admission of what happened, by the guy who did it. You may not agree with him or his motives, but he had the cojones to step up and own his actions.
Doug: in the interests of complete disclousre, it might be worthwhile to mention what Rick was paid.
Re:Honesty.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:hi, I'm the guy you're bashing today (Score:3, Insightful)
Point is, you should have a fair shake. That's not to say that the article - as I read it five minutes ago - is not pretty impartial as-is, IMHO. As soon as the legitimate beef came up, it became a pretty skeleton'ish thing with a (hopefully) intelligent attached 'talk' section that goes through the entire debate in all its horrifically standards-excited glory. Ergo, you got what you wanted and didn't even have to pay El Blogosphere for it. That's on time and under-budget if I ever saw it.