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."
Re:For or Against? (Score:5, Interesting)
Removing FUD. (Score:2, Interesting)
There is A LOT of Anti-MS behavior and FUD out there. Therefore, MS is contracting PR agents to "fix" this publically available (and incorrect(?)) (mis-)information.
I don't see a problem provided they don't alter the FACTS.
I'd say business as usual... (Score:4, Interesting)
The trouble with this though is its akin to paying one of the guys at websters to change a dictionary entry for you. People don't expect those to have any signifigant bias.
I'm impressed by Microsoft (kind of off-topic) (Score:5, Interesting)
If you have ever worked in a moderately sized organization, you will know how difficult it is to get anything slightly unusual through the bureaucracy. Yet a clearly outside-the-box proposal like this apparently got through. Presumably, it is even encouraged. That would never have happened in any of the organizations I worked in, except maybe for the small 3 employee upstart.
Re:Apple gets its truth squad for free (Score:1, Interesting)
The Apple fanboys are certainly a pain. However, you have all unawares actually made a very telling point *against* Microsoft, namely:
Microsoft are so toxic that nobody loves them; consequently, no one who isn't paid by them will do anything for them.
Re:For or Against? (Score:2, Interesting)
Everything must be in neutral POV for it to be acceptable, however sometimes an objective POV is better.
I would like to see a wikipedia branch which offered different perspectives upon an article.
It would be good to see the Microsoft POV on themselves and how the public perceives them.
It would be good to know the facts about Manchester United football club, but since I support them I also don't mind reading about extra detail, where the best pubs are, bitching about the opposition and all other stuff someone who doesn't follow won't be interested in.
With microsoft I might want to see the party line on events actions and (for instance) the reasons behind those, I might want to be an investor who is looking more closely about the accounting details or a ravid linux fanboy wanting the conspiracy theories.
I would want to set my preferences like slashdot moderation groups and see the wiki-content I want.
All of this is available and is constantly created and destroyed in daily edit wars about POV.
Re:Honesty.... (Score:5, Interesting)
Third parties are usually where corporations finds impartiality, even if the third party receives a cheque from the company on a monthly basis. Most other industries use a third party for impartiality--e.g. auditing in the financial industry, security audits, etc. are essentially asking a third party to review existing data for disrepencies. Why can't Microsoft do the same with their products and/or standards?
Re: Honesty.... (Score:5, Interesting)
Somewhere, deep inside the twisted corridors in Redmond, some person must have actually thought of the idea to hire third parties to edit Wikipedia. He must also have presented it to his boss (unless it was some boss who thought of the idea himself), who in turn must have ordered someone to carry out the plan. Shouldn't an obviously unethical plan such as this have been stopped at some point in this chain? Shouldn't that boss figure have some kind of conscience which should have stopped him from doing this? Another problem may be the current inability (real or imagined) of "peons" in a corporation to themselves stop such plans when being ordered to carry them out. Generally, I believe that the lack of personal responsibility for actions being carried out "in the name of a corporation" is the real culprit.
Also, aside from the ethical standpoint, must they not have realized that this would leak out?! I mean, this cannot be considered positive PR, right?
Re:Honesty.... (Score:2, Interesting)
Would you take the job? (Score:5, Interesting)
In other words, being paid to do something you would gladly do for free, if you had the time?
Re:For or Against? (Score:2, Interesting)
It does not throw it away.
Currently there is a whole goldmine of good information buried inside the wikipedia history files.
It has been edited out of view because somebody did not agree with the content.
Why not just moderate these phrases instead of hiding them?
Sure, theres lots of drivel and spammy vandalism, but that might actually be of interest to someone.
We write a hell of a lot into our keyboards, we are infinite monkeys at our keyboards and I sense there is another work of shakespeare hiding away within our collective edits.
wikipedia's MS articles are anti-MS bashfests (Score:1, Interesting)
This is crap (Score:2, Interesting)
So the author is not a Microsoft fanboy/drone/borg/whatever.
So we can assume that the author knows what he is talking about, assuming he isn't lying (and he writes for XML.com so he probably isn't lying).
And after more "I'm no MS fanboy" bits, the author states that he received the Microsoft offer letter and:
Sounds fair enough.
The guy who knows what he's talking about finds an error rather quickly...
That one just amuses me, given the Slashdot submission which says:
Or to bring out the key points:
Well, they're not trying, they're doing.
Even the skeptical author of TFA stated that they seemed to want non-partial editors.
Nice one. In reality it was to correct information in Wikipedia that is just plain wrong.
Microsoft annoys the crap out of me, I use a Mac and before that used Linux for 6 years, but when Slashdot has stories like this it just makes us all look like assholes.
Re:Honesty.... (Score:4, Interesting)
Actually this isn't the problem with corporations today. The problem is that employees are not responsible for the companies actions. Instead, corporations are now "people" who are responsible for the actions that the employees take. There's an obvious disconnect there; the "person" responsible is not the person actually doing the crime.
Corporations typically have a hierarchical structure just so that somebody can be held accountable. If a corporation does something illegal then the person behind that decision needs to be tried for it, not the corporation. If the company hires somebody to do something illegal then the person authorizing that is responsible and the people who knew about it are accessories and the people who found out later and did nothing are accessories after the fact.
This is the real problem today. For example, Microsoft gets convicted of criminal restraint of trade and there are absolutely no personal consequences for the people authorizing it and perpetrating it. There are plenty of people in MS who knew of this and would not have allowed it to happen if their own butt was on the line.
Re: Honesty.... (Score:4, Interesting)
There's an interesting view emerging that it's actually more accurate to view a corporation as a self-aware entity. The reason that corporations routinely engage in behavior that would be considered obscene by a human being is not that there just happen to be a few "bad eggs" in positions of power, but rather that the structure of a corporation encourages and extracts bad behavior from otherwise reasonable human beings.
There are endless examples of this, and an intriguing discussion in Wade Rowland's Greed, Inc.. It's convenient for corporations to blame "bad egg" individual employees, because people can be easily replaced, and ignores the reality that the true root of the problem is systemic.
Re: Honesty.... (Score:4, Interesting)
Anybody that has worked for or with large corporations knows that they have a unique "culture" that is different from one to another. This culture largely survives changes of individuals within it. It is hard to identify where the culture "comes from". There is no single source of it - in some corporations you could replace the CEO and his direct reports and the culture would not change in the short or medium term (or ever cf: government).
One analogy would be the human brain. Many brain cells - individually very simple - governed by few simple imperatives generating very complex behaviour which is hard to pin down to any single brain cell (or even small group of cells).
"Mob rule" is another example of this kind of thing - where behaviour arises that exceeds that which any of its individual elements would necessarily countenance.
Here's a thought...
If evolutionary pressure was enough to select for "morality" and "ethical behaviour" in individuals, could it be that over time, these new entities will eventually evolve these traits as well?
I'm one of Wikipedia's big MS article writers (Score:5, Interesting)
Wikipedia articles are edited by people from Microsoft on a regular basis. Most of the time it's simple stuff, like fixing spelling mistakes, updating links, and putting some newly published information in about future releases. (This [wikipedia.org] is one example of an MS employee edit to the Office Open XML article. Pretty harmless.) It's quite rare that someone at Microsoft adds in unabashed "pro-Microsoft" stuff, and when they do, I or other interested editors remove it entirely or tone it down. But, I have yet to see any kind of co-ordinated efforts to astroturf Microsoft Wikipedia articles... if anything, it's just individuals who are proud of their work and want to write about it... you can tell, it doesn't have that shiny PR veneer on it. I've had to remind a few Microsoft employees to stay within the encyclopedia's neutrality and verifiability policies, but it never turns out to be a problem; almost everyone who's new to editing Wikipedia needs to learn that.
Frankly, I see far more crap by juvenile pro-Apple zealots, like redirecting the Windows Vista article to Mac OS X [wikipedia.org] and other such time-wasting noise. That's a reflection of the kind of uphill battle Wikipedia has to fight against vandalism.
Shit, after 7,000+ edits to Microsoft-related articles, maybe Microsoft should be offering to pay me to keep Wikipedia clean of anti-Microsoft crap, since I assuredly work harder at it than some dude with an O'Reilley blog. I wouldn't take their money for it though... or if I did, I'd make a public display of donating it all to the Wikimedia Foundation. They need the money more than I do.
If Microsoft wants to pay someone to write more into the OOXML articles, that's fine, I don't care -- but there's no damned way they're getting material inappropriate for Wikipedia past me & the other regulars. You can be sure of that.
Re:Honesty.... (Score:3, Interesting)
To put it simply, if a recording can be viewed, it can be copied. And experience has already shown how the public will put up with a hell of a lot of degradation rather than pay for content.
Re:Honesty.... (Score:3, Interesting)
In this particular case point (b) was of course the main reason for the Templars being accused of heresy in the first place, but that merely underlines the fact that this was a period when the extremely wealthy had to be even more careful about what they said and did than everyone else (Ballmer's "monkey dance" and chair throwing could for example have been presented by jealous rivals as evidence of obvious demonic possession, thereby opening Bill G. to accusations of sorcery, and anyone else associated with him to the same).
Re:Honesty.... (Score:3, Interesting)
If you have a HDTV set with a cathode-ray tube, you can use this to decrypt your signal. Get the red, green and blue intensities from the electron gun grids and you can get the position of the beam from the scan coil drives. This should be enough information to be going on with. You can (assuming the beam is scanning normally, which is a fair assumption) create a sync signal in sympathy with the starts of each horizontal line and vertical field. Then just adjust the RGB voltage levels to match the RGB inputs found on all modern sets, and feed the decrypted picture to another television or monitor. As soon as you have got hold of some unencrypted form of the movie, no matter how good the original protection may have been, it's worthless. You can make as many copies as you like of your unprotected version.
The public have been accepting egregious degradation from audio and video cassettes for years. The film E.T. was probably the most pirated in its day; it wasn't released on video for something like ten years, so there were a lot of dodgy camcorder copies (and such camcorders as existed in the early 1980s were enormous) about. But a flickery rendition with people walking about and making noises is better than nothing.
I don't know whether your example of "flip-book sketches" is at all realistic.
Re:hi, I'm the guy you're bashing today (Score:3, Interesting)
The Wikipedia page is already much better, so I think that's a results-oriented way to look at it. It will be interesting to see whether others agree with your analysis.