In a corner of the web last week a group of PRs debated Wikipedia’s attitude to the PR industry. The discussion came after errant PR firms were caught out breaching Wikipedia’s guidelines. Stuart Bruce has the details.
A dull but worthy topic you might think. Not one bit. Wikipedia is a top ranking site for search. It frequently takes the number one slot in Bing and Google search results, Alexa ranks it as one of the top ten sites on the Internet, and its credibility makes it a starting point for internet research.
Wikipedia is a community. As Julio Romo highlights PRs can register as contributors but must follow Wikipedia’s guidelines:
- Contributions or edits must have a neutral point of view and no conflict of interest
- Content must be verifiable
- Articles must not contain new analysis or synthesis
It’s the first issue: neutrality and conflict where the PR industry falls down.
Wikipedia has published guidelines for the PR industry. In its Social Media Guidelines published last year the CIPR advises that PR practitioners seeking to update a Wikipedia entry on behalf of a client should work with an editor to update the relevant page per the CIPR’s Social Media Guidelines.
This is social media at its most social. The ultimate arbiter is the community. If anyone makes a contribution that the Wikipedia community deems to breach the guidelines it will be removed. To misquote James Grunig or more recently Philip Sheldrake, it’s a platform for symmetrical communication.
But Phil Gomes and Stuart Bruce don’t think the existing Wikipedia guidelines are sufficient. Gomes cites company data and information that is out-of-date and Bruce reckons that the very community nature of Wikipedia is the natural playing field of activists.
In a response on Gomes’ blog Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales says that he has yet to hear a cogent argument for PR practitioners to directly edit entries. He says paid advocates don’t make good editors because they insert spin.
“The simple and obvious answer is to do what works, without risking the reputation of the client: talk to the community, respect their autonomy, and never ever directly edit an article,” he said.
Wikipedia agreed last Thursday to meet with representatives of the CIPR to develop clearer guidance on this issue. Ahead of that meeting Philip Sheldrake has, appropriately enough, developed a wiki page on the CIPR Social Media wiki to kick off the discussion.
Wales’ argument is incredibly arrogant. His reference to “the community” seems to refer to his army of voluntary editors and ignores Wikipedia’s other community – the consumers of the information they provide. When journalists go to a Wikipedia page they expect facts and they expect the most up to date facts.
Take the example of a Wikipedia entry on a midlevel FTSE250 company from a non-sexy sector. With the best respect to the Wikipedia ‘community’, the original poster of this entry isn’t really going to have much enthusiasm to go back and change details on market capitalisation or a revised headcount. And this information could change quarter. Yet it is exactly this kind of information that actracts a harrassed journalist doing background on a feature, or a quick bit of comparison on a NIB.
This is precisely what PR agencies or their clients should be updating, basic company information. It’s quite offensive to say they are incapable of doing this. Most journalists think it is happening anyway, despite it being against best-practice or the Wikipedia rules – more importantly most journalists don’t mind. You cant put ‘spin’ on the location of a head office or the name of a CEO.
If journalists start finding their information dated and inaccurate theyll stop looking, and that isnt it anyone’s interest.
Great piece and a good round up – I’d missed a few of those references first time around!
[...] the latest PR blog posts – from, among others, Stuart Bruce, Phil Gomes, Julio Romo and Stephen Waddington - there appears to be a belief that the existing Wikipedia guidance needs to be updated. The [...]
I think the answer is fairly simple. If you are even a half-decent journalist working on a story about a company and you want some basic company info e.g. Staff numbers, you will go to the company’s website not Wikipedia. If you want some independent thoughts about something the company may not be proud of, you will go to Wikipedia, do a Twitter and blog search, etc. PRs who want to correct factual inaccuracies (not opinions or interpretations) on Wikipedia should point Wiki editors to the relevant section on their client’s website and ask for corrections to be made. It is against the spirit and letter of Wikipedia to start messing around with entries and, more importantly for PRs, if and when you get found up it is likely to end up causing your client reputational damage both on and offline. Think before you hit the ‘Edit’ button…
Andrew,
Your comment here, and your comment on my post on the same topic (click my name), aren’t quite right I think. PR practitioners are allowed to do the things you describe like change obviously erroneous facts and figures. Check out the Wikipedia guidelines here:
http://mnwh.li/wikipediapr
Philip
Yes, the guidelines say that PRs can make minor edits of small factual and typographical errors. But when Jimmy Wales starts issuing indirect threats of damaging the reputation of those who edit their clients’ entries (as he did on Phil Gomes’ post on this subject), comms professional become wary of taking the risk. Marshall Manson comments on your post that Edelman has a policy banning staff editing Wikipedia, and they advise their clients against editing.
The sad thing is that in all the recent debates on Wikipedia, not many PR and comms folk have been offended by Jimmy Wales hostility to their profession. As I stated on your blog Wikipedia needs to be trusted. I don’t believe that the level of hostility from Wales is conducive to trust. The headline at the top of this page is ‘Not all PRs are rogue’. Unfortunately nothing will convince Jimmy Wales that this is true.
And PturnedG – of course journalists shouldn’t use Wikipedia as primary source material. I was talking about initial story idea research, or early comparative research. But if a half decent journalist cant rely on Wikipedia for basic facts, why should they rely on it for ‘the dirt’? There, surely, lies even greater danger.
Jimmy created Wikipedia with five pillars, one of which requires editors to have a neutral point of view (NPOV). Anyone paid not to have a NPOV obviously doesn’t have one. While I agree that’s an issue when others who may not necessarily have a NPOV are allowed to edit more freely (albeit subject themselves to the wrath of other Wikipedians), the rules are the rules.
Two wrongs don’t make a right. We should not break the rules. Well done Edelman.
However, we are welcome to challenge the rules. I’ve had the pleasure of speaking with Jimmy Wales on three or four occasions and he comes across to me as a nice bloke, happy to chew the cud – as his participation in the CREWE dialogue recently is testament.
Being truly objective, who really has worked hardest to date on trust? – Witness the Wikipedia community’s relentless focus on its founding pillars, and the unethical behaviour of some PR practitioners? And I qualify unethical not just in terms of breaking Wikipedia’s rules, but in terms of undertaking any tactic anonymously – a clear breach of the CIPR’s code of conduct for example.
Let’s live up to the true definition of PR as I see it – working hard to affect mutual understanding between an organisation (the PR profession in this case) and stakeholders. Let’s not resort to defamatory accusations, but identify new and constructive ways in which Wikipedia might work to the greatest value of all.
Being an objectivist, Jimmy embraces reason. Let’s reason.
I have just looked at his comments on CREWE. I was impressed with the level of debate taking place there. Thanks for bringing it to my attention.
[...] excerpt FROM: http://www.speedcommunications.com/blogs/wadds/2012/01/09/wikipedia-not-all-prs-a-rogue/?12345 [...]
Please be aware that Jimmy Wales is not some sort of all-powerful CEO of Wikipedia who makes policy decisions himself these days. He is the one of the founders but policy and guidelines on the English language Wikipedia are made by the community of several thousand active editors, and we are an independent bunch. To argue that the Wikipedia community doesn’t need to worry about unethical PR efforts is really ludicrous to experienced Wikipedia editors who battle an unrelenting flood of spam, promotionalism, advertising, get rich quick schemes, hate diatribes, fringe theories, ethnic warring and the most bitter forms of religious and political disputes every hour of every day of every week of every year. So don’t be surprised when efforts perceived as whitewashing of corporate clients are not received with a friendly ear. I doubt if Jimmy Wales thinks that all PR folks are “rogue” but I think that he is smart enough to know that no PR person will add accurate information to an article that will be perceived as detrimental to their client. Wikipedia editors are expected to write from the neutral point of view, and almost no one is capable of being fully neutral in their public writing about the person who signs their paycheck. On the other hand, experienced Wikipedia editors can recognize professionalism even by advocates for a point of view, and are interested in balance and fairness. Most are quick to correct factual inaccuracies and want to have well-referenced coverage of both sides of a controversy. That includes your client’s side of a controversy unless it is spurious and utterly discredited. I edit under the user name “Cullen328″. Feel free to contact me on my talk page.
[...] Jimmy Wales, and there have been numerous supporting posts, such as these from Stuart Bruce, Stephen Waddington and Peter [...]
Could the NPOV policy be flexed to accept a ‘Declare an interest’ button for such editors to tag their entries with?
Alongside an ethical ‘facts only’ code of conduct, this’d mean that dull but incorrect entries would actually be changed and anyone in ‘the community’ interested enough to look would easily be able to see the entries that they may want to double-check.
Wikipedia does not forbid editing by those with a conflict of interest. Instead, it recognizes COI as a problem, expects editors to declare their COI on their user pages and on the talk pages of articles they edit, and to defer to disinterested editors on controversial matters. In my judgment, the chance that Wikipedia will change its attitude toward paid editors and COI editors is essentially nil. The vast majority of active editors and administrators would oppose such a change, based on what I’ve learned as a very active editor.
Wikipedia References…
[...]Wikipedia: Not all PRs are rogue | Wadds' PR Blog[...]…