The hostile relationship between the PR profession and Wikipedia is well documented. But this week the two parties have taken a step towards establishing common ground.

PR professionals Philip Sheldrake and Neville Hobson addressed the Wikimedia UK AGM at the Science Museum, London on Saturday. Wikimedia UK represents Wikipedia contributors in the UK.

“Wikipedia is a community and the PR profession respects the community’s right to set its own rules,” said Sheldrake.

“If anyone believes the rules should be changed, then the case has to be made in a public forum for open debate, and what better forum than the community’s own,” he added.

It’s in this spirit that Wikimedia this week agreed to host draft guidelines for the PR profession on using Wikipedia. The guidance which was written by the CIPR Social Media Panel, is now open for consultation before being finalised in June.

“We welcome this approach from the PR community in what is a very sensitive area,” said Jon Davies, chief executive, Wikimedia UK.

The move has support from across the UK PR industry.

“I’m delighted the PR industry was represented on Saturday. The mood in both camps is that strengthening the relationship between Wikipedia and the PR industry is beneficial for everyone,” said Francis Ingham, CEO, PRCA.

You can contribute to the consultation via the Wikipedia page.

Further reading:

• CIPR calls for feedback on PR guidelines about Wikipedia use, PR Week
• Reputation and Wikipedia, part II, Philip Sheldrake
• Your time, your place, your opportunity, Neville Hobson

You can get up to a lot of no good with a little cash online, like buying fake girlfriends or blank accounts for nefarious means. You can also buy popularity.

Over on The Kernel I discuss a little experiment I recently did On Manufactured Influence.

I gamed Twitter followers with the intention on seeing the effect on social capital measurement services, like Klout and PeerIndex. I paid for a drastic increase in followers, but my influence scores didn’t budge.

As I discuss in the article, what did change was my real life influence, an increase in real people following me, based off of my apparent popularity. There’s no denying that having more Twitter followers makes you look more important.

There is a huge market for these types of services and it costs very little to appear influential. As more preferred treatment, career opportunities and perks become available for those with large follower numbers, the temptation to fake it certainly increases.

As Wadds said in a recent blog post, “Much of the information created on the web, especially the social web, is utter nonsense… Everyone needs to be their own information analyst and be able to question the authenticity of content.”

As well as the content, the same “crap detection” should be applied to how we see the online profiles of people themselves.