In my post yesterday discussing an attempt by a Microsoft employee to pay a blogger to make changes to certain Wikipedia entries that Microsoft considered unfair, we noted that a Microsoft spokesperson made a number of factual statements.
Spokeswoman Catherine Brooker said she believed the articles were heavily written by people at IBM Corp., which is a big supporter of the open-source standard. IBM did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Brooker said Microsoft had gotten nowhere in trying to flag the purported mistakes to Wikipedia’s volunteer editors, so it sought an independent expert who could determine whether changes were necessary and enter them on Wikipedia. Brooker said Microsoft believed that having an independent source would be key in getting the changes to stick - that is, to not have them just overruled by other Wikipedia writers.
This seems to be the stake that Microsoft has put in the ground - they went through the normal Wikipedia channels, got nowhere, and were forced to take extreme measures to protect themselves.
The problem is, as we noted yesterday, that the discussion area of the page in question has no mention of any attempts by Microsoft to clear the record. Update: see below
We asked Wikipedia today for a comment on this. In particular, we asked them if Microsoft made any attempt that they know of to contact Wikipedia or the Wikipedia community to get their side of the issue communicated properly. The answer we got, from an unnamed insider, was “We have nothing in our ticket system, no phone calls, nothing.”
Without any evidence to back up their statement, it’s easy to believe that Microsoft skipped the crucial step that they said they took - trying to work directly with the Wikipedia community. I’d like to ask Brooker or another spokesperson for Microsoft to provide evidence that they did in fact engage with Wikipedia, before attempting to buy the changes they requested.
On the other side of this story, I think Microsoft is making a couple of good points.
First, in going through the discussion area, it’s clear that the article, while ostensibly about standards, is really a political battle between pro and anti-Microsoft factions. Each trying to make changes that the other side quickly reverses. It’s also clear that Microsoft is losing that battle. Both sides are exceedingly nasty.
Second, Wikipedia is a bit odd in that the experts on a given subject are the only people not welcome to participate (their methods for making these points, however, are leaving a very bad taste in my mouth). Nick Carr put it well today when he said: “It seems like we’re getting to the point where anyone who has gained deep enough knowledge of a subject to have developed a point of view on it will be unwelcome to edit Wikipedia.”
Update: See comments #3-5 below. We’ve found one (but only one) Microsoft comment in the discussion area of the article that occurred prior to this incident occurring (and others that were added in the last couple of days after this story broke). There are thousands of comments on the history of the discussion page, and most have no company affiliations. If there are other MS comments that anyone finds, please let us know. And by the way, I now know more about ODF and OOXML than I ever cared to.
You make some valid points in the article, especially the fact that specialists are seemingly treated with horrendous paranoia by Wikipedia.
But the one thing that I can’t understand about all of this is why Microsoft, one of the most successful tech companies in the world, is at all worried about the real or imagined bias of an article on Wikipedia. Has Wikipedia become so influential with the right people that it deserves the gazing eye of Sauron to look over it suspiciously?
Saying Wikipedia shuts out experts from participation would be an exaggeration. It doesn’t stop every so called _expert_ from making changes. Only people directly related with a topic are not entertained to make edits so that the _neutral_ point of view is maintained. But they can always use the discuss page to bring any mistakes to attention.
Anyway this is not a _rule_ in Wikipedia. Jimmy Wales himself edited his wiki page sometime back creating a controversy with fellow co-founder of Wikipedia.
> The problem is, as we noted yesterday, that the discussion area
> of the page in question has no mention of any attempts by
> Microsoft to clear the record.
This is incorrect. If you look in the talk page that you’ve linked, you’ll see several comments by Dough/User:Dmahugh/Doug Mahugh. Here’s his Wikipedia userpage:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Dmahugh
He makes no secret of being a Microsoft employee. He also happens to be the Microsoftie who contacted Jelleffe.
Please make a correction.
Note that at least one of Doug Mahugh’s contributions to that talk page dates back to August 2006.
Brian - I searched under his name, and found one contribution that occurred prior to this pay-the-blogger event unfolded - the one in August you refer to:
“I agree this is now more straightforward.
I still find it strange, however, that this article uses specific qualifications such as “Microsoft maintains” and “Microsoft has stated,” whereas the Wikipedia entry on OpenDocument uses general language such as “some argue” and doesn’t ever say whose opinion is being expressed in phrases such as “intended to provide an open alternative” or “without any implementation barriers.”
Why is the Open XML entry full of qualifications and attributions, while the OpenDocument entry presents similar types of information as fact without saying whose opinion is being expressed? I’m with Microsoft, so if I were to change anything in the OpenDocument entry I’m sure some would feel that’s inappropriate, but the lack of consistency in editorial style is pretty striking and seems to reflect a strong pro-Sun/anti-Microsoft sentiment. Hardly encyclopedic, in my opinion.
- Doug Mahugh, Microsoft131.107.0.103 17:24, 15 August 2006 (UTC) ”
If you can find any others, please let me know. Some of the other comments may be microsoft people without attribution, or even with (there are thousands of comments).
Guys world is becoming a highly unfair place to do business, every body wants to win and hense there is this mad rush to be the supreme winner but in the race the benevolence of Human Species is lost somewhere.
htttp://www.tekno-world.blogspot.com
According to the Sydney Morning Herald website (a national Australian newspaper) …
Wikipedia already takes “balance” to an extreme. In the real world, not all points of view are equally valid.
Microsoft’s attempt to “standardize” its proprietary (and hitherto secret) file format, in response to ODF becoming a standard, is a case in point. The ODF people genuinely want an open standard. The intention behind ODF is that anyone who wants to write a program to process files generated by OpenOffice should be able to do so.
Microsoft has never wanted to conform to any open standard. Its “Office Open XML” is partly an attempt at damage control (not supporting a standard looks bad). The document describing it is the opposite of what a standard should be like: it just describes what Word does, regardless of whether the result is a reasonable file format.
This is not Microsoft vs Sun, or Microsoft vs IBM. It’s Microsoft trying to maintain its monopoly, which in the long run is bad for everybody except Microsoft.
This open standard also bit Microsoft quite hard when they were forced by Adobe to remove native PDF publishing from the Office 2007 products.
Wikipedia claims to be “written collaboratively by volunteers, allowing most of its articles to be edited by nearly anyone with access to the Web site.”
But anyone that has ever tried to edit anything in Wikipedia knows that the content is guarded ferociously by a handful of gatekeepers. It is NOT the true, open democratic encyclopedia that the general public has this romantic notion of.
I admire what Wikipedia is trying to accomplish, but I know of many more companies that have been bitten by the same thing Microsoft is now being publicly flogged for…trying to change something that is percieved as inaccurate only to be stonewalled by the gatekeepers. The problem with Wikipedia’s approach is that each subject only has one (collective) point of view and very few things in life are that simple.
I agree with this comment - “It’s all tricky, you know” Jimmy Wales.
(http://www.foxnews.com/wires/2007Jan24/0,4670,WikipediaPaidEntries,00.html)
I also blog on O’Reilly, where Rick flagged the offer made to him by Microsoft.
On reading the original entry , I believed (and still do) that there is nothing wrong with this.
a) Rick has flagged in a very public forum that he has been made and accepted the it.
b) Rick also was very clear that he was being paid for his time, not to alter his opinions. He would continue to express himself as professionally as possible.
As someone said yesterday, why does this really matter? MS was trying to fix something they thought was incorrect…isn’t that what Wikipedia is about? Secondly, as stated previously, Wikipedia is nice to reference but I would never say that it’s fact. Who knows where half that stuff comes from. And lastly, TC seems to have it’s own agenda on this…and I think I’m going to spend my time reading elsewhere.
I completely agree; however, I’d like to add that “anyone who has gained any knowledge of a subject is generally unwelcome to edit Wikipedia.” I was a frequent editor until last year, and probably one of those gatekeepers PJC mentions. I created one of the most popular templates whose quality has diminished over time due to an incredible degree of bloat. Being a gatekeeper [of quality] is hard, actual work; unfortunately, this work is unpaid and anyone performing this work is reviled. There’s no sense in contributing to a project whose community of volunteers does not want you to contribute.
Why are you vilifying MS?
There actions pale in comparison to your own Wikipedia alterations.
People who live in glass houses shouldn’t through stones.
Why is this not in the main discussion?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W....._all_rules
I don’t understand why people are saying they couldn’t update information about their own technology.
Is the problem here that OOXML sucks? I know nothing about it but what I gather from this is that Microsoft was hiring someone to specifically do this for them. Paying someone to do this work would be the same as someone internal doing this for them. Money is money.. people are people.. employed or not. Doesn’t matter.
But if Microsoft felt so strongly about their viewpoint.. they should have just changed it.. and been a MEMBER of the community..
I read some articles about them saying that Wiki was just a fad and it will pass.. Why would someone wish or say that about a great community achievement?
Just dogging the opposition as usual.. and THAT is what makes me mad at Microsoft.
Microsoft made a decision, early on, to hire these so-called “evangelists”, like Doug Mahugh and Alfred Thompson (and Robert Scoble before he jumped ship, maybe he was clairvoyant) who are tasked to spread the Microsoft gospel, and the strategy worked for a while, but now there are signs of backfiring, and this incident with Wikipedia is the culmination of the fact that these evangelists simply got overly emboldened.
When the Wikipedia incident blew up, Mr. Mahugh was at least man enough to own up that he alone (gasp!) contacted the Australian guy. But Microsoft still has guys like Alfred Thompson, an admitted gun-loving ring-winger, who has been using every opportunity to preach his Republican-tilted messages, and Microsoft leadership has to pray that Mr. Thompson does not cause another embarrassment for them.
I honestly don’t get the comments here, nor do I get this article. The fundamental question at stake here is one of facts vs. bias. Any organization wishing to build an encyclopedia service in good faith should be doing their utmost to represent the facts and free itself from any bias. What we are witnessing both in the reaction to Microsoft’s attempts to present the facts and in the overall tone of the comments here is the genuine bias that the open source community has against Microsoft. Essential what Wikipedia is doing is they’re saying that anyone in our “community” can contribute to the collective truth but anyone outside our “community” is excluded. That’s like getting your news in a communist country. Sure, the state-owned newspaper will deliver the truth as they see it, and there may even be some facts mixed in there, but does anyone believe them when they are inherently biased? Can you trust the facts when they are filtered by the state?
What we’re witnessing is the fundamental bias of the opensource community and the institutions they hold so dear. There better be some fundamental changes in governance over this stuff or there cannot be any trust. Intellectual freedom necessarily means ideas cannot be suppressed, even when they come from sources (such as Microsoft) that the “community” doesn’t agree with.
Until these “community” run institutions support other ideas and broader contributions, nobody will believe the “information” in Wikipedia. If that’s the case, one must then ask, what’s the point of its existence?
Adding to what edwardk just said this reminds me of Stephen Colberts joke about one of the Wikipedia’s failings - that they do not report the facts but rather what enough people within an accepted community accept as a fact or “the truth”. This was when Colbert publicly vandalized a Wikipedia article about elephants and got a large following of people to do the same.
Adding to what edwardk just said this reminds me of Stephen Colbert’s joke about one of the Wikipedia’s failings - that they do not report the facts but rather what enough people within an accepted community accept as a fact or “the truth”. This was when Colbert publicly vandalized a Wikipedia article about elephants and got a large following of people to do the same.
This whole situation makes me wonder what is Microsoft’s motivation? The only thing I can guess is that by adopting ODF, Microsoft would lose sales of its Office Suite applications. However, if they are successful in standardizing their own conceived format, then they can retain sales and lock in users again.
There are two big stories here:
1. The objectivity of Wikipedia articles.
However, given that anyone has the opportunity to edit almost any article (a small number are locked due to their controversial nature), the resulting article is at least going to end up presenting several sides of ‘the story’. In fact, the success and superiority of Wikipedia’s approach has forced Encyclopedia Britannica to now accept open requests for reviews or changes to EB articles.
2. The ongoing sales and profitability of Microsoft’s major business unit, and one that pulls along lots of associated Microsoft products, is under real competitive pressure for the first time ever.
The risk to Microsoft amounts to tens of billions of dollars of potential lost profit. Microsoft’ s ongoing dirty tactics, already well documented at investigative sites such as Groklaw.net, are simply to be expected, given that Microsoft continues to use the same self-serving tactics it has been employing for more than twenty years.
With tens of billions of dollars of annual profit at stake in the ODF v OOXML struggle, nobody should be surprised at the lengths to which Microsoft will go to kill competition.
I don’t think we should treat Wikipedia as an authoritative source of information based on just how that information gets put together. The issue is that the reliability of information very much depends on the reliability of the informer. Now in the absence of any reliable way to establish the credibility to informer, we should take the information with a grain of salt.
This is what Citizendium is trying to address although it remains to be seen how successful they can be.
Mike,
I attempted a trackback ping to this post which I don’t see right now. Anyway, I have written a post about this in the form of a reply to Dare’s original post.
Summary: Wikipedia is a bit of an acquired taste, but there is an underlying wisdom that plays out (sometime a little slower than desired) en route to preserving the facts.
I have experienced the good, bad, and ugly with Wikipedia (as detailed in my post) while continuing to believe it delivers far more good than bad.
Our industry is littered with lots of deliberate misinformation which typically takes the form of marketing and corporate communications. Larger companies have dominated this part of the game for years, and Wikipedia is flipping this mode of operation on its head - one of many Web and Internet driven inflections.
Microsoft simply needs to edit and debate it’s way to defending its position. That’s what the Talk pages are all about.
This whole ‘neutral point of view’ idea is an illusion. Facts exist. But the way facts get assembled and the choices of which facts to include and which facts to omit reflect the point of view of the author. The POV that prevails on Wikipedia is that held by the people with the greatest social standing in that community not by the people who have the most knowledge on a topic. Microsoft’s problem stems from the fact that anyone promoting a positive POV about Microsoft will see their social standing reduced and therefore their POV will be systematically excluded.
WikiPedia Would NOT haved change its entire policy just to please Microsoft.
(if we did it for one, we will have to do it for all)
And any endeavor of Microsoft contacting them to stress the urgent need in particpating to balance the issue……means rumours would have been generated out of thin air and blown way out of proportion - that Microsoft tried to intimidate or put pressure on Wikipedia.
The problem is that also no matter MicroSoft did or did NOT choose to do - they would have been critcized by someone
In a way it is humorous. IBM pretty much ‘owned’ computing until pc’s became inexpensive enough to enter consumers homes. DEC, VAX, Sperry, BASF and the others were around but ‘Armonk Iron’ was IT. Then a pirate stole from Xerox and built one of the larger companies. Microsoft is a prime example of two axioms:
1) Power corrupts
2) History repeats itself
Thankfully technology has reached a point where the Wintel consortium rule no longer forces us to buy bigger, better, newer, faster……. boxes every 6 months.
By the way, “What is WikiPedia?” Never been there and after reading this I probably never will visit. Lastly……how many angels really do dance on the head of a pin? Fact, fiction, truth or lies…..ain’t it a riot. WAY too heavy for my lil brain.
FUCK WIKIPEDIA, THEY ARE NOTHING BUT PROBLEMS, GO ON SEARCH ENGINE AND TYPE WACKY WIKI CAN DRIVE YOU CRAZY, YOU WILL FIND MORE INFORMATION, ALSO TYPE WIKIPEDIA WATCH, CURRENT WIKI ADMINISTRATION IS TOTAL BULLSHIT!