Original Image by Matthew Dutile
I got an email from a Spark listener the other day, describing a sticky workplace situation. The listener’s employer asked him to “review and edit” the business’ Wikipedia entry. What to do, asks the listener? How to keep the boss happy, but not violate the neutrality provisions on Wikipedia, particularly since Wikipedia’s guidelines caution against making an edit when there’s a conflict of interest.
Some questions for you:
What would you do? How would you handle the office politics with your boss? What is the ‘best practices’ procedure if you think a Wikipedia entry, in which you have an interest, needs to be edited?
It's a tricky situation, but I'd point out to the boss that's it's very easy for people to see who has made edits to the Wikipedia. If you edit your page to make you look better, you might gain a little bit of good publicity, but it won't outweigh the bad publicity when people find out what the company has done. As an example, just show him Jimbo Wales' page — not even the creator of wikipedia can get away with it.
This is a general problem not specific to Wikipedia editing.
In my case I try to avoid being in work situations where I feel too dependant on that specific job. I have left places of employment a few times in the past due to ethical disagreements with my employer (Example: computer retailer that would ask me as the hardware technician to swap defective parts from broken computers with a brand new computer, and send back to the manufacturer as DOA for a full refund).
Unfortunately far too many people feel trapped in their current employment, and are unwilling to challenge or even open an educational dialogue with their employers. I suspect with what people are currently hearing about the status of our economy they would be even less likely to take the right decision.
I'd reply to the boss as Wellington indicates: that I could review the page and note any errors, and discuss them on the entry's Talk page, but that any changes I made to the entry would be detected and would reflect poorly on the company. If the boss insisted that changes still be made, I would ask that someone not related to the company make them. Like, uh, maybe the boss's spouse?
At least the employee knows a bit more about what the Boss is like by the request that was made. A diversion would be to mention that it is a conflict-of-interest and offer a suggestion to get one of their pals to do it as it would be a bit more anonymous and not cause any embarrassment to the Boss. Dale Carnegie 101. As an aside from the crux of the subject – I do not work for employers where I can not speak freely while I am employed in Canada. Never have – never will.
I guess what we don't know in this situation is whether the boss is someone who simply isn't aware of what wikipedia protocols might be, or someone who simply doesn't care.
I had a similar situation at work: my boss wanted me to create a page for our company, as well as adding links to our site on Wikipedia pages that related to content on our site. I explained to him that this was a violation of Wikipedia's TOS, but he merely got angry that I wasn't working hard enough at marketing the company.
It is possible to create an anonymous-sounding user name to edit pages, if 'embarrassment' is what you are worried about. But moderators at Wikipedia keep track of what edits come from what IP addresses — and to make a long story short, they will consider your edits spam and remove them, if they catch on. After my struggle with my boss over this, that's what happened. We were actually suspended and now can't make Wikipedia edits from our IP as well!
Renewing a leased DHCP IP address is easy enough (reboot router) but , if you are in a small/large business network environment that requires a static IP address then it gets more difficult. Being busted you would have to have been identified by your IP address. Wow – that's pretty powerful. Never was a contributing editor for Wikipedia(tm) but it sure does come up in the top searches when I Google(tm). Nah, the Boss is nasty and just asking someone else do the work for them (equal opportunity employer).
One of the nice things about running your own business of organization is that you do not have to worry about what your supervisor will think about editing pages in Wikipedia. That is because you are your own boss. As a sole proprietor, you get to make all the decisions, especially those of this type.
This post makes me wonder how many companies try to use Wikipedia as advertising in violation of its TOS, and what their chances are of being caught. What I mean is, if lots and lots of companies were attempting this, would the number of entries "slipping through the cracks" be great enough to "contaminate" Wikipedia?
As for what I would do in the employee's position, I suppose I would try to convince my boss that :
A) the negative publicity that would result if we were caught would outweigh any positive publicity we might receive; and
B) my time (and therefore the company's money) would be better spent trying to find other (ie. more ethical) ways of achieving positive exposure online without the risk of bad PR.
From there, it just depends on how reasonable the boss is, I guess.
Exactly. The potential black eye is in no way worth it.
Adbrite pays very little, i’d better go with Infolinks and other ppc programs*”‘