This Wikipedia entry brought to you by . . . It's no longer safe to assume everyone will play by the unspoken Web 2.0 rules
By: Shane Schick
The truth can get very expensive if you have to pay for it. Lies could cost even more. Not that Microsoft has to worry about money.
A story surfaced out of Australia on Tuesday about a local software engineer who said he had been offered a contract from Redmond to edit some Wikipedia entries on OpenDocument Format (ODF) and Microsoft Office Open XML (OOXML), the competing desktop standards. No one from Microsoft has confirmed the story, and the software engineer has not yet signed any contract, but that’s beside the point. The debate over pay-per-Wiki will make the one over pay-per-blog-post look trivial.
The premise of Wikipedia, and of wikis in general, is that the network effect will provide the checks and balances necessary to weed out overly biased information. The increasing skepticism around that belief has led to the introduction of more strict registration procedures at Wikipedia, as it likely has elsewhere. What Microsoft has allegedly done is not necessarily bribery  there is nothing wrong with paying someone qualified to do a job, and it’s not like the online public has taken any kind of collective oath to uphold wiki values, whatever those are. It would probably breach Wikipedia’s terms and conditions, but that would only become clear if the relationship between the wiki editor and his or her employer was known. This could be one of many such offers Microsoft, and a raft of other publicity-minded companies, have been making for some time.
Although there are many users who would not trust Wikipedia as their only source of information on a given subject, it provides an example of how predominance can lead to influence. As a volunteer-led organization, it depends in large part on the honour system for the integrity of its data. Like charities that get manipulated by profit-driven companies, however, Wikipedia and online resources like it will increasingly be prey to misuse that will be very difficult to detect.
The Microsoft allegations represent a much different spin on the kind of manipulation that Wikipedia has suffered in the past. In most cases, edits were challenged when it was obvious that the changes were made by the subject of the entry, or other people with vested interests in the subject. In this case, Microsoft reportedly was only looking for someone “independent but friendly” (which is a great way of describing bias with a lower-case “b.”). There’s no reason other vendors couldn’t solicit the services of similar experts-for-hire who voice their opinions based on who pays for them to speak.
It is tempting to think of such maneuvers as bad sportsmanship, but it depends on how deep your belief in the wiki model runs. If someone deliberately tries to substitute the truth for lies  and despite all its subjectivity, there are still a few facts in Wikipedia  shouldn’t that be considered a security breach of sorts? Malware cripples a piece of hardware or software, but there could be equally ominous dangers from the secret ways in which information is twisted to suit the ends of a few. It’s not a virus so much as a syndrome, and we have yet to develop the immune system for it.
sschick@itbusiness.ca
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Software giant Microsoft has attempted to correct a Wikipedia article concerning the Microsoft Office Open XML format.

Wikipedia strongly discourages contributors involved with the subject of an article from editing the article, when a conflict of interest is likely. Instead, such contributors are advised to comment or suggest changes to the articles for the broader community of editors to review and implement, if found acceptable. Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales and  administrators have on occasion blocked users thought to have violated these guidelines from editing Wikipedia.

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Doug Mahugh from Microsoft contacted Rick Jelliffe, who is the top technical officer for Sydney computing company Topologi - and offered to pay him for the time it would take to modify the article.

“Wikipedia has an entry on Open XML that has a lot of slanted language, and we'd like for them to make it more objective but we feel that it would be best if a non-Microsoft person were the source of any corrections,” reads the email Microsoft employee Mahugh wrote to Jelliffe.

One of Wikipedia's core policies is that articles must be written from a "neutral point of view" or NPOV.

“Would you have any interest or availability to do some of this kind of work? Your reputation as a leading voice in the XML community would carry a lot of credibility, so your name came up in a discussion of the Wikipedia situation today."

The e-mail also stated that Microsoft would not stop Jelliffe from disclosing the deal and rather encouraged him to post it on his blog at oreillynet.com. It also reassured Jelliffe that Microsoft did not have to approve any changes he made to the article.

"We were very disappointed to hear that Microsoft was taking that approach," Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales said. Wales stated that the proper thing for Microsoft was to write a "white paper" concerning the article, post it on an outside website and then link it to the discussion page of the Wikipedia articles' discussion forums. "It seems like a much better, transparent, straightforward way," Wales said.

Microsoft spokeswoman Catherine Brooker said she believed the articles were heavily written by people at IBM, which is a supporter of the rival ISO-approved OpenDocument standard used by two leading Open Source office suites rather than the controversial Microsoft Office Open XML format.