Microsoft Pays Editors to improve Quality of Wikipedia Articles
Wednesday, January 24, 2007
Microsoft has begun a program to improve the quality of technical articles on wikipedia. Rick Jelliffe (an Oreilly Author and regular participant at ISO standards) noted in his blog on monday that he had received an email from Microsoft on monday asking to hire him as an independent consultant for a few days, and help to create and preserve factual integrity on wikipedia's technical articles on open standards specifically the Open Document and OOXML standards.
Rick Jelliffe has worked with ISO SC34 and the original XML group at W3C, Rick was a sporadic member of the W3C Schema Working Group and the W3C Internationalization Interest Group. He is the author of The XML & SGML Cookbook; Recipes on Structured Information and lead the 'Chinese XML Now' project at Academia Sinica Computing Centre. However many editors on wikipedia have made it their personal vendetta to block these changes.
The best and worst part of wikipedia is that any one is allowed to edit any article, and anyone carries the same 'weight' when it comes to consensus reguarding edits, evidently the wikipedia community feels that they know a lot more about this standard, than microsoft and the leading experts in XML.
Although Microsoft originally developed this standard for use in Microsoft Office, it is believed that this article was mostly written by employees of 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.
One of Wikipedia's core policies is that articles must be written from a "neutral point of view," Although the Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales suggests that microsoft should have gone about this differently by changing the article through more indirect means. Encouraging independent open standards and XML experts to contribute is by far the best practice. Instead Jimmy Wales should focus more on the ideal goals of maintaining the Neutral Point of View, and removing bias from articles. This is what Microsoft is trying to acomplish.
Labels: microsoft, OOXML, wikipedia
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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.