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January 24, 2007

People are in an uproar because Microsoft offered to pay someone to alter a Wikipedia article they felt was wrong.

Bloggers and reporters keep harping on the audactity of Microsoft for trying to do that. No one has really addressed why MS would have done that. If people bothered addressing that fact, I doubt you could really blame them.

First off I should say this: I hate Microsoft products. In college I abandoned Word and wrote all my papers in ASCII - Word crashed like crazy. When I worked in the computer labs for a campus job, I fiercely advocated everyone using ASCII - or at least learning to automatically type the 'save' shortcut at the end of every sentence. Their software , in my experience, was unreliable , unusable, and dangerous.

Today I use Mac and BSD desktops. I barely touch Windows. When I'm asked to consult on a project that is already running on .NET or slated to, I turn down the offer unless they'll run it on a *nix/bsd platform. I don't like MS products, I don't trust them, and I'm not fond of their business ethics.

That said, I see little wrong in their Wikipedia dealings. Wikipedia and its users are incredibly biased against MS. Articles related to MS almost always have an uneven tinge. Even their quality standards are sub-par. The default entry, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft , is ridden with typos and abberations, suggesting a monkey chained to a typewriter wrote the article... mainly by banging its head on the keyboard.

This must be my favorite line:
The company's first international office was founded on November 1, 1978, in Japan, entitled "ASCII Microsoft" (now called "Microsoft Japan"fsdfsfaf).[23]

Google seems to know little about a company named '"Microsoft Japan"fsdfsfaf'. Perhaps wikipedia can chime in.

Whether or not MS is ethical or makes good products, or anything like that at all , is irrelevant. The whole situation reflects more on Wikipedia than anything else. It makes me wonder if the Wikipedia PR crew is really trying to blow up this MS situation as Microsoft's fault to combat the simple fact that it shows a blatant double standard in Wikipedia.

In all honesty, everything in Wikipedia is amateur and should be taken with a grain of salt. There's no accountability in articles- anyone can write/edit. Sure , something might be written by a professional, but there's no large review process like you see in newspapers and encyclopedias where everything is fact checked and approved before publication. Instead people leave footnotes and things can get flagged as 'ok' or 'needs proof' - but they're published as-is, live -- ready to inform or misinform viewers.

The model of wikipedia is a cause for concern too. In a real encyclopedia or journal , you have a staff writer who is assigned something and paid, and sometimes you'll have an expert draft an article, which is then edited to standards and fact-checked by the staff. In wikipedia you have no 'market' force compelling people to write, just people wanting to contribute of their own free will. As such, you get fans / anti-fans / and experts writing everything - or, as i like to call them, the most biased people you can imagine. Its only until people fight enough that articles become more neutral - but neutrality is not something inherent or automatic in wikipedia.

Microsoft claimed that a lot of articles on wikipedia had an anti-microsoft tinge. Aside from people pointing out how their software sucks where it does actually suck, I think they're right. And I'll go further: Wikipedia will probably never be able to have a legtimately neutral article about microsoft, because the audience that reads and writes for Wikipedia overwhelmingly hates microsoft. At the most basic level, you have an open source foundation with open source writers and content , writing ( for nothing in return ) about a for-profit/capitalist/litigious group that makes competing products. You'd need to live in a land of magical unicorns and candy cane trees, or be on a morphine drip, to expect a fair and neutral article to come out of that.

So I don't blame MS. And i'll still read Wikipedia. But I take everything I read in Wikipedia as an allegation - not a fact. When it comes to the internet, I think there's only one rule : 'The notion that "well, if its on the internet, then it MUST be true!" is the mantra of idiots. Don't believe everything you read.'

Posted by Jonathan at January 24, 2007 4:14 PM

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