How PR Subverts Wikipedia 219
Daniel_Stuckey writes "We all know that Wikipedia can be subverted—it’s an inevitability of an open platform that some people will seek to abuse it, whether to gain some advantage or just for a laugh. Fortunately, the Wikipedia community has strong mechanisms in place to deal with this, from the famous cry of [citation needed] to the rigorous checks and standards put in place by its hierarchy of editors and admins. In recent months though, Insiders have encountered something altogether more worrying: a concerted attack on the very fabric of Wikipedia by PR companies that have subverted the online encyclopedia's editing hierarchy to alter articles on a massive scale—perhaps tens of thousands of them. Wikipedia is the world's most popular source of cultural, historical, and scientific knowledge—if their fears are correct, its all-important credibility could be on the line... Adam Masonbrink, a founder and Vice-President of Sales at Wiki-PR, boasts of new clients including Priceline and Viacom. Viacom didn't respond ... but Priceline — a NASDAQ listed firm with over 5,000 employees and William Shatner as their official spokesman — did. Sadly, Priceline didn't choose to respond to us via Captain Kirk; instead Leslie Cafferty, vice president of corporate communications and public relations, admitted, 'We are using them to help us get all of our brands a presence because I don't have the resources internally to otherwise manage.'"
Never Kirk (Score:2, Informative)
Shatner's persona of The Negotiator is not Captain Kirk, and Priceline have never used Kirk as a spokesman.
Barefaced corruption of Wikipedia (Score:5, Informative)
https://www.wiki-pr.com/services/
The most outrageous part of this is that Wiki-PR claims to have Wikipedia admins on their staff, not just normal editors. There is one, and only one response to this - find out who they are and remove their admin status immediately.
Als, some excerpts, as this stuff has to be seen to be believed:
"We respect the community and its rules against promoting and advertising." - Claims the advertising agency whose following services completely revolve around image management and promotion of corporate interests.
"Don't get caught in a PR debacle by editing your own page." - As if having an advertising firm editing it for you through a network of paid-for eds/admins looks any less corrupt and underhanded.
"We've built technology to manage your page 24 hours a day, 365 days a year." - Blatantly working against the Wikipedia rule against asserting page ownership.
"That means you need not worry about anyone tarnishing your image - be it personal, political, or corporate." - Possibly the worst admission, goodbye balanced articles, goodbye controversy sections, hello censorship and whitewashed articles.
Though the abuse of an open platform for informing the public is to be expected, what is surprising is how blatantly these people are advertising their corruption of Wikipedia.
Re:Internet democracy (Score:2, Informative)
And why is it you only hear about the Jews hmmm?
Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm
Agreed! (Score:5, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afsaneh_Mashayekhi_Beschloss [wikipedia.org]
Note that nowhere in the entry does it mention that Mrs. Beschloss was a former employee of the Carlyle Group (which in point of fact she was).
I became suspicious about this and noticed an extraordinary number of former Carlyle Groupers had excised that from their background and history. Most peculiar . . . .
Re:How to get banned from the Internet: (Score:2, Informative)
because it is *literally* impossible.
It is not literally impossible. Some people are forbidden by court order from accessing the internet, or any computers that are capable of it.
Short of that, it is practically impossible. But not literally.
Re:Internet democracy (Score:4, Informative)
Now, you may or may not believe the miracles in the Bible, but historically and archaeologically it's a VERY accurate book.
God creates light and separates light from darkness, on day one. But he doesn't create the sun and the stars (things that produce light) until the fourth day. He also created plants on the third day, perhaps unaware of them needing a source of light. Then there was that whole business about creating a woman from a rib, a Jewish zombie. The earth took six days to create, not 13.7 billion years. Pi equals 3.
Shall I go on, or does the stupid burn enough? No, the bible isn't historically accurate... it's a story about some dude who had been dead for five hundred years, and most of the material says it came from him. Now I don' t know about you, but think about the most famous thing to happen in the past fifty years. Now imagine what they're going to say about it 500 years from now. Do you think it'll still be perfectly accurate... if the only thing to go on is word of mouth?
You're an idiot. Sit down. Shut up. And the moderator who upmodded you should be found, dragged from his keyboard, and publicly beaten.