Boston – When a blogger revealed this week that Microsoft Corp. wanted to pay him to fix purported inaccuracies in technical articles on Wikipedia, the software company endured online slams and a rebuke from the Web encyclopedia’s founder for behaving unethically.
But why is it so bad to pay someone to write something on Wikipedia? The “free encyclopedia that anyone can edit” requires articles to have a “neutral point of view.” But most contributors surely have some personal motivation to dive into a subject, whether it’s adoration of “Star Trek” or geraniums.
What’s to say contributors who get paid have a harder time sticking to the golden path of neutrality?
And doesn’t Wikipedia have a built-in defense mechanism – the swarms of volunteer editors and moderators who can quickly obliterate public-relations fluff, vanity pages and other junk? That is precisely what ran through Gregory Kohs’ mind last year when he launched MyWikiBiz, a service that offered to write Wikipedia entries for businesses for $49 to $99.
“It is strange that a minor Pokemon character will get a 1,200-word article but a Fortune 500 company will get … maybe 100 words,” said Kohs, a market researcher in West Chester, Pa.
Kohs, 38, said he was committed to having MyWikiBiz create only legitimate Wikipedia entries – neutral, footnoted and solely on companies or organizations with a sizable presence.
“I was not going to write an article for Joe’s pizza shop at the corner of Main and Elm,” he said.
Kohs was fine with Wikipedians editing his clients’ entries.
Andrew Ressler of Helium .com, which lets anyone write an article, argues that Wikipedia’s ban on perceived conflicts of interest shuts out people with “valuable insights and knowledge” and tends to leave the site to a small clan of die-hards.
“Everybody is getting rewarded somehow,” Ressler said. “Whether it’s intangible or tangible, what’s the difference?”
