Sourced from smh.com.au
Microsoft has landed in the Wikipedia doghouse today after it offered to pay an Australian blogger to change technical articles on the community-produced web encyclopedia site.
While Wikipedia is known as the encyclopedia that anyone can tweak, founder Jimmy Wales and his cadre of volunteer editors, writers and moderators have blocked public relations firms, campaign workers and anyone else perceived as having a conflict of interest from posting fluff or slanting entries.
So paying for Wikipedia copy is considered a definite no-no.
“We were very disappointed to hear that Microsoft was taking that approach,” Wales said.
Microsoft acknowledged it had approached the writer – Rick Jelliffe, who is chief technical officer of Sydney computing company Topologi, based in Pyrmont – and offered to pay him for the time it would take to correct what the company was sure were inaccuracies in Wikipedia articles on an ”open document format” and a rival put forward by Microsoft.
Doug Mahugh, a technical expert for the Microsoft format, Office Open XML, has identified himself as the Microsoft employee who contacted Jelliffe requesting his services.
In a comment posted on the popular Slashdot technology website, Mahugh published what he said was an excerpt from an email to Jelliffe, detailing “what I asked Rick to do”.
“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 Mahugh apparently wrote to Jelliffe.
“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 email also encouraged Jelliffe to disclose his deal with Microsoft in his blog at oreillynet.com, and reassured Jelliffe that Microsoft did not have to approve any of his Wikipedia edits before they were made.
This morning Jelliffe was not at his Pyrmont office and could not be reached on his mobile for comment.
Microsoft spokeswoman Catherine Brooker said she believed the articles were heavily written by people at IBM, which is a big supporter of the rival open-source standard.
IBM did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Brooker said Microsoft had gotten nowhere in trying to flag the purported mistakes to Wikipedia’s volunteer editors, so it sought an independent expert who could determine whether changes were necessary and enter them on Wikipedia.
Brooker said Microsoft believed that having an independent source would be key in getting the changes to stick – that is, to not have them just overruled by other Wikipedia writers.
Brooker said Microsoft and Jelliffe had not determined a price and no money had changed hands – but they had agreed that the company would not be allowed to review his writing before submission.
Brooker said Microsoft had never previously hired someone to influence a Wikipedia article.
In a blog posting yesterday, Jelliffe described himself as a technical standards aficionado and not a Microsoft partisan.
He said he was surprised to be approached by Microsoft but figured he’d accept the offer to review the Wikipedia articles because he considered it important to make sure technical standards processes were accurately described.
Wales said the proper course would have been for Microsoft to write or commission a “white paper” on the subject with its interpretation of the facts, post it to an outside website and then link to it in the Wikipedia articles’ discussion forums.
“It seems like a much better, transparent, straightforward way,” Wales said.
