By: RH
What's up with Wikipedia ?
Cnet reported that there is some conflicts of interest taking place on Wikipedia. Being one of the most popular sites on the net with a ton of monthly traffic there have always been those who try to use it for their advantage.
From the article:
It began this week when an interesting discussion started on the DYK ("Did You Know") discussion page.
Roger Bamkin, trustee of the Wikimedia Foundation UK, whose LinkedIn page describes him as a high-return-earning PR consultant, appeared to be using Wikipedia's main page "Did You Know" feature and the resources of Wikipedia's GLAM WikiProject (Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums) initiative to pimp his client's project.
Bamkin's current client is the country of Gibraltar.
In August, Gibraltar was featured as a Wikipedia DYK front page feature an astonishing seventeen times – that's an unusual frequency of every 2-3 days.
Other than the Olympics, it is the only repeated topic throughout the month.
The "Did You Know" section on Wikipedia's Main Page publicizes
new or expanded articles – the publicity viewership on Wikipedia's front
page is estimated in the hundreds of millions per month.
Wales: "wildly inappropriate"
When you read the whole article you will read about Untriki Wiki. Well Untriki Wiki put out a rebuttal and explanation on their website.
From the article:
UntrikiWiki has recently received some public attention from
Wikipedians who disagree strongly with our belief that COI consultants
can serve in a mutually beneficial liaison that is good for both
Wikipedia and organizations that contract us. We’d like to explain in
more detail what it is that Untriki has been doing, and what our future
plans are to try to ameliorate some of the confusion around us.
We’ve never made a single edit for which we had a conflict of
interest on Wikipedia – ever. Although we have advertised such a
service, we’ve not aggressively pursued it – and we have not accepted
any clients interested in on-Wikipedia work. We’ve set up private
internal wikis for organizations, and we’ve provided brief consulting on
best practices to organizations who were interested in learning how to
engage productively with Wikipedia’s community, but we’ve never made any
COI edit on Wikipedia – even in user space. We’ve made clear to all
entities that have talked with us our ethical standards, and made clear
that if they can’t accept them we can’t work with them.
Read the whole article on untrikiwiki.com
Here is a link to some interesting facts and stats about Wikipedia traffic that you may find useful.
