Or at least one employee does.  Peter Torr, a program manager at Microsoft, admits to editing Wikipedia articles on HD-DVD in order to “[keep] the pages interesting, up-to-date, and accurate“.  He also comes clean about doing a bit of anonymous editing in the past and states he created a Wikipedia account so noone can “stumble” on his edits and accuse Microsoft of astroturfing or such.  Which of course people will.  I personally applaud Peter for being upfront with his editing, it will be up to the users of Wikipedia to decide if his comments are biased or not.  I would encourage Microsoft to make a standard corporate Wikipedia account that their employees should use if they want to edit Wikipedia.  Or establish a policy that they must create a MSFT* user or some-such.  Though most companies are becoming transparent wither they want to or not, thanks to WikiScanner.   Regardless,  another sign that Microsoft is more open then people give them credit for.

It looks like Mike Arrington of TechCrunch has gotten a little up upset over Dare Obasanjo’s experiment on Wikipedia editing. It seems Mike knows how to stir things up, the digg article on the situation is up over 300 diggs at this moment. Mike Arrington is saying that this Wikipedia page is “vandalized”. Hardly, Dare simply posted a fact about some people’s opinions of the site. Granted it was biased, but that was exactly what Dare was trying to point out.

The question of how to handle obviously biased articles on Wikipedia is a touchy one. You’ll hear alot of talk about democracy and freedom of speech in this situation. The problem with democracy is that it’s nothing but the rule of the mob. Even if everyone agrees on something, that doesn’t automatically make it right. Had no one edited the TechCrunch article back to it’s original state, or added in the opposing view point (as what was done) then no one could argue that democracy wasn’t followed and freedom of speech wasn’t respected.

Mike seems to feel that one sentence on Wikipedia espousing an opinion about someone’s credibility with a couple of links to blogs that assert this, is “The Man Holding You Down”. The problem with this thought is that you can then argue that anyone that doesn’t agree with you or that questions you is simply trying to “silence your view point”. This is a common tactic of people who have no argument. Such a knee jerk reaction does nothing more than strengthen your opponent’s argument.

The ironic thing is that 1) Mike’s original article on TechCrunch was hardly anti-Microsoft, and 2) Dare’s purpose wasn’t to attack Mike Arrington. Dare was simply trying to point out a flaw in the Wikipedia system, namely that it’s a pure democracy where mob rules and not true neutrality.

The whole situation could be resolved by allowing people to edit Wikipedia articles that reference themselves or their companies as long as they do it in a transparent manner.

Microsoft is embroiled in another “scandal“, between this and the Ferrari Fiasco it’s been a bad couple of months for ol’ MS. It’s really undeserved in my opinion.

Especially this latest Wikipedia thing, if you go back to the source that started all this hoopla (and was in fact linked on the Slashdot article), you can see that Rick Jelliffe was not paid to promote Microsoft’s worldview. In fact, reading the opening paragraph to his article sounds like a nice bunch of reasons why it would have not been in Microsoft’s interests to even contact him:

My first computer was a Mac Plus. Loved it. My second computer was an AT&T Unix PC running System V. Loved it long time. My third computer was a Sparc running Solaris or SunOS. Loved it. At work I run Linux, Open Office, Firefox, Eclipse, etc. No drama. For the last six years I have been running a little company making Java programs. Love Java. I do a little open source development, in particular with the Schematron program (quite like it!), but I have also contributed some code to the Flamingo/Substance project over at JavaDesktop, which provides novel looks and feels and more modern GUI components.

Doug Mahugh actually posted to the Slashdot thread with the contents of his email to Jelliffe where he states that all Microsoft was interested in was to get more informed and less-one sided discussion going on. If Microsoft is going to ask a professional to take some of their time to review something and elicit their unbiased input, isn’t it only fair that the professional is compensated? If Microsoft was serious about not preapproving any of the changes and honestly wanted to simply open up a discussion they felt was being stymied, they should be applauded not condemned. Replying to the Slashdot thread took incredible courage and guts from Doug, and I applaud him for doing it. I don’t see Microsoft as evil, I think the mob is more evil then Microsoft ever could be, and in this case the mob is blowing it out of proportion. Ironically they’ve done exactly what Microsoft and Doug had hoped:

Good to see the tone of the Open XML debate getting some broad attention and analysis. I’ll leave it up to others to reach conclusions, but as always I have confidence that most people are reasonable, and will reach reasonable conclusions from the facts.

Let’s turn the debate in a more general manner. What if other corporations sponsored editors to take an unbiased look at articles they felt were skewed? Would this be a problem? I don’t think so, and here’s why. If the sponsor thought the editor was unfair (or just didn’t like what they posted) they could stop paying the editor. But if the editor was no longer being paid, then they have no incentive to edit, and the sponsor looses in that the biased slant can easily come back (in fact all it takes is a revert!). Honestly, if Microsoft paid me to review something or add my view (not theirs) to a discussion, because they thought the current dialogue was onesided, I would have no stronger desire to lean in their favor. Why would I? I’m not their employee, I’m doing them a favor by taking my time to check something out, and they’re paying me for that time. Here’s the kicker, it’s not my full time job. And it wasn’t Rick Jelliffe’s either, he wasn’t offered a position, he was offered compensation for a favor. Nothing more. Haven’t you ever given someone a beer because they helped cut your grass?