Microsoft Gets Transparent on Wikipedia
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.
3 comments:
Thanks Michael. My original anonymous edits weren't meant to be "secret"; I just never thought I'd do more than a couple of small changes so couldn't be bothered creating an account... until now.
Ooops, that last comment was from me :)
Oh the irony ;)
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