Wiki Wompus

The mood on Wikipedia is mixed right now to say the least. But, I find it interesting that the only people I hear criticizing Wikipedia tend to be industry people. I've never heard a student, family member, or anyone other normal person looking for a simple yet fairly comprehensive answer to a simple question, do anything but sing praises for Wikipedia.

Yes, the nay sayers have some valid arguments. However, I think in general that most of them are just uncomfortable with yet another form of information democratization. If you are struggling with your own Wikipedia issue, here are some tips you may find useful before you go edit crazy.

The cardinal rule is to maintain a clear and open relationship between your connection to the content being edited and any commercial affiliations you may have. You are right for thinking that you need to be monitoring your Wikipedia entry for submissions of incorrect or biased information, but you cannot be the source of biased information yourself.

Here are some measures you may take to increase the odds of your edits being accepted:

1. Make small edits rather than sweeping changes. If just one word of your edit is found to be vandalism or bias then all changes submitted with that word will be reverted. In other words, it's all or nothing.
2. Site all sources used for claims made. These sources should reference other non-bias sources.
3. Make sure additions to content conform to their Notability requirements. The content has to be of significant, from a NPOV, and be encyclopedic in nature.

Comments

[joe]

Couldn't agree more. No matter what people in the professional world want to say about wiki, it won't be making the public use it less.
The vast storage of all kinds of useful and useless knowledge and the ease of finding that info has already spread into the mainstream. It's quickly becoming the next, "google it".
Great pointers for companies that find themselves on wiki and feel that they need to own it. To put it simply, You can't own it! Put the keyboard down!