Wiki Alarm – Email alerts when your Wikipedia page is edited
We are pleased to announce that a new free service called WikiAlarm.com launches today!
Journalists and bloggers are sourcing information from Wikipedia every day and yet the information on pages about companies is often added by somebody totally unconnected with the brand.
Imagine if your competitor was to edit your Wikipedia page to say your company had been involved in some kind of illegal activity. What if this information wasn’t spotted for months?
Most large brands, celebrities & politicians have Wikipedia pages and until now there hasn’t been a way to easily monitor changes to these pages.
Wiki Circularity
Interestingly Ali G was the first victim of wiki circularity. A phrase first used by Will Critchlow from Distilled Wiki Circularity is the “self fulfilling prophecy†of the Web 2.0 world and works as follows:
- A competitor or upset former customer edits your Wikipedia page to say something bad about your company.
- Left unedited for a few weeks the information is picked up by a lazy blogger or journalist doing research for a story.
- The story then appears on a well known blog or website & the author doesn’t mention they researched the story on Wikipedia
- When you find the inaccurate article and try to edit the information on Wikipedia you find that the Wiki moderators refuse to remove it
- To add insult to injury the Wikipedia page is updated to include a link referencing the inaccurate blog or newspaper article
Wikipedia editors normally rely on the reputation and accuracy of the media when they are deciding on the content of a page. This becomes a big problem when journalists and bloggers are using Wikipedia to research stories.
Sign up to WikiAlarm.com today and protect your brand on Wikipedia
Post category: Social Media Tweet
Patrick Altoft is Director of Search at Branded3, a Leeds SEO & Digital Agency specialising in SEO, Web Design, Development & Social Media.
Comments
Read the 5 comments below, or add your own!
This is ridiculous. Not only does Wikipedia have built-in alerts for page edits, but the reasons for this “tool” existing is flawed:
…which is exactly as it should be. Wikipedia has a policy on conflict of interest. People directly connected to a public figure or brand should not be editing their pages. Doing so is no better or worse than someone adding bogus information in the first place, and edits by such people are often revert or flagged as needing a re-write when they’re discovered, which is surely more damaging than uncited, defamatory information being posted; such information is often easy to spot and removed as quickly as its added in the natural cycle of page edits.
That, and any reputable news source or blogger wouldn’t be using Wikipedia as a source in the first place.
Thanks for the link, Patrick.
mrj: unfortunately things are never as idyllic as that. Wikipedia has a wide range of rules and guidelines around conflict of interest but they certainly do not say that you should never edit a wikipedia page where you are directly connected to the entity. What they do suggest is that you discuss things on the talk page first and seek consensus and mutually-agreed copy:
From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Your_company#How_to_handle_conflicts_of_interest
Also, while you say (and I agree) that any reputable news source wouldn’t use Wikipedia as a news source, that unfortunately doesn’t mean that many *major* news sources don’t use it…
I just sign up to the pages RSS feed. As the poster above says, Mediawiki provides the tools to monitor this already. However I disagree that Wikipedia should be dismissed as a source of information, you just have to engage brain and check out the sources of the article – kinda what research is all about!
mrj if I ran a company and people had posted incorrect information about it online then I would want to know about it and perhaps take action.
does this work really according to me even when u post or edit any content in wikipedia it does not approve just like that is it it goes to a moderator of wikipedia will be go through it and then it comes to live is int ,i guess so then whts the use of such kind of alarms and stuff ,if its really usefull then its a good post