“A software engineer in Australia has said he was offered payment by Microsoft to edit certain entries in the Wikipedia online dictionary, opening a heated debate about the ethics of such a move,” Nancy Gohring reports for IDG News Service.
Gohring reports, ‘Rick Jelliffe, chief technology officer of XML tools company Topologi, said he will probably accept a contract from Microsoft to edit Wikipedia entries on ODF (OpenDocument Format) and OOXML (Microsoft Office Open XML), competing document format standards.”
“In a blog posting on the O’Reilly Web site, Jelliffe said he recently received an e-mail from Microsoft saying that the company wanted to contract someone ‘independent but friendly’ for a couple of days to provide ‘more balance’ on Wikipedia concerning the ODF and OOXML formats. Jelliffe said he rarely uses Microsoft products and does not imagine he is viewed as a Microsoft enthusiast,” Gohring reports.
Gohring reports, “His disclosure unleashed a heated debate about the ethics of a company paying someone to edit Wikipedia entries, and the effect such payment has on the credibility of the site. ‘From now on we should take the Wikipedia entry on OpenDocument with a grain of salt,’ wrote Daniel Carrera, an ODF developer, in an e-mail.”
Full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Doug” for the heads up.]
Even forgetting all of Mafiasoft’s ugly history, anyone who saw the ridiculous over-proliferation of Zune-related “enthusiast” websites before the device was even available – and still hobbling along today with so few of the ill-fated Zunes in use – should not be surprised by this move from Microsoft, the king of astroturfing.
::::: eyes roll :::::
So I was a little surprised to receive email a couple of days ago from Microsoft saying they wanted to contract someone independent but friendly (me) for a couple of days to provide more balance on Wikipedia concerning ODF/OOXML. I am hardly the poster boy of Microsoft partisanship!
I think I’ll accept it: FUD enrages me and MS certainly are not hiring me to add any pro-MS FUD, just to correct any errors I see. If anyone sees any examples of incorrect statements on Wikipedia or other similar forums in the next few weeks, please let me know….
Why not? Take the money and sic ’em, Rick.
MW: “pay” – as in get some…for a change. You need it if you live in the big smoke.
Yikes. honestly, what goes through their heads? these types of stories are almost always quashed by them before they get to the mainstream press, but wikipedia? that is for unbiased information purposes! i hate them, i am not using microsoft products anymore, and that includes office for mac.
Not possible. Microsoft has a solid history of honesty, straightforward answers and fair play. They have <u>never</u> been motivated by ego or greed.
“Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates was called “evasive and nonresponsive” by a source present at a session in which Gates was questioned on his deposition. He argued over the definitions of words such as “compete”, “jihad”, “concerned”, “ask”, and “we”. BusinessWeek reported, “Early rounds of his deposition show him offering obfuscatory answers and saying ‘I don’t recall’ so many times that even the presiding judge had to chuckle.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft
Oops. Never mind.
Now, as for Microsoft…heheh…caught with its fingers in the cookie jar again! Booo…!
This is what Microsoft is all about.
They have the money to pay (bribe) anybody in this world. The last thing they need is INNOVATION.
Big surprise.
Microsoft will NEVER excel…
… except in scabrous behavior.
MDN: Magic Word: TRUTH… hah!
“independant but friendly”
Great stuff! And what a wonderful euphemism for buying positive publicity – i.e. bribery!
It reminds me of Nixon’s way of saying (back in the 60’s) he’d been lying up until now : ‘all previous statements are now inoperable’.
MDN. You should read the article before you rattle off the same old anti-MS rant. He makes some good points in his blog posting. You complain about journalists not getting their facts right and spreading FUD with regards to Apple and then do exactly the same thing.
Whoops! That should have been ‘independent’.
You missed MDN’s point. The fact that MS, who is the largest software company in the world, would bribe somebody to say something nice is really deplorable.
I can be your ‘friendly’ friend, just show me the money..
If you’re going to quote, copy and paste: it’s “independent” and not independant.
And I might as well address all the native English speakers who spell “definitely” as definately. I’ve seen it spelled wrong so many times that I’m afraid it might become accepted as common practice.
No worries, Gavron, so many people spell it as independant that it’s acquiring stickiness.
Calling Zune Tang!
That seems to fit the way they do things. Check out the headline “Microsoft Tech Evangelist Viewed Industry Analysts as Bribable” on daring fireball (http://daringfireball.net/).
Troll is right. So many independant loosers definately need spell Czech.
wikipedia has its flaws and some of the philosophy behind it is politically correct.
they list dates as bce and ce rather that the tried and true bc and ad. I tried to edit that in an entry and it was edited back to the politically correct method of dating.
that is revisionist history. that is political correctness. approach with a grain of salt (if they allow that phrase in wikipedia since it is a biblical term – written first century ce.)
Microsoft pays for good press…what ? Noooooo…what the ????
Look, anbody who reads the web for techie stuff this last 4 years can clearly see 1 common theme. Today’s tech consumer is NOT the scared 50- something that wanted to email & surf, that jumped in during the web boom of the 90’s. Today’s consumer is much more savy and at home with tech. For the most part any kid who is in his/her early 20’s has grown up with computers all their life. These will not be afraid of other products than the “stuff we have at work”, err, I mean stole from work. Google, Apple, Firefox and a host of Linux and open source stuff is out there. People use quality digital cameras & video cameras. People upload pics to walmart etc. for printing. People skype.
Summary = Microsoft is in deep trouble and knows it. The iPod was the catalyst that really moved it forward. Most people do not know yet. But millions do. You don’t need a Microsoft dominated tech world. Microsoft wants to squash this fact asap. But it’s too late.
BCE=Before Common Era, CE=Common Era Not politically anything, just right. Referencing Jesus birth as the dividing point in time.
You must be clueless, sooner or later you need to stop listening to R. Limbaugh and have your own opinion.
Yeah, how about “the ridiculous over-proliferation of Zune-related “enthusiasts…” (such as Zune Tang on this very Web site — MacDailyNews).
Come clean MDN. Did Microsoft also pay you to manufacture the Zune Tang alter ego and provide “independemt but friendly” commentary as part of a “grass roots” campaign to improve the image of the company’s and products?
Seriously, Microsoft has to rank in the top ten in one important category — the worst American PR teams in history. The company probably ranks somewhere just behind the O.J. Simpson legal team, Major League Basball’s steroid plan, the George Bush and Richard Nxon White House media teams, the entire U.S. Republican party in the 2000 election and Bill Clinton’s self-managed attempt to parse the meaning of the words “is, sexual and relations.”
Now that truely is a rogue’s gallery of the clueless trying to manage public opinion, and Microsoft is among the leaders.
BC-Before Christ. Leave it alone you libs.
I pulls out my bones. You knows which ones. The ones that makes things happen and people do things. Yeah, those bones. Gonna roll them bones, gonna call the one they calls Zune Tang. Gotta do the Zune Tang dances. Gotta do the Zune Tang Thang. Gotta move my bones to the rhythm of the Zune Tang…. “Oh, Great Zune Tang! We summon thee from the depths of MS to be within our midst! Oh, Great Zune Tang, quench our thirst for wisdom!”
No surprise here. This is standard operating procedure for this very “ethically challenged” corporation. Remember the free laptops for Vista reviewers? Microsoft’s management would not know how to act otherwise. It is in their DNA. I suspect a corruption gene.
WHAT????? We have to take things on Wikipedia with a grain of salt???????
I thought everything on there was 100% true!