A post over at Tech Crunch intrigued me today. It was a post regarding Microsoft paying someone to edit certain pages relating to Open Office Standards in Wikipedia. Microsoft did not tell the person what to write, but this behavior was controversial nonetheless.
As Michael Arrington explained in his post, Microsoft is in an interesting position. Editing a Wikipedia page about yourself is frowned upon. Hiring someone else to edit the page is also a bad idea. The proper way to deal with this is to clear the record in the discussions portion of that page.
I find all of this interesting for a number of reasons.
- I am just starting to work with wikis. I had never even thought about this sticky situation before, but now I can see a need to teach my students about this type of wiki-etiquette.
- I’ve never spent any time reading the discussion section of any page I was using in Wikipedia. Now I see this might be a powerful way to teach students about the strengths and challenges of using Wikipedia as a resource. It could give them clues about how to interrogate a source. It could also help them unpack whatever they were researching in the first place.
- I hadn’t realized that companies such a Microsoft thought Wikipedia had enough impact to warrant this type of intervention.
These are new thoughts for me and I think I’m going to chew on them for a while and to see where they take me. I welcome your comments on it all.
You raise some interesting points Susan. We had our book club last night (we were discussing “The World is Flat”) and I mentioned your post. It is amazing that Wikipedia has become so influential that Microsoft would care what is written there. We also noticed that the Google post has been restricted to registered members only, maybe the same kind of thing is happening there. It seems companies have caught on to a new form of advertising…
In reference to your second point, we also use the discussion feature in our student created wikis as a way for students to communicate across class groupings. It’s been really exciting for students that are not in the same social studies class (for example) to actually be able to “talk” about what they’re learning.
Oh! I hadn’t even thought of how much students would enjoy that. We aren’t using any wiki’s with students in my division, but I had two teachers in the past week approach me wanting to see how they could use wikis. All my thinking about student use has been limited to the elementary model of one teacher/one class. Now you’ve given me more to think about. (c:
The more I learn about wikipedia, the more I wonder if I should link to their pages from my blog. I have to say, though, that so far the information about Japanese things has been useful and accurate.
I’ve been wondering, too, about surf safety for kids and how or what teachers utilize to find childsafe sites. I’ve just learned about ICRA and Safe Surf (sorry I don’t have their links) and was wondering what you thought of them, Susan.