Pay for Wikipedia edits not a scandal according to O'Reilly blogger
Humphrey Cheung
January 25, 2007 15:32
Culver City (CA) - Microsoft's offer to pay for Wikipedia edits may not be the big scandal many news organizations are hoping for. This opinion comes straight from Rick Jelliffe, the O'Reilly author and blogger who was offered money for changing Microsoft Wikipedia entries. In an email interview, Jeliffe told TG Daily that he believes the edits are normal and that paid edits could be the wave of the future.
Jeliffe made Microsoft's offer public by posting in his O'Reilly-sponsored blog. You can read the entry entitled "An Interesting Offer" here. According to Jeliffe, Microsoft wanted someone independent, yet friendly, to edit Wikipedia entries about Open Document Formats and Microsoft Office's competing OOXML format. Initially Jeliffe was quite surprised and added, "I am hardly the poster boy of Microsoft partisanship!"
Wikipedia's openness to editing has spawned some excellent and informative articles, but critics question the encyclopedia's impartiality on other controversial subjects. Jeliffe said in his blog that Microsoft was, "frustrated at the amount of spin from some ODF stakeholders on Wikipedia and blogs." IBM, Microsoft's chief rival in the office suite standard's war, is one of the main backers of ODF and some of the company's employees have edited Wikipedia entries.
Jeliffe told us that no specific amount was discussed, but added that paid entries could be a sign of the future. "Probably Wikipedia will set up some "independent editor" process where companies who feel misrepresented (but who respect the bar that Wikipedia's guidelines recommend against company people editing directly) can give funding to a Wikipedia-sanctioned group of independent editors who won't have a conflict of interest," said Jeliffe.
Of course paying for edits could appear to be a conflict of interest and while other news organizations and bloggers have proclaimed the offer as a scandal in the making, Jeliffe sees it as something completely different. Coming from a technical background and writing one of the first books on XML, he told us that the edits were normal. "It is being treated as a scandal or bribe when it is just a job," Jeliffe told TG Daily.
According to Jeliffe, some of the Wikipedia articles were biased to begin with and that he is just fixing the matter. "So being paid to do something I have skills in, on subject matter I know about, on a forum I respect, with no requirement other than removing bias and improving impartiality, seemed a good offer," he adds that his expertise and impartiality in open formats made him the obvious choice for the edits, adding, "I was chosen because of my neutrality: ODF people have quoted my blog as well as OOXML people in the past."
It was never the intention of Jeliffe to hide the offer, in fact that is exactly why he blogged about it. He has talked to other Wikipedia editors about the offer and says that "there was never any intent or discussion to break Wikipedia's guidelines here, and we haven't."
http://www.tgdaily.com/2007/01/25/wikip ... otscandal/
Simples as definições de wikipedia segundo o google são:
Essa do Google está demais... 
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