Rational Idealist

My Grace Park Photo On Wikipedia (Photo credit: kk+)

I am surprised, more and more often, by really well written Wikipedia pages for very obscure people and services.

I so far assumed they are written by themselves, or rather a PR professional on their behalf.I just couldn’t believe there is enough people who care about XX to properly maintain that article, and even have it much more elaborate than for instance the one about YY.

Also, my favorite trick to use for content-based pet projects in Slovenia is, to contribute part of the content to an under resourced Wikipedia, and cite the new project as the source. Everybody wins.

So I guess I’m surprised that Wikipedia is not under attack by mercenaries who should know everything about content business. It might be that Wikipedians are such merciless defenders of the shrine, that nobody evil dares to touch it.  😉

PR News Poll: Wikipedia Mostly Unexplored By PR Pros

PR News Poll: Wikipedia Mostly Unexplored By PR Pros By Bill Miltenberg, PR News There’s been an ongoing debate between leading PR pros and Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales about PR’s participation in the creation and editing of Wikipedia posts. Wales says that objectivity and transparency is lacking among PR pros, especially within agencies.

via: www.prnewsonline.com

I think it’s a fascinating topic, and one we will hear more about this year, as the content marketing goes mainstream. What if Wikipedians were paid to edit Wikipedia full time?

Related articles

• I Use Wikipedia More Than Makeup (techcrunch.com)
• Wikipedia & the PR Pro: Friend or Foe? (forbes.com)
• Making the Case for PR Pros Editing Wikipedia (prsay.prsa.org)
• Wikipedia and PR have got to work it out (stuartbruce.biz)
• A Big PR Firm Got Caught Editing Its Clients’ Wikipedia Pages, And Jimmy Wales Is NOT Amused (businessinsider.com)

While listening to shocking reports from Gaza I started to imagine a true online newspaper of the future. Since navigating information and additional information became so simple, I expect my paper to be a structured aggregate of knowledge, not just the most appealing news resource. On ‘world affairs’ section, I want to see all wars that are going on in the world today and browse trough their histories, so that I can create my opinion about it based on facts. I don’t want to live in a media-constructed reality thinking that there is only one good and one evil at each moment.

And this morning, I entered the search term into the engine: “wars going on in the world”, and was pleasantly surprised – Wikipedia has this page called Ongoing Conflicts, summarizing exactly what I was looking for, including a map. This is not the first time Wikipedia had some obscure idea of mine already included, and each time this happens, I get a nice feeling of at least something moving in the right direction in this world – collaborative encyclopedia can really be the groundworks for many amazing applications of the future. The web is still young.