Microsoft rumbled over Wikipedia edits

MICROSOFT HAS has got itself in trouble with Wikipedia for paying experts to write "accurate information" about it in the online encyclopaedia.

According to SiliconValley.com, the Vole had a gutsful of people penning FUD and nonsense about its products on Wikipedia.

It approached an Aussie blogger Rick Jelliffe to correct what it considered inaccuracies in Wikipedia articles on an open-source document standard and a rival format put forward by Microsoft.

A spokesVole said that the Wikipedia articles had been penned by the spinners at IBM which supported the open-source standard and it was not fair about what it said about the Volish effort.

She had flagged the purported mistakes to Wikipedia's volunteer editors who religiously ignored them. So Microsoft called in Jelliffe to make the changes for them.

Jelliffe said that he had no problem with that, particularly as the articles on the Microsoft standards include allegations that Vole was hiring death squads to kill off the Open Sauce standard.

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales said he was "very disappointed" to hear that Microsoft was taking that approach.

Wales said that Vole should have written a 'white paper' on the subject with its interpretation of the facts, post it to an outside Web site and then link to it in the Wikipedia articles' discussion forums.

In other words, if what a company says is at odds with what some idiot with a false-penis fetish says, Wikipedia will side with the idiot. µ

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