As Wikipedia abandons its “anyone can edit” ethos, will you lose control of the site’s information about your brand?

In the eyes of the cynics, it had to happen sooner or later. Wikipedia, the site that has become the most far-reaching store of human knowledge on the Web by allowing anyone to edit articles on all imaginable topics, is expected to soon place restrictions on who can edit its content. After U.S. Senators Edward Kennedy and Robert Byrd left a lunch on Inauguration Day last week amidst reports that both had been hospitalized, “vandals” updated the Wikipedia entries about the two senators with the false information that they had both died. (Kennedy was treated and released; Byrd never actually went to the hospital.) Now, a set of rules aimed at preventing such intentional misinformation seems likely to take hold. That could have implications for your ability to edit pages on the site that discuss your brand, products and services.

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An expert weighs in on how Web 3.0 is about to make media monitoring easier

Kingsley Idehen, a co-founder of DBpedia

For public relations professionals, finding mentions about a particular brand or product is getting more challenging as the vast clutter of the Web continues to grow. While paid monitoring services like those offered by Cision and others can help, for those using free-text search engines like Google for media monitoring, combing through pages of irrelevant search results has become routine. For example, acronyms pose a problem: how many instances of the term “HP” referring to “horsepower” do you have to sift through to find articles about Hewlett-Packard products? Plenty.

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How to avoid thorny debates when editing content about your brand

Photo courtesy animalspeek.blogspot.com

One day, I took it upon myself to add some content to the Wikipedia page about a little town in southern Japan where I had briefly taught English after college. Who else, I figured, would be inclined to add information about the local hotel and restaurant owners’ annual tradition of throwing live pufferfish into the harbor on a February afternoon? So, in December of 2006, I added a paragraph about it. I didn’t cite any sources because I couldn’t find anything written about the event…I had only attended it. A full year later, someone slapped a banner across the top of the page: “This article does not cite any references or sources.” My heart sank a little. Read it all..