PR Newswire, 27 January 2014 link
Wikipedia Academy for Marketers linkRALEIGH, N.C., Jan. 27, 2014 /PRNewswire-iReach/ -- Ethical Wiki, a professional services firm focused on helping companies contribute to Wikipedia ethically, has introduced the Wikipedia Academy for Marketers. The Academy is an online resource with instructions on how marketing professionals can engage with Wikipedia ethically by requesting corrections, offering content for consideration and managing their conflict of interest appropriately. "When marketing professionals use Google to find answers on how to improve Wikipedia ethically, they are faced with a lot of erroneous, confusing or contradicting advice," said David King, founder and Wikipedian for Ethical Wiki, "Some of that advice essentially tells marketers to ignore errors and other problems, while others encourage risky and potentially illegal behavior. I wanted to create a basic resource that provides authoritative, straight-forward instructions."
The Wikipedia Academy teaches professionals how to engage with the Wikipedia community in a manner that is compliant with disclosure laws, Wikipedia's policies and established ethical best practices. The Federal Trade Commission requires that marketing professionals disclose a financial connection online and the Wikimedia Foundation sent a cease and desist letter to a Wikipedia firm that allegedly violated the site's terms of use by misrepresenting their affiliation with clients. According to a recent survey by the Public Relations Society of America, 12 percent of public relations professionals believe it is common practice for marketers to pretend to be someone else in order to make changes on Wikipedia. "In our 2012 analysis of 2,578 company pages on Wikipedia, only ten percent of them were marked as important by Wikipedia's volunteer community," said King. "These articles are paramount to the companies they represent but comparatively unimportant to the volunteer editor community, which maintains thousands of articles on a volunteer basis. Companies can take the initiative to improve them, but the safest and most effective way to participate long-term is to do so in a manner that is ethical, transparent and useful."
According to Ethical Wiki's eBook, marketing professionals should give Wikipedia's editors a similar experience as they would have working with other volunteer contributors. This can make the company uncomfortable, because following Wikipedia's content policies may require including viewpoints the company doesn't agree with. The Wikipedia Academy includes guides on how to offer a new article to Wikipedians for consideration through the Articles for Creation tool, how to request corrections through the Request Edit template and how to approach unfair content.
About Ethical Wiki
Ethical Wiki is a professional services firm that helps organizations offer content, request corrections and discuss issues with Wikipedia's editors in order to obtain neutral, high-quality Wikipedia articles. A substantial portion of Wikipedia's highest-ranked company articles, which have been assessed by an independent editor to meet a high standard of Wikipedia policy, were facilitated by Ethical Wiki.
An overview of Wikipedia for marketing and public relations professionals David King LinkedIn link
King is a "Veteran Editor III" on Wikipedia with more than 20,000 edits and five years of experience on the site. He has created more than 15 percent of Wikipedia's most highly ranked articles about companies, which have been evaluated by the Wikipedia community as being neutral, properly sourced and of high-quality. King advocates for the importance of Wikipedia and for ethical participation on the site as a regular speaker, author, and educator. He previously supported public relations, social media and Wikipedia programs at The Hoffman Agency, Gutenberg Communications, Lutchansky Communications and Edelman.