Rewriting History

Winston Churchill observed that history is written by the victors. But rewriting history can be an embarrassing proposition for PR practitioners who do it on the sly in Wikipedia, the open-source online encyclopedia. Consider the case of ExxonMobil. According to The New York Times of August 19, 2007:

"In 2004, someone using a computer at ExxonMobil made substantial changes to a description of the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska, playing down its impact on the area's wildlife and casting a positive light on compensation payments the company had made to victims of the spill."

The covert rewrite was one of many uncovered by California Institute of Technology graduate student Virgil Griffith. He created a device called the WikiScanner. It connects the dots between anonymous edits and the IP addresses at which they were made. When the New York Times piece by Katie Hafner ran, Mr. Griffith had churned through 34.4 million Wikipedia edits performed by 2.6 million organizations or individuals since 2002.

Among the embarrassment of switches unearthed by his WikiScanner:

• Someone at a Diebold computer deleted paragraphs about the company's electronic voting machines;
• Someone at a Wal-Mart Stores address changed an entry about employee compensation at the retail giant; and
• A person or persons at a Dow Chemical address deleted an entire section on the 1984 Bhopal, India, chemical plant disaster that cost 20,000 lives.

Mr. Griffith, who sometimes refers to himself as a ''disruptive technologist,'' says the digital acreage he’s plowing is so huge that more treasures are bound to turn up.

So what is a hardworking PR professional to do when faced with a Wikiepedia entry that is odds with their own version of the truth? If it’s a simple factual correction – your company is headquartered in Denver, not Des Moines – just make the edit.

But Jimmy Wales, founder of the Wikipedia Foundation, suggests taking more substantive matters to the discussion page that sits behind every Wikipedia entry. There you can support your edits with solid facts and well reasoned arguments. Always identify yourself and the organization you represent. Enlist outside advocates to pipe in by appealing to their sense of truth and fairness.

Working the backroom of Wikipedia may be more time-consuming than simply slipping in and changing an entry that another reader may subsequently alter. But by playing it straight, you stand a better chance of changing the minds of readers. And you obviate the risk of having your credibility being called to task by the WikiScanner.