Editing information about your organisation in Wikipedia is becoming more popular amongst organisations trying to manage their online ‘reputation’, or by individuals and organisations trying to alter information about someone else.

One of the nice things about Wikipedia is that it lets you see just who is doing what (sort of). So for example if you knoe where to look you can see that:

BBC staff made 7613 changes to pages

• The number of changes to the listings about A Levels and GCSEs stops at 1000 changes each
• Teachers’ TV has had 66 changes made
• BECTA’s entry has been changed 280 times
• SSAT entry has been changed 16 times
• The DfES entry was changed 75 times in several years but the DCSF entry has been changed 16 times in 6 weeks

You can even drill down into the changes, who made them and what they changed. For example, one of the people who changed information about the DCSF goes by the moniker Boy1jhn. He or she has also made 44 entries about the BBC in just three days in August. Boy1jhn’s several hundred changes to Wikipedia seem to focus on just two broad themes, the BBC and Labour politicians ranging from David Lammy, Caroline Flint, Patricia Hewett, and Harriet Harman to Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families, Ed Balls. Are we alone in finding such single-minded enthusiasm a little odd and smell a paid employee/party hack/activist?

www.wikipedia.com