Wikipedia is an online community of more than 100,000 active contributors. It is the first place that millions of people seek out when researching a topic. Here we tackle the often fractious relationship between the public relations industry and Wikipedia, with the goal of providing clear guidance to practitioners.

Wikipedia is the sixth most popular website in the world according to web information firm Alexa; beaten only by Facebook, Google, YouTube, Yahoo and Baidu.com. It is a crowdsourced online encyclopaedia of more than 20 million topics in 285 different languages and is frequently the starting point for online research.

Building a crowdsourced encyclopaedia

Wikipedia was launched in January 2001 by internet entrepreneur Jimmy Wales using a social media technology called a wiki. This is a web platform that allows content to be added, modified, or deleted via a web browser.

Initially Wikipedia was created as a site for amateur contributors to complement an online encyclopaedia created by subject-matter experts called Nupedia. Wikipedia had none of the formality of its counterpart. It could be modified live whereas Nupedia had a seven-step approval process to control the content of articles contributed to the site. Wikipedia quickly overtook the site that inspired its creation and Nupedia was shut down in 2003.

Wikipedia remains an open community funded by the Wikimedia Foundation, a US charitable organization, whose goal is to bring free educational content to the world. Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales is a trustee of Wikimedia and an ardent advocate of Wikipedia's community status. Wikipedia has established a strong brand and has become a destination site on the web. It also ranks highly for search. These two features combined mean that Wikipedia has a significant reputational impact for any individual or organization that is discussed in its articles.

A study in February 2012 by search tool provider Intelligent Positioning¹⁶² found that Wikipedia ranked on the first page of Google for 1,000 search terms selected by a random noun generator. This provided ammunition to critics of the two organizations to claim that Wikipedia is receiving undue prominence from Google. The reality is that Wikipedia has earned its search ranking dominance because it is incredibly well optimized for keywords and has built a large number of inbound links.

Reputation management

Critics claim that Wikipedia has become too powerful and that it operates without the recognized processes or oversight common for more traditional media. This is the issue that puts Wikipedia in conflict with the public relations industry. Errors in traditional media can be dealt with swiftly through well-established processes. Correcting content in a Wikipedia article requires engagement with the community and, crucially, adherence to its rules.

The reputation of an organization can be attacked in a matter of hours through changes to its Wikipedia page. Monitoring Wikipedia pages for modifications has become a key part of managing the reputation of an organization. In reality, rogue attacks on Wikipedia pages are few and far between, but when they occur an organization has no option, for now, but to seek redress via the community's own workflow.

So-called Wikipedia vandalism tends to be associated with high-profile individuals and organizations. But damage can also be done by micro-edits. Repeated changes in a short period of time can go unnoticed but have the effect of dramatically changing the content of an article. You don't have to look hard to find cases of pages that have been wilfully edited with factually incorrect content that is shared via social and traditional media before its authenticity is verified.

The so-called Seigenthaler incident in May 2005 saw a hoax article posted on Wikipedia falsely accusing US journalist John Seigenthaler as a suspect in the assassinations of US President John F. Kennedy and Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy. The entry went uncorrected for four months. The incident led to unregistered users being banned from creating new articles.

Crisis situations inevitably make headlines and make good content for discussion on the social web, but there is a more fundamental issue. Wikipedia is an important reference source yet many of its articles contain outdated or incorrect information such as spelling mistakes in the names of company executives and incorrect financial information.

A US survey of more than 1,200 individual members of CIPR, IABC, NIRI, PRSA and WOMMA, published by Marcia W. DiStaso, a communications assistant professor at Pennsylvania State University published in the PRSA's PR Journal for Spring 2012, found that 60% of Wikipedia articles contained factual errors.¹⁶³ Under Wikipedia's current rules these errors cannot be corrected by anyone that has a direct interest in the subject and who would arguably be best placed to make a correction. The study was criticized by the Wikipedia community for being self-selecting and narrow in its definition of what constitutes an error.

Relationship with public relations practitioners

The relationship between the public relations industry and Wikipedia is an uneasy one although there have been numerous efforts in recent times to bring the two constituencies closer together.

Herein lies the issue. Wikipedia did not set out to create a business directory.

“The issue I have with PR editing is that it just takes up too much time. Wikipedians didn't turn up to help manage a business directory written by PR and advertising folk, they were attracted to Wikipedia for some far less worldly subject: philosophy, in my case, or military history or whatever it might be,” said Tom Morris, a Wikipedia editor with more than 10 years' experience.

While an individual may contribute or edit articles on Wikipedia, they may not do so where you have a conflict of interest. That means that if you have a vested interest in an organization, individual, client or product you may not edit content.

The Wikipedia community claims that editors with a conflict of interest make bad Wikipedians.

“What I have found – and the evidence for this is pretty comprehensive – is that people who are acting as paid advocates do not make good editors. They insert puffery and spin. That's what they do because that is what paid advocates do,” said Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales.

A group of public relations practitioners has created a group called the Corporate Representatives for Ethical Wikipedia Engagement (CREWE)¹⁶⁴ to lobby Wales and the wider Wikipedia community to review the community's processes and policies in favour of improved corporate engagement. This remains a work in progress, although thanks to the efforts of CREWE and organizations such as the CIPR in the UK, and the PRSA in the US, the relationship and understanding between Wikipedia and the public relations industry is much improved.

Working with Wikipedia

To engage with the Wikipedia community, contribute articles and edit pages successfully you must have a good overview of the site and an understanding of its ethos. The community is ruthlessly transparent and you can review its governance on the Wikipedia site. Its core principles consist of five key pillars.

In addition to these key pillars Wikipedia has three core content policies covering neutrality, verification and attribution which public relations practitioners should understand.

How to help improve Wikipedia articles

This next section has been adapted from the CIPR's best practice guidance for public relations professionals.¹⁶⁷ This is a document produced by the CIPR's Social Media Panel that provides clear and detailed advice on how public relations practitioners should engage with the Wikipedia community. The document was written openly and collaboratively on an open wiki with input from both public relations practitioners and Wikipedians.¹⁶⁸ It remains a live document online.

All editing should be conducted in an open and honest manner. Public relations professionals should create an account with Wikipedia and create a user page associated with this which discloses their place of work and a list of their clients. Wikipedia policy doesn't allow user accounts to be shared, so each person should have their own account and user page.

Engaging with the community

Once you have registered with Wikipedia, head to the Talk section of the article where you are seeking changes to the article (the tab at the top of a Wikipedia entry labelled Talk).

“If something has been written about your client, tell them your client has a response, or a response that has been published elsewhere and should be on the site. Talk to the community with respect. State your job title, identity, interest and company. Escalate with kindness. This is effective almost always,” says Wales.

Wales has a point. Marcia W. DiStaso's study into the relationship between the public relations industry and Wikipedia at Pennsylvania State University found that less than 35% of the respondents to the study had engaged with the Wikipedia community.

Engaging directly with the original editor or an editor of the page can prove effective. By going to the Toolbox section in the left-hand sidebar and looking for their list of contributions, you will be able to check if they are still active on the site. If not then try other, more recent editors.

If you get no response from the Talk pages, proceed to a relevant noticeboard. These pages are watched by groups of people with a particular interest: in effect, specialists. Noticeboard pages are very active and provide help quickly. If you are concerned about an entry for an individual, you can go to the Biography of Living Persons Noticeboard. If you want to make changes to a company page, or you think that someone editing the article is biased, it is a good idea to ask someone from the Conflict of Interest Noticeboard.

Inevitably there are sensitive situations where you may not want to disclose your identity because it may inflame an already difficult issue. In such instances you should email [email protected]. This is managed by a small group of Wikipedians who will act as your advocate within the community and offer advice. When you have a reply, keep the reference number so that any further correspondence can be tracked.

Dealing with disputes

If a subject is controversial, or there are repetitive edits better known as edit wars taking place, you can apply for the page to be protected. There are various stages, from full protection, where only a Wikipedia administrator can make an edit, to semi-protection, where only Wikipedia editors who have been registered on the site for more than four days and have made at least ten edits are allowed to make changes. To apply, ask an administrator or email [email protected].

There is a dispute resolution system within Wikipedia, but the best advice, almost always, is to seek informal negotiation or mediation. The Administrators' Noticeboard can be effective in dealing with obnoxious conduct. Wikipedia's conflict resolution mechanisms are based on the simple tenet of good faith.

Administrators will almost never get involved in disagreements over the content of a page but they may ban one of the parties from the page or from the whole site for rude behaviour or sabotaging efforts to reach consensus. If an administrator does get involved then listen to any advice they have to give you, even if it is not what you want to hear or believe is correct.

The table below provides a quick reference summary of how to join and engage with the Wikipedia community.

Wikipedia works

Wikipedia is a free-to-access online encyclopaedia first and foremost, but it is also a community. It is not a media property in the traditional sense of the definition and does not share the same structures, workflow or governance. But there are very clear processes for seeking redress and corrections.

When I asked my network recently for examples of significant reputational damage caused to an organization or individual by an article on Wikipedia in the last 12 to 24 months, examples were few and far between. Yes, there were plenty of examples of minor errors and content about past corporate activity that public relations practitioners would prefer to be erased, but by and large it appears that the Wikipedia community works.

Biography

Stephen Waddington (@wadds) is European digital and social media director for Ketchum. He has earned the reputation as a public relations modernizer, thought-leader and consumer engagement advocate working with organizations including The Associated Press, Cisco, The Economist, P&G, Philips, IBM and Tesco. He is a regular commentator on issues related to modern brand communications and reputation. His published work includes Share This (John Wiley & Sons, 2012) and he has written Brand Anarchy (Bloomsbury, 2012), a provocative book on brands, social media and public relations. You can connect with Stephen via his popular blog Two-Way Street.