Wikipedia edit
- 16 Aug 07, 03:02 PM
There was significant interest in our piece yesterday on the online tool that shows the identity of organisations where employees have changed Wikipedia pages.
The focus of the story was changes the CIA had made to pages, but other organisations - including The Vatican, the US Democratic Party and US company Diebold - didn’t escape our attention.
Words like glass, house and stones spring to mind, because we weren’t exactly sharp about the other obvious question that springs to mind... What about people inside the BBC?
This was an irritating oversight. Some of you have written to complain, others have given the issue a significant airing online (see here, here and here) and beyond.
I still think it was a good piece to write, but we should have asked the question about ourselves - and reflected it in the report - before it was published. That may be the sound of the barn door closing, but we have now put a line at the end of the story about the BBC and the fact that the Wikipedia scanner shows updates from people at IP addresses traceable back to the BBC.
Some of the examples are pretty unedifying, but for every dodgy one there are many, many more uncontroversial edits where people at the BBC have added information or changed a detail in good faith. The scanner also shows the same kind of results for a wide variety of other media organisations.
So what are my conclusions on all this? People from the BBC interacting with social networking sites seems like an entirely proper thing. We are only part of the web, after all, and we should be willing to freely link off to other places and to engage intelligently with some of them.
You are hardly the brightest button if you choose to make unpalatable updates to Wikipedia when you are sitting at a BBC computer, but policing every keystroke of more than 20,000 staff is impossible. One thing is clear – when BBC staff choose to get involved, they should behave well and not in a way that flies in the face of BBC values or risks bringing the BBC into disrepute.
Having said that, I think I’ve broken the rules once too. Some time back I noticed Wikipedia had the wrong information about who was in charge of BBC News Interactive. So I wrote a couple of paragraphs about myself which is by all accounts not good form in the Wiki world. Whoops, I’ll leave you to go in and edit that one.
Pete Clifton is head of editorial development, multi-media journalism
Earlier this week our interest was sparked by the news that a group of c
