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Interesting Times

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It seems I've put a few folks in a bit of a tizzy, by asking Rick Jelliffe to contribute his expertise to some incorrections on Wikipedia that I've been unable to get corrected on my own. I won't take the time to go through the whole story here, but these are the links that tell the tale:

Rick's original post (many interesting comments):
https://www.oreillynet.com/xml/blog/2007/01/an_interesting_offer.html

"Microsoft PR Paying to "Correct" Wikipedia" on Slashdot:
https://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/01/22/2056214

My comment on that thread:
https://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=218248&cid=17724650

There are lots of other blogs linking to this as well. Good to see the tone of the Open XML debate getting some broad attention and analysis. I'll leave it up to others to reach conclusions, but as always I have confidence that most people are reasonable, and will reach reasonable conclusions from the facts.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    January 23, 2007
    I had seen this on Engadget but didnt think to much about it. I like the comment you posted on slashdot - gutsy and honest. Good Job.

  • Anonymous
    January 23, 2007
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    January 23, 2007
    Nice, straightforward clarification.  But of course, Evangelist = PR (the first reply I noticed to your SourceForge rebuttal).  Funny. Thanks putting a bright light on this.  On retrospect, I's disappointed in how Rick characterized the contact that was made to him.  Posting the body of your e-mail is very helpful.

  • Anonymous
    January 23, 2007
    You guys really don't understand this "Open Source" thing do you?  Why do you shoot yourselves in the foot so much? My goodness, for being supposedly some of the smartest developers, programmers, and technical evangelists alive you sure don't think things through do you?

  • Anonymous
    January 23, 2007
    Jeff, Dennis, thanks for the comments. JD, I agree with your point on your blog that there's no course of action here that seems right -- it's still not clear how these community-driven sites can achieve maximum editorial accuracy.  But I'm glad we're all debating it, that's step one. Devnet, I'm not sure what you mean.  At this point, I don't know what we'd do differently.  Wikipedia's conflict of interest rules state as rule #1 to "avoid editing articles related to your organization or its competitors."  So it seems that contacting a person like Rick for their input is a way to correct it without violating Wikipedia's rules.

  • Anonymous
    January 23, 2007
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    January 23, 2007
    "An interesting offer: get paid to contribute to Wikipedia" (Une offre intéressante : être payé pour écrire dans Wikipedia) titre un des billets de Rick Jelliffe qui explique avoir reçu une proposition de Microsoft pour écrire des articles plus équilibrés..

  • Anonymous
    January 24, 2007
    It's your day, today.

  • Anonymous
    January 24, 2007
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    January 24, 2007
    Bizarro?  I just thought, as the one and only person who ever contacted Rick about this concept, that I'd share the actual facts of what was said.  If you find that hard to believe, I suppose you could ask Rick about it. By the way, just so nobody gets misled by your comment, evangelists are an entirely separate division of the company from PR.  In fact, we sometimes disagree about how to handle some things. :-) Yes, Stephane, it's my day, and I'm looking forward to Thursday more than usual.

  • Anonymous
    January 24, 2007
    When you contact anyone outside your company you are representing Microsoft.  Therefore you made yourself part of PR. You've got plenty of web sites on which to document file formats.  Using a third party to bypass Wikipedia rules isn't helpful to anyone, whether the facts on the page are right or wrong.  Let Wikipedia change as it may and just worry about your own sites. If Microsoft was more open about all file formats (patents, Word docs) and acted as a better member of the community you wouldn't be ridiculed so much.

  • Anonymous
    January 24, 2007
    For a detailed explanation of why some people may have reasonable doubts about OOXML, consider reading; http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=2007011720521698 or http://www.consortiuminfo.org/standardsblog/article.php?story=20070117145745854 Perhaps these issues caused the authors of the wikipedia entry to give a negative tone.

  • Anonymous
    January 24, 2007
    Oooof..! Microsoft Offers Cash For Wikipedia Edit Microsoft blunders over Weipedia editing The Darkside

  • Anonymous
    February 19, 2007
    I've spotted some lovely Sydney photos on Doug Mahugh's blog . That must mean he is in Sydney. For those

  • Anonymous
    August 30, 2007
    The ISO voting on Open XML is delivering even more drama this week than I expected. In addition to the

  • Anonymous
    August 30, 2007
    The ISO voting on Open XML is delivering even more drama this week than I expected. In addition to the

  • Anonymous
    December 30, 2007
    It's been quite a year for those who have been blogging about the Open XML file formats. Here's a look