Make the dirt stick

One of the questions that keeps coming up when we introduce people to the idea of Crocodyl is, "What do you do when the company tries to edit its own profile?" Our response has always been that we apply our standards of quality to the contributions, not the contributor. We are continually rethinking our strategy on how to offer accurate and timely information on corporations, while maintaining an open, community based framework. One recent development on Wikipedia illustrates a shift in the ecosystem of information online significant to this debate.

Wikipedia recently began altering the structure of articles on companies with a lot of controversy surrounding their activities. Perhaps because many companies police their Wikipedia pages, the site has taken to creating separate pages from the company profile. Royal Dutch Shell has successfully dodged a few pieces of bad PR by having a separate page for controversy, even though the page appears to have been created by a well meaning activist. Even the New York Times has a separate page, labeled "Criticism of The New York Times." This trend is problematic because it severs this important information from the pages that get the most traffic--the main company profile. We might be able to fill a void here by assuring that the "mud sticks" on our company profiles, adding a critical voice to the conversation. I think a critical part of this is trusted individuals and organizations acting as "sponsors" of a set of profiles by subscribing to the page, and checking the quality of new submissions, but I am curious to hear what other people think. Please feel free to add comments in response.

I recently had a conversation with Daniel Souweine, who has been working on a project to better integrate the environmental record of companies into their main Wikipedia profile, and he had some advice about how we could address this issue in Crocodyl. In an email he explained the phenomenon:

"What we have tried to do is avoid the controversy frame, which as you note ends up sluffing the important information to another article. Instead, we have tried to establish sections like "Environmental record" or "Health and safety record". These section headings are basically neutral, but with a company like Shell will end up skewing critical. But it is really hard for anyone to argue that they don't belong in the main article." He added,

"That said, if there is enough controversy, or really enough of any kind of information, it is actually consistent with WP guidelines to split it off. Put another way, it would be unwieldy to have all the stuff that is in controversy put in the main article. In those cases, I think the key is having a really clear summary of controversial issues in the main article. For example, the summary controversy section that is in the main Shell article right now is kind of all over the place and doesn't succinctly lay out the basics about what bad stuff they have done. For a list of all the articles we have worked on environmental issues, check out the task force page."