Just don't announce it to

Just don't announce it to the whole world Wikis -- sites where users supply and edit the content -- seem to hold some real potential in the world of online real estate (see Future of Real Estate blogger Pat Kitano's insightful post last month, The Potential of Real Estate Wikis, which ended up, appropriately enough, over on the Zillow blog as part of a blog swap. ("Appropriately enough" because Zillow has launched its own Real Estate Wiki)).

If this is the kind of stuff that gets you excited, you're probably already following the controversy over allegations that Microsoft Corp. tried to hire an XML expert to fix supposed inaccuracies in Wikipedia entries (for Microsoft's side of the story, see Brier Dudley's post on his Seattle Times blog). AP technology writer Brian Bergstein uses the incident as a starting point to explore a couple of questions: Is this kind of thing inevitable and, if so, what's wrong with it given that members of Wiki communities can edit or delete biased or inaccurate entries?

Bergstein talks to Gregory Kohs, a market researcher who created a company that was offering to write Wikipedia entries for businesses for $49 to $99 -- before he got kicked off the site. Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales told Bergstein (in so many words) that yeah, people will sneak around and do this kind of thing (post and edit entries for money) in secret, but that the site ain't gonna just throw in the towel and let someone announce they are doing it.

As Inman News noted last month, Wales' latest effort -- an open-source search engine that will incorporate Wiki-like features to return more relevant results -- may also be vulnerable to such efforts at "spin."
--Matt Carter, Inman News

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