Monday, April 19, 2010

To Wikinvest or not to Wikinvest?

This week I read Undisclosed paid content on Wikinvest. Dominic Jone’s article talks about how he found that several companies are paying a third party to write about them on Wikinvest.


Wikinvest is a site that provides financial data and backgrounds on most, if not all publicly traded companies. It can be edited by users, but content is monitored by Wikinvest to ensure there is no bias and that all information is neutral.


Jones feels that by paying the third party to write about the company automatically makes the information provided biased and it should not be posted on the site. Wikinvest states that “Upon review, though, the author had stayed within Wikinvest’s guidelines — unbiased, neutral content with little in the way of predictions or overly glowing descriptions. In fact, this author happened to be better than our average contributor at citing their references. As of now, these edits have been allowed to stand and we’ll continue to monitor issues like these as they arise to see if our standards should change.”


Jones ultimately felt that this wasn’t good enough and followed up with “I guess being paid (in stock or cash) to post content isn’t considered being biased at Wikinvest. So rather than waste my time counteracting paid content on the site, I’ll do one better and simply avoid using it.”


Personally, I really don’t see the issue with what these companies are doing. They are just using a third party to do the work that they would more than likely pay an internal employee to do anyways. Furthermore, if the information is unbiased and is merely stating facts then why does it make any difference who is posting it? It seems to me that this is a harmless issue. If any average person can make a comment on the site, then why not have someone who supposedly knows what they’re talking about make the comments? I feel much better knowing my information is coming from a professional than some guy off the street.


The only actual problem I have is with this mysterious Thomas McCarthy/Tom “the Dean” McCarthy. I do find it a bit weird that he has two profiles, but more importantly, he has two of the most unprofessional looking profiles. He could make it look like he was trying to run a legitimate business and market himself a bit better, but that is a whole other issue. Overall, I don’t see that harm in what these companies are doing as long as the content stays unbiased and factual.

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