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In a deservedly much-commented upon piece on Seomoz, Rand Fishkin relates what’s up in terms of spamming and hacking at Google’s all-time darling, Wikipedia.

Essentially, it’s the old Dmoz story all over again: A long, sordid tale of broken dreams, tainted trust, misguided zeal, faked concerns and, barring politics, some of the sleaziest social engineering extant.

If you though that Wikipedia was a mildly nutty but essentially benevolent amateur community effort at an unprecedented scale, leveraging the wisdom of crowds to create an immensely useful repository of human knowledge - well, there’s no need to rethink that view as long as you know that you’re dealing with a venture that’s wildly unreliable and inaccurate in too many respects to seriously compete with the professional setups such as the Encyclopedia Britannica and others.

However, what’s happening now (and actually has been happening for quite a while now) is the natural evolution of just about anything in a capitalist society that’s offering some monetizable value.

Which it positively does: While Rand outlines a slew of the more common practices aimed at gaming the system, there’s a lot more under the hood we cannot tell you about due to trust preservation issues. But even

Of course, like with any single-topic view, perception tends to get dreadfully skewed. It’s not as if all of Wikipedia can legitimately be rated a cesspool of spam, corrupt information and manipulated entries servicing undisclosed agendas. That would obviously be a gross and exceedingly myopic exaggeration.

Still, considering that Google in its infinitely inane wisdom has chosen to pursue the line of least (i.e. cheapest) resistance by serving Wikipedia results right as top of the fold references for just about every query in existence, it only stands to reason if we expect this issue to stay and actually deteriorate even further - arguably impacting an entire online generation’s perception of “reality” as it is, or at least: as the Internet and its big time taskmaster and “Good Shepherd” (more akin to the Pied Piper of Hamelin, really) Google want us to ingest it, servicing, it requires no mention, their very own agenda.

Read the full story here:
The Dark Side of Wikipedia

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