Rhiannon Ruff is co-founder of Lumino, a digital marketing agency.  She is the author of “Wikipedia & Crisis Communications” and was kind enough to sit down with me and discuss Wikipedia, which is probably the first thing any stakeholder or journalist reads when they first hear about your company.

BJ Fischer:

Wikipedia is still very much a thing. Talk about some of the ways that Wikipedia influences communications beyond the Wikipedia site, such as Google and training AI and things like that.

Rhiannon Ruff:

I used to talk a lot about Wikipedia and the fact that people were going and reading it. And what I meant is that if someone searches for a topic, they then see Wikipedia in the search results they click through and read that article. And increasingly that's not the only case. People are getting information that's coming from Wikipedia, and they don't even know that it's coming from Wikipedia. One of the main reasons that people will reach out to me nowadays is because they see something in that Google Knowledge panel that appears when you do a search for an individual or a company. You get that box at the right-hand side of your search results with key facts and a little blurb that is pulled from Wikipedia.

The search algorithms see Wikipedia as being a reliable source of information, any search engine is going to pull from Wikipedia and it's going to put Wikipedia up high in search results. Things like, the search generative content that Google is doing these days is going to use Wikipedia as one of its sources.

We now have the various LLMs, AI tools like ChatGPT, and they are looking for sources of information that are reliable. They're trying to not pull from sites that have been created for SEO. They're trying not to pull from news sites that might not actually have accurate information. Since Wikipedia is already "trusted" by search, and the site is content-rich, it is an ideal source for these tools.

People are going to ChatGPT or another AI tool and they're using it for research or to start off their research. And the information they get is sometimes coming from Wikipedia, and people don't realize. We can backtrack a little bit in ChatGPT and see that it's using Wikipedia for that information.

BJ:

I'm interested in the idea that when Wikipedia first came around, people were like, well, you can't rely on that, anybody could type anything in there, right?  How did that evolution happen to the point where it's viewed as a credible source as opposed to a place where a bunch of knuckleheads could add anything they wanted to?

Rhiannon:

I think part of it is the natural journey of a platform. Initially, you just want to get a lot of users and content, and that's really where Wikipedia was in its early days. Over time we've got this natural kind of pruning out of some content, more of an emphasis on making sure that it's correct and they have created a lot of rules about what should be included.  At first, there weren't so many, and now there are thousands of different guidelines and specific little rules, and then unwritten rules based on these written rules. They're really keen to make sure that anything that goes on the site has a very well-established, independent source. It's not perfect because it's a human-curated platform. With that said, a lot of times rather than things being outright incorrect, you have things that are outdated.

BJ:

Let’s talk about those rules…which is a daunting topic. The example you have given in the writing is that you know there's something about your company that's in Wikipedia that you know is incorrect. Let's just say it's factually incorrect and you don't want untold numbers of people seeing that, repeating it, etc. You're not supposed to fix it yourself, right? So how do you go about that?

Rhiannon:

The actual true meaning of “you can't go fix that yourself" is a little more complex than a lot of people understand. So, you can fix it. You just shouldn't be going in and immediately editing Wikipedia yourself.

One thing I want to clarify here is I think people don’t understand the conflict of interest rule and when you have to disclose. If you want to fix something on Wikipedia and it's for your client, even if your client hasn't specifically told you, go fix this, you're still considered to have a paid conflict of interest because they are your client. Likewise, if you work in an organization, say you're in the communications department and you see something on Wikipedia and realize “Oh, that's wrong. I should go fix it."  In that situation, you have a paid conflict of interest, and you need to disclose that you work for this company, and you've gone in there to fix it. So, the first thing is being aware that you have that conflict of interest.

The second thing is, how to approach this and how to prove your case. We can't just go to Wikipedia and say, “That is wrong, here is the correct information. Please fix.”

You need to go and find sources that confirm your information. It can't be from your company, so it can't be a press release or your own website.  It should really be an independent source, not your press release reprinted by an outlet. It has to be a journalist-written piece. That confirms the information. If you're just trying to fix something like number of employees, annual revenue, things like that, you can potentially use your website. Or if you're a public company, your SEC filings. You can use those, but only if you're using it to fix something that's basically a number—the facts that appear in the sidebar on Wikipedia.

For everything else, you should really be looking for completely independent sourcing and not another company's website or press release--no press releases at all. No organization websites at all. Go out and find some media coverage.

Once you've got your sources and your information that you want to fix, the next step is to go to the right place with it. Every Wikipedia page has a discussion page that's attached to it. It's like a discussion forum that's specifically for the Wikipedia article. It's not to talk about the topic itself but instead to discuss the content of the Wikipedia article. You can use that page to post a message and say “Hi, I'm here from that company. I know that I shouldn't be editing. Here is my source. Here's the thing I'd like fixed. Here is why it needs to be fixed. Can someone help?”

There are various ways of finding editors to come and look at that to review it, because a lot of times if a page hasn't been updated, it probably means editors are not keeping a close eye on it. The best way is that there's a little template that you can add to it that puts it into a big queue of requests.

If you go and look up on Wikipedia, the "Plain and simple conflict of interest guide" will tell you exactly how to do this process. That's what I always point people to, because it was written by editors trying to be as straightforward as possible and explaining this to an audience that is coming to Wikipedia, probably for the first time.

You've got to be prepared, be patient and, be persistent, because that's the only way that you'll get these things done. Everyone on Wikipedia is a volunteer, and they are just doing this whenever they have spare time. Many are students or work during the day.

BJ:

That's interesting. Let's say you had a press release, and you sent it out. The press release itself is no good obviously because you wrote it. But let's say it says that your brand has the best-selling product, and a journalist then takes the press release and writes a story, and he repeats the claim that it has the best-selling product. Wikipedia's assumption is that they actually verified that, correct?

Rhiannon:

That's correct. So that's what the expectation is on the journalists, that they have verified that information. Now journalists, they might write up something like “according to the brand they are the best-selling.” In which case then you can't just put it into Wikipedia because it's still coming from the brand. But if the journalist has written that it's the best-selling brand, the assumption is that they must have looked at the figures that would have confirmed this, whether or not that's the case.

BJ:

Last thing. Everyone's temptation will be to create a fake username and go in there and edit it themselves, right?  Why shouldn’t we do that?

Rhiannon:

It can take some time for Wikipedia editors to uncover edits made by someone with a conflict of interest, but it's really just a matter of time. There are tools that they use that will flag edits as potentially being promotional based on the type of sourcing that's used or words that are included, but then a human has to come and look at. But oftentimes it's just the pattern of edits.  For instance, an editor coming by on a page one day reading a sentence, and thinking "That doesn't sound like something a neutral editor would have written." They will go and look at the edit history of the page and they'll see that Dave789 has been editing this page a whole bunch recently, and it seems like he has removed some negative details, and has added in new stuff about the company. Some of it seems OK, some of it doesn't, but it seems a lot like this are edits being made by the company. Wikipedia editors don't always have time to fix everything, so usually what they'll do is just revert and then they'll slap a tag on the top of the article that says “This article has been edited in return for undisclosed payments.” At that point, all the changes that you were intending to make have been lost and now you have a flag on this page that you have to deal with.  Editors are not always keen to remove that tag because some of them see it as kind of a scarlet letter. It could just stay there permanently. All in all, while it takes more time, it's better to use the Talk page approach, rather than end up wasting your time and creating an antagonistic relationship with Wikipedia editors.