Several years ago, I consulted the press person for a major Chicago business person on how to use Wikipedia.
I enjoy educating and training people. I wrote my senior college capstone paper on Wikipedia and the concept of authorship as it pertains to Wikipedia. I was happy to evangelize and coach.
This project made me feel uneasy.
Pitched initially as helping them with Wikipedia, and though only a few hours in total, I felt guilty coaching this person what’s appropriate to put on Wikipedia. In particular, we were trying to minimize mentioning a particular news item because a major announcement for the business person was imminent. Here I am, helping a subordinate of the page’s subject, and using potentially biased, second hand sources, to edit the subject’s page.
I do recall advising her that you want to express balance, and that a total omission of the event would raise flags. It felt odd being a 26 year old, working with an experienced, former local journalist and telling her how to write copy that would avoid impression of bias.
There is a cottage industry out there to help change individual’s histories online, perhaps best documented in the book So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, but this is not the type of consulting I support. Is it legal, yes. Am I complicit in trying to obscure the facts? I feel that way. I could and should have provided generic training content and she could have still made the changes herself, but I watched and coached her as she pasted in paragraphs referencing favorable sources. My conscious then and now feels it wasn’t right, and I wish I said something earlier. However, I felt at the time I was doing a favor to my company for what was then a major account.
I have to laugh now because the business person’s page has a dedicated subsection to the news item in question.