Microsoft's New Slogan: Paying You To Do Our Dirty Work

Holy Cow, Batman! This is just utterly freaking insane news, via the Washington Post and the Associated Press!

We all know that Wikipedia has an iron grip on what passes muster and what doesn't pass muster on their site. Seems like the mighty Microsoft has come up with a way to circumvent the wiki's editorial process when it comes to fixing things like 'errors'. Cough. (Translation: Things the firm doesn't like to see about itself, or that other companies have said about them, in print.)

Here's their solution: Hire an outside writer to make the fixes. Then pay her or, in this case, him to change the entry. Makes it look more legit that way:

Microsoft Corp. landed in the Wikipedia doghouse Tuesday after it offered to pay a blogger to change technical articles on the community-produced Web encyclopedia site.
While Wikipedia is known as the encyclopedia that anyone can tweak, founder Jimmy Wales and his cadre of volunteer editors, writers and moderators have blocked public-relations firms, campaign workers and anyone else perceived as having a conflict of interest from posting fluff or slanting entries. So paying for Wikipedia copy is considered a definite no-no. ...

Microsoft acknowledged it had approached the writer and offered to pay him for the time it would take to correct what the company was sure were inaccuracies in Wikipedia articles on an open-source document standard and a rival format put forward by Microsoft.

Of course, doesn't this follow hot on the heels of the whole Vista fiasco. Microsoft? Not doing too well on the ethics front in 2007, I think.

Kinda taking payola to new lows, if you ask me. Although I am very, very, very happy to know that, if only I were to compromise my morals, I, too, could potentially have a new market as a writer.

Yay! (Not.)

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Microsoft's New Slogan: Paying You To Do Our Dirty Work

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