Beauty and the Beasts
It’s a sad fact that beauty normally comes at the price of fragility, and often vulnerability to the actions of you, me and the rest of society.
Obvious topical examples include pandas, polar bears or the earth itself. But what’s true of the natural world is equally applicable to beautiful concepts that society has developed for itself.
Democracy is an equally topical case in point, judging by the recent experiences of Russia or Egypt.
So too is Wikipedia.
Why Wikipedia? And, for that matter, what has its beauty, or lack of it, got to do with communications or PR?
I will get to these questions before things get ugly, so to speak, but first let’s cast a lustful eye at a few of Wikipedia’s vital statistics.
In barely a decade, it has become a multi-lingual, international go-to reference site for about half a billion people a year, with tens of thousands of active contributors working on nearly 20 million articles. What’s more, its open-house culture means that hundreds of thousands of visitors each day make edits, additions and updates to its diverse content.
It’s a thing of beauty – a living, voluntary, global collaborative bee-hive of knowledge.
And that’s another thing about beauty; it’s something we can’t buy, despite the lures of collagen, peroxide or botox.
Of course, it is never without the odd flaw. In Wikipedia’s case, innaccuracies and worse can be injected by accident or by internet vandal ‘trolls’, though these are normally sieved-out as articles develop, meaning that newer pieces need looked at slightly more sceptically, while older pieces grow fulsome, fair and full of links to pukka published reference sources.
Some have argued that this IT imposter can never be a true encyclopedia, being too susceptible to mistakes and mistreatment, and at the minimum it needs hedged with legal and regulatory safeguards to succeed. Interestingly though, when the science journal Nature compared its accuracy with Encyclopedia Britannica, they found the same ratio of ‘serious’ errors per article for both.
That stands in Wikipedia’s favour , given that its articles average double the length of those in the good old EB.
So far, so good.
Then, enter the Beast, in the shape of certain PR professionals.
Well-known agency Bell Pottinger has recently found itself at the centre of a not-so beautiful web of controversy, following revelations in the Independent newspaper that its directors have been taped claiming to undercover reporters that they could ‘sort’ individual Wikipedia entries for clients.
Then, it was alleged that another leading PR professional had become very busy as an online ‘reputation cleanser’, doctoring dozens of Wikipedia entries for a range of wealthy businesspeople and even a belted earl. This apparently included removing controversial personal details and softening negative references to certain business activities.
Crude interference of this kind, along with other unethical online practices like posting fake product reviews or blogs, looks increasingly out-dated and unsustainable but, nevertheless, will always pose a potential threat to the delicate but ever more globally robust health of web resources like Wikipedia.
And it reminds us starkly of what we should – or should not – promise potential PR clients.
The rightful claim, and unique benefit, of good public relations and marketing activity is that it can help people, organisations, businesses and their products to get noticed and get the reputations that they deserve – so that they say what they are, and are what they say.
Anything else is simply a business of cosmetics, applying façades of beauty which, as we know all too well, go no deeper than the skin.
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