Wikipedia monitoring: recognizing defamatory criticism of the company at an early stage
Most companies have recognized the importance of entries in Wikipedia - be it about the company, its brands or its management. Anyone who has made it to the article should keep an eye on it permanently. Wikipedia experts from Aufgesang and Sucomo explain why monitoring is important and how companies can best proceed.
"A Wikipedia article is never complete: Authors can make changes or add information at any time - anonymously," explains Peter Montag, Wikipedia expert at Aufgesang. "Things get tricky when people who are hostile to the company see the openness of Wikipedia as an opportunity for vituperative criticism. Monitoring is urgently recommended in order to recognize unobjective comments at an early stage."
"Large companies like to delegate the task to their PR department, which also takes care of a correction if necessary," adds Markus Franz, Managing Director of Sucomo. However, this harbors risks because they treat Wikipedia as one of many channels, even though the encyclopedia works very differently to Facebook and the like. "A Wikipedia service provider who is familiar with the community can reliably evaluate changes and react more quickly to problematic content. This is a particularly sensible option when a large number of articles and several languages are involved, as is the case with corporations, for example."
Tip: Wikipedia monitoring for Outlook
With a "Watch list" you can set up a notification when there are changes to individually selected articles. To create a watch list, it is first necessary to register with Wikipedia. If you do not make any changes to the content, you can choose any user name for your monitoring account. If an article is called up, it can then simply be added to the watch list by clicking on the star in the top right-hand corner - and removed again in the same way. Once all relevant articles have been added, the watch list can be imported into Outlook as a newsfeed. A link on the left in the vertical navigation bar leads to the corresponding web address.
The display of changes to articles is limited to a 30-day period by default. A practical feature is that there are also notes on new posts on the discussion pages of the articles - the list can also be formatted to hide small changes and bots. The watch list is a useful tool that makes it much quicker to find changes - but it is no substitute for checking and evaluating content.
Aufgesang has a free guide which offers advice and support on all questions relating to Wikipedia.
