Wikipedia - Biased Knowledge?

While on vacation, I have been reading David Weinberger's Everything is Miscellaneous (a tough slog for the first eighty-odd pages, but much more grounded and interesting after that). A chapter on 'Social Knowing' stands out for what it explains about Wikipedia's role in "delaminating of authority and knowledge" and how knowledge now has "no knower" per se.

The problem, though, is many people (danah boyd for one) trying to confront misinformation about their company or themselves in Wikipedia articles are finding it may not be striving as hard as it should to reach its goal of achieving a neutral point of view (NPOV) with its articles.

Weinberger says "Wikipedia provides the metadata surrounding an article -- edits, discussions, warnings, links to other edits by the contributors -- because it expects the reader to be actively involved, alert to the signs."

But in my limited experience, joining the conversation about an article when you are representing a corporate POV is not so easy (unless you are with the CIA or Vatican apparently). If, as Weinberger also says, "Authority now comes from enabling us inescapably fallible creatures to explore the differences among us, together", shouldn't corporate voices be able to expose weaknesses and errors, assuming they are speaking the truth and can prove it?

It would help if Wikipedia were more explicit about how an organization can correct polemic disguised as neutrality or misinformation as fact even if the correction is made by someone from the public relations department.

Comments

[Steven]

To be quite honest, the idea that Wikipedia's most troubling issue is that it fails to defend the reputations of multinational corporations against the unwashed horde is laughable. Since when did organizations spanning the globe and throwing millions at their personal PR machines need to worry about an encyclopedic entry with "veiled polemic", which happens to change about every second. Wikipedia, with its open and honest processes that have (at least up until now) allowed corps. to anonymously alter their own articles, is the one that needs protecting.