First, thanks to Jonathan Hochman at Search Engine Land and others for keeping this story alive. It originated here with Kevin Poulsen last week on the Wired Blog Network.

Caltech graduate student Virgil Griffith just launched an unofficial Wikipedia search tool that threatens to lay bare the ego-editing  and anonymous flacking on the site. Enter the name of a corporation, organization or government entity and you get a list of IP addresses assigned to it. Then with one or two clicks, you can see all the anonymous edits made from those addresses anywhere in Wikipedia's pages.

Do read the comments left in response to this news if you have time. Corporations will find ways to work around this issue.

The major significance of this piece in my view is that it is yet another data point suggesting that having PR people on hand is becoming as bad as "lawyering up" in the minds of some.

Having a crisis? Hire a PR firm.

Just want to talk and tell the truth and have a real conversation? Then get the PR people out of the room and as far away from the messaging as possible.

In reponse to this I continue to see and hear a lot of talk from traditional PR people that everything is better than ever; that business is great; that PR people are getting invited more and more often to the board room. Know what I think? I think after about 75 years of being professional Happy Facers, traditional PR people aren't trusted anymore, and that is the real crime.

[Online source of graphic image.]

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