Wikipedia Used For Apparent Viral Marketing Ploy

jangobongo writes "An article over at BoingBoing discusses what appears to be a viral marketing ploy appearing in a Wikipedia entry. Quote: "Someone has apparently abused collaborative reference site Wikipedia in a viral marketing campaign for a BBC online alternate reality game." "

Re:Hmm

[Baricom]

It depends on whether you're looking at the live version, or the historical one. The live version was apparently re-written to reflect the fact that it describes a fictional character.

It's No Longer "Fake"

[rsmith-mac]

Just so we're clear here, by the time the article was posted on Slashdot, it was corrected as to be a proper writeup on the game itself, instead of being a false article based on the game. You can see the original viral entry [wikipedia.org] from the article's history however if you want to see what the initial fuss was about.

Sure it was the BBC?

[orzetto]

Looking at the page history [wikipedia.org], one finds that the original author is a certain Jon Hawk [wikipedia.org], who claims not to be a BBC employee [wikipedia.org], and with quite a few spelling mistakes too. He has also a few other contributions to Wikipedia [wikipedia.org], so maybe this page is all work of a fan and not of the BBC.

However, it is true that this page [wikipedia.org] (in the history of related article Boyd*Upp) was written [wikipedia.org] by someone operating out of IP 132.185.240.121, corresponding to webgw1.thls.bbc.co.uk.

The article has already been rewritten

[Namarrgon]

This [wikipedia.org] is the original, disputed article, and clearly is not factual. The majority of votes [wikipedia.org] were against keeping this article, on the grounds that it was advertising, and fiction presented as fact.

This [wikipedia.org] is the current article, completely rewritten by a third party, which now describes the game rather than a character in it and takes care to present itself as a description of a piece of fiction, with many references to related discussions. Most people seem willing to keep the updated article, despite some lingering accusations of advertising.

There are other [wikipedia.org] article(s) that are still written from the fictional context of the game, and are likely [wikipedia.org] to be deleted.

Original post on Wikipedia

[Anakron]

The original article didn't mention that it referred to a fictional character. For those who missed it, here's the original text:

James Kenton Kane (born 22 October [wikipedia.org] 1982 [wikipedia.org] - 2005 [wikipedia.org]) better known as Jamie Kane was a British [wikipedia.org] pop musician [wikipedia.org] and was a member of boyband [wikipedia.org] Boy*d Upp [wikipedia.org].

After the band split up, Kane launch a mildy successful solo career. He appeard on the covers of Top Of The Pops [wikipedia.org] magazine and NME [wikipedia.org].

Kane was the subject of several scandals in his last year.

Kane died in a helicopter crash of the coast of the Netherlands [wikipedia.org].

External links

Official site [jamiekane.co.uk]
Fan site www.jamierules.co.uk [jamierules.co.uk]

If you want to advertise your business...

[wikinerd]

...you are free to come to my wiki JnanaBase [jnanabase.org] which has only one policy: You are free to do whatever you want within the minimum possible legal and decency limitations. The goal of the project is to document all information that exists in the universe, thus creating a copy of our brain (we will later organise and manage all that information with some special software [wikinerds.org] we develop). Yes, you can write an article about your business or even a biography for your dog, as long as the information is useful and accurate. We created this project as an alternative to Wikipedia because we believe that there should be no limits in information.

Linking to Wikipedia

[PhilHibbs]

When submitting a Slashdot story, please consider linking to a specific page revision (from the History page), rather than to the normal article link. This way, Slashdotters visiting the site need not be subjected to pages full of pictures of penises. This article was only vandalised three times today, and none were terribly obscene, but it's happened in the past and reducing the impact of trollish behaviour should in turn reduce such behaviour.

This is not official Wikipedia policy, just a suggestion from a Slashdotter and a Wikipedian.

Update: No its not

[AceJohnny]

Extra Extra! Read all about it! [boingboing.net]

Actually, it seems to be more of a case of fanbase going wild. From the article:

I'm Rob, the Senior Producer on the Jamie Kane game. A couple of people have emailed the BBC asking for an official response to the Jamie Kane/Wikipedia thing. If you guys still have space for it, would you mind adding in the following, as there seems to be some confusion:

"Just to confirm, the BBC would never use Wikipedia as a marketing tool. The first posting was simply a case of a fan of the game getting into the spirit of alternative reality a little too much. The follow up posting was made by a fan of the game who happens to work for the BBC and was made without the knowledge of anyone in the Jamie Kane Team or BBC Marketing."

Re:wikipedia archive

[wikinerd]

I usually copy the most interested deleted Wikipedia entries to my wiki [jnanabase.org], but I think Wikipedia is already archived automatically by many sites around the world, including the Internet Archive [archive.org].

BBC Policy Clarified

[ear1grey]

I contacted the BBC to ask for clarification on the events and received the unequivocal response [boakes.org] that:

the BBC would never use Wikipedia as a marketing tool.