360 DIGITAL INFLUENCE BLOG — We often get questions about if and when brands can edit a Wikipedia article and I’d like to provide some background on Wikipedia’s format and clarify what is and is not an acceptable edit. I am not morally against brands editing Wikipedia articles and there are no rules against it but the acceptable instances are few and any edits should be done transparently and by someone educated in the format and citation process of Wikipedia. To start, let’s check off the two most frequent unacceptable reasons brands want to edit an article...

Wikipedia is all about words words words. The big arguments at the user-edited encyclopedia are always about the wording of articles — and even a casual user can see that the articles emphasize written over audio or visual content. For those who think that’s a problem, a new web site called Navify wants to deliver a richer Wikipedia experience, with more focus on images, videos and comments. And it just added a continuously-updated list of the most popular articles on Wikipedia, which should appeal to anyone who likes Google Trends. The data, says co-founder and chief executive Alan Rutledge, comes from Wikipedia itself...

With the rise of social media, it's no surprise that online reputation monitoring has been a growth market. Knowing what consumers and customers are saying about you on the internet is extremely important. Generally, sites like Twitter and Facebook get the most attention when it comes to reputation monitoring but there's another site that may be even more important for brands to keep an eye on: Wikipedia...

According to Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, there are too many Indians and not enough Chiefs in the world of Web 2.0 marketing today. "There is a lot of advice about how brands should be interacting [online]," he said in a keynote presentation at Ad:Tech San Francisco today. "But, unless your brand is information dense, this highly interactive marketing is both expensive and useless." The good news however, is that communities offer the best bang for your buck in this miserable economy and Wales sees return on investment (ROI) as an "incredible steal right now," when it comes to consumer generated media...

Wikia is announcing on Tuesday that it is closing the Wikia Search product. The service was intended to be a user-generated search engine, through which users could influence the rankings of results for all other users. Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikia and driving force behind Wikia Search, fully expected the development of Wikia Search to be a "long-term project." The current economy, however, has forced him to "reassess everything," and "do what we need to do to get to profitabililty"...