I spent most of today providing online crisis communications training for the head of corporate communications for an overseas government regulatory authority. Coincidentally, one of the topics we covered was its Wikipedia page which is incomplete and out of date. It isn’t a commercial company and is notable enough to warrant an entry.
The reason it is so important to improve the page is that on a variety of search terms it is the highest ranking page after the official websites of the organisation.
Unfortunately it turns out that it created some of the existing entry itself and had planned to simply edit and update it again itself. The main reason being is that those responsible didn’t know you couldn’t. One of the concerns here is that an organisation that is resp0nsible for enforcing rules absolutely can’t be seen to be ignoring or infringing other people’s rules.
A further challenge is that it needs to be tackled in more than one language.
It is now going to use the CIPR’s new Wikipedia guidance to engage with the Wikipedia community and see if it can transparently and ethically get the page improved.
I’m going to watch what happens with the page and eventually perhaps publish a case study on how successful it was.
I’ve kept the name of the organisation private – to preserve client confidentiality, but more importantly so that the process can happen exactly as it would if it wasn’t being monitored to see how well it works.
Any luck so far?
Any luck so far?