When did you last check for vandals?

An acquaintance of mine recently suffered data vandalism. He’s a semi-public figure with a biography on Wikipedia. He’s also not technically gifted, so he suffered a few anxious days thinking that the world would see and believe the defamations. Now that’s all sorted (history -> undo -> add to watch list), but it brought home to me the importance of monitoring information about us in publicly editable databases.

It makes good business sense to check from time to time whether someone has created a Wikipedia entry about your organization. If there is one add it to your watch list so that you can check the facts any time there is an edit. Then if a vandal attacks you can take action. But bear in mind that Wikipedia is intended to be written from a neutral point of view. If you edit entries about yourself, you could be considered the vandal.

Wikipedia:Cleaning up vandalism – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia via kwout

As well as checking Wikipedia, you might want to take a look at Freebase. This is a relatively new community edited database that contains highly structured and cross referenced information about topics and the relationships between them. As well as listing your business address Freebase might, for example, list the members of your board and what their other business affiliations are.

IBM : Freebase via kwout

Wikipedia and Freebase both show that, given the opportunity, altruistic individuals will collectively build and maintain large databases of public information. As storage and bandwidth costs fall more of these systems will be developed, and organizations will increasingly need to consider them when forming information strategies.