Microsoft offered blogger payments to edit Wikipedia pages

Microsoft offered blogger payments to edit Wikipedia pages

Software giant Microsoft has admitted that they offered payment to a blogger to edit some pages on the open source encyclopedia Wikipedia.

The site developers have in the past blocked public-relations firms, campaign workers and other people who they believed had a conflict of interest from posting and editing information on the Wikipedia.

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales spoke about this incident: “We were very disappointed to hear that Microsoft was taking that approach.”

Microsoft in a statement admitted that they had approached the writer and offered to pay him for the efforts to make the changes on the website.

The company claims that certain articles on the service are inaccurate and needed fixes with correct information. In fact, company representative Catherine Brooker said in a statement that the concerned articles seemed to be written by people at IBM who are supporters of the technology being detailed on the pages.

Microsoft further said that they had intended to seek an independent expert who could have done a fair job correcting the mistakes on the Wikipedia pages.