BBC is Spamming Wikipedia

Boingboing reports that BBC has posted a wikipedia article about a fictional pop star to promote their online reality game. This is the same viral advertising, just like that ilovebees crap which was used as halo promotion. But it's one thing to use your own website, and it's another to spam public system like wikipedia. Yes, this is spam - nothing more. They can spin it any way they want, but information provided in the wiki entry is false, and was posted solely to advertise the game.

Of course, the beauty of the Wikki system is that this entry has been identified and corrected soon after it was posted. If you look in the history, you can see all the changes that were made. In other words - Wiki system works. Even if BBC hires someone to change that page every day, it wont stop people from correcting it. And all one needs to do is look in the history page to see the truth.

This makes me worry though. If BBC decided to post false wiki entry, then others may follow. And then what's next? I really hope that corporations won't think that it is ok to flood public information systems with useless spam. But then again, what would stop them from say running scripts that would automatically change all wiki entries to spamvertisements?

Tags: wiki, bbc, jamie kane, bbc spammers