Letter - Wiki ethics need to be made more clear

Wikipedia has 5.3 million pages with more than 10,000 edits a day. With such high traffic, the issue of ethics - who should be allowed to say what about companies or brands - is too much of a grey area and one that needs to be resolved urgently so that PR practitioners have clear rules of engagement.

Is PRWeek, for example, allowed to embellish its own page on Wikipedia? You did, by the way. Or at least someone at your publishing house's IP address did!

With the CIPR social media guidelines adding little to the issue, we are left with each Wiki platform's own guidelines - but I would like to see a clearer and more applied industry stance.

I believe that with a more applied approach, a brand and its marketing, PR and communications teams, both in-house and in agencies, will find it easier to carry out its own cosmetic web surgery where the guidelines set by the likes of Wikipedia and the CIPR fall short.

Drew Benvie, director, Hotwire.