How Many Schools View Wikipedia as a Marketing Tool?
Wednesday, October 28, 2009 by Kelly Sutton 
Where's the college Wikipedia police? Photo by flickr user Steve Punter
Whilst browsing my own school's Wikipedia article, I noticed something interesting. During the section discussing LMU's limited Greek system, I found these sentences:
There are non-registered and un-recognized groups that exist on campus and are NOT affiliated with LMU or any of its departments. Any group that claims it is a part of LMU has no validity unless registered through Student Leadership & Development. More information can be found at www.lmu.edu/greeklife
The statements in these sentences are true. They don't, however, belong on our school's Wikipedia article and were quite obviously added by someone working at the school. (While it's not outright forbidden, it's usually considered bad form to edit an article of something that you are personally a part of.) This person also is clueless to proper Wikipedia formatting.
Here, someone at LMU has taken it upon themselves to remind any reader of the Wikipedia article that unsanctioned fraternities are not associated with the university.
How Many Schools are Doing This?
So the question is: how many schools are doing this? How many of them have realized that their Wikipedia article is better marketing than a Princeton Review profile is?
After doing some more research, it appears that poorly veiled Wikipedia entries are only from second-tier universities. Loyola Marymount only has a 1:1 ratio of references per page of text. Pepperdine keeps their article pristine and well-cited at a 2.5:1 ratio. (Curses!) The Notre Dame page has nearly 200 references (4:1 ratio)!
The Effects
While the repercussions of editing out any information are not huge currently, they have recently become a bigger deal. Two years ago, a tool was released that tied Wikipedia edits to companies and organizations via their IP addresses. There was a kerfuffle about the CIA editing pages like Ahmadinejad's. Chances are, there will not be a huge fallout from a university caught editing their own Wikipedia page.
But the effects of this dishonesty will slowly start to creep up to them. Just as cigarette companies of yore were unable to squelch information about shady dealings and the lethal effects, so too will universities be unable to Ctrl+Z their mistakes.
Does your university or college edit their own Wikipedia page?
Reader Comments (6)
ohhh notre dame.
that's just how the administrators do things.
Whoops, my wording implied that Notre Dame was a second tier university. I was trying to make the point that better schools seem to have better Wikipedia articles.
This is the first time I've read something like this about Wikipedia. Interesting. This post brings so much awareness. Thanks for the information.
Wait, why is it necessarily dishonest for a college to edit their own wikipedia page? I work at a college, and when I looked at our wikipedia page recently, for example, there was barely anything there & I wanted to add stuff. Why would that be a bad thing? People who work at an institution and are knowledgeable about it should be cut out of the editorial process of creating a relevant wikipedia article? What?
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@anon
While it's quite possible that a university will come up with a balanced Wikipedia article, it will probably conveniently omit anything that casts the university in a bad light.
Just as you wouldn't want the major contributor to the Wikipedia article of a political party to be itself, so too will you not want the university to be the primary maintainer of its page.