Charities Recommend Keeping Tabs on Entries in Online Encyclopedia

Wikipedia, the collaboratively written online encyclopedia to which anyone can contribute, contains entries ranging

from Bratislava to Madonna to the laws of thermodynamics.

And among the more than one million articles in the English-language Wikipedia are numerous entries on charities and foundations. (Wikipedia is available in more than 200 languages, though many languages’ encyclopedias contain fewer than 1,000 articles.)

It is hard to determine how widely those articles are viewed, but Internet search programs, such as Google, frequently link to them when people are looking for information about specific nonprofit groups. That’s because the results of such searches are often ranked by usage, and Wikipedia has more than one million registered users, making it among the top 20 most-visited Web sites in the world.

The Nature Conservancy, a land-preservation group in Arlington, Va., has appeared in Wikipedia since March 2004.

“We are indeed aware of the Wikipedia entry,” Bridget Lowell, a spokeswoman for the conservation group, says in an e-mail message. “At times the entry has contained inaccuracies, and our staff has corrected them.”

The article, Ms. Lowell says, was initially written by a Wikipedia volunteer with no connection to the Nature Conservancy and included spelling errors and an “incomplete picture of the conservancy’s mission.” A member of the charity’s digital-technology department now keeps an eye on it.

Ms. Lowell says her group considers Wikipedia an “important site” because of its mainstream popularity, and although there is no way to tell for sure, she credits the encyclopedia for increasing visitors to her group’s own Web site, which is linked to the Wikipedia article.

The Salvation Army has an expansive Wikipedia article that includes numerous photos. Melissa Temme, public-relations director at the charity’s U.S. headquarters, in Alexandria, Va., says the group’s international headquarters in London has contributed to the article and keeps it up to date.

“It’s definitely something we want to keep an eye on,” Ms. Temme says of Wikipedia. “It’s yet another way we can communicate with the public.”

Conversely, the AmeriCares Foundation, a large humanitarian-aid group in Stamford, Conn., does not have a Wikipedia article. “I wasn’t aware that we weren’t on it, and I wasn’t aware that other groups were,” Beth Walsh, a spokeswoman for the group, said when contacted by The Chronicle.

Marnie Webb, vice president of knowledge services at CompuMentor, a San Francisco charity that provides technological assistance to nonprofit groups, says charities that have not looked into the online encyclopedia should consider doing so.

“I’ve not heard a lot of people say they are concerned about Wikipedia,” she says. “In general, nonprofits and charitable organizations should know where they are being represented on the Web.”

Wikipedia’s potential for presenting flawed and even damaging information is one reason charities might want to keep an eye on it.

For example, the Wikipedia article for the March of Dimes, in White Plains, N.Y., has been edited on occasion by the organization’s director of media relations to remove what the charity says is inaccurate information added by animal-rights activists about the research it supports.

The charity also removed an image of its logo that was included with the article, citing trademark issues.

For several weeks, the Rockefeller Foundation’s Wikipedia entry alleged that the New York foundation had paid for controversial eugenics research with ties to Nazi Germany. A Wikipedia volunteer, who said that the allegations lacked supporting references, ultimately removed the controversial matter.

Michael Cowan, a Rockefeller spokesman, said the fund’s experience, as well as other cases of misleading or inaccurate information, points out Wikipedia’s limitations.

He recalls the most publicized case of Wikipedia’s pitfalls, when the entry on John Seigenthaler — a retired journalist and former aide to Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy — included the false claim that he had been a suspect in the assassination of both Robert F. Kennedy and President John F. Kennedy. The Wikipedia article’s author eventually came forward to say it was written as a “gag.”

Says Mr. Cowan, of Rockefeller: “Wikipedia is an interesting idea, and can be a valuable resource. But as the Seigenthaler case demonstrated, it is not always reliable.”

Need for Neutrality

Wikipedia articles are supposed to be written from a neutral point of view.

The site’s guidelines for volunteers discourage people from writing about topics with which they have a personal connection. Even so, members of organizations frequently do write about their own groups, says Jim Wales, founder of the nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation, in St. Petersburg, Fla., which runs Wikipedia. He asks only that such contributors “respect Wikipedia’s editors and not describe their group in an overly favorable, very glowing light.”

Ms. Webb, of CompuMentor, says charities should consider contributing to Wikipedia articles related to their area of expertise, rather than writing about their organizations.

“If you are the American Heart Association, for instance, better than editing your own entry could be contributing articles with facts having to do with heart disease,” she says.

When it comes to substantially editing the content of existing articles, Ms. Webb says charities need to be “upfront about who they are and what they see as the problem.”

She suggests charities first post their concerns on Wikipedia’s “discussion” page, an online bulletin-board area linked to individual articles where volunteers hash out editorial differences. In the end, because of Wikipedia’s comprehensive and unbiased aims, Ms. Webb says charities need to be aware that their articles may contain information they perceive as unflattering.

“Any charity that’s been around for 100 years is bound to have stuff that they’d rather not have publicized,” she says.