Should Companies & PR Professionals Have A Voice In Social Media?

The CREWE Facebook Group is a community setup to discuss the ethical editing of wikipedia pages by communications professionals, started back in January and inspired by Phil Gomes' article and Stuart Bruce's article.

Both authors suggested the current state of affairs were not tenable, both for Wikipedians, and PR people.

Since then, we've discovered to Wikipedians it doesn't really matter what PR people think.

And the best advice Wikipedians have for PR people is use the talk pages, and never, never edit content directly on a wikipedia content page.

Is that the end of the discussion, are we done, should we just pack up?

I got into this discussion because it bothered me all PR people were being vilified by some wikipedians. It seemed wrong to me that it would not be possible for a PR professional to provide an edit to a wikipedia page, even with a COI, if they followed the rules and provided neutral content.

For many years PR professionals in social media have been leaders in giving advice to companies about how to approach the web, giving communications counsel on how to take the right steps, and not get into a situation where they make things worse. It just seems so ironic that we now have to advise companies not to contribute. Even though they might contribute through the edit pages.

Remember we are not asking for any changes to Wikipedia rules, rather the chance for PR professionals and companies to also have a voice, if that voice is providing facts and encyclopedia content.