Ryan Holiday

How Publicists Manipulate Journalists to Control Wikipedia

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Book extract from "Trust Me I'm Lying", written by Ryan Holiday: "I remember sitting on the couch at Tucker Max's house one January a few years ago when something occurred to me about his then on-and-off-again bestseller. "Hey Tucker, did you notice your book made the New York Times list in 2006, 2007, and 2008?" (Meaning the book had appeared on the list at least once in all three years, not continuously.) So I typed it up, sourced it, and added it to Wikipedia, delineating each year.* Not long after I posted it, a journalist cribbed my "research" and did us the big favor of having poor reading comprehension. He wrote: "Tucker Max's book has spent over 3 years on the New York Times Bestseller List." Then we took this and doubled up our citation on Wikipedia to use this new, more generous interpretation."

Publicists and lobby groups organize their manipulation of Wikipedia very carefully, using it to pump information up the chain, helped along by lazy, willing and/or corrupt journalists.

Book extract from "Trust Me I'm Lying", written by Ryan Holiday: Wikipedia acts as a certifier of basic information for many people, including reporters. Even a subtle influence over the way that Wikipedia frames an issue—whether criminal charges, a controversial campaign, a lawsuit, or even a critical reception—can have a major impact on the way bloggers write about it. It is the difference between "So-and-so released their second album in 2011" and "So-and-so's first album was followed by the multiplatinum and critically lauded hit ..." You change the descriptors on Wikipedia and reporters and readers change their descriptors down the road. A complete overhaul of one high-profile starlet's Wikipedia page was once followed less than a week later by a six-page spread in a big tabloid that so obviously used our positive and flattering language from Wikipedia that I was almost scared it would be its own scandal. It's why you have to control your page. Or you risk putting yourself in the awkward position a friend found himself in when profiled by a reporter at a national newspaper, who asked: "So, according to Wikipedia you're a failed screenwriter. Is that true?"
"On occasion I have instructed a client to say something in an interview, knowing that once it is covered we can insert it into Wikipedia, and it will become part of the standard media narrative about them. We seek out interviews in order to advance certain "facts," and then we make them doubly real by citing them on Wikipedia."

These extracts are from publicist Ryan Holiday’s book titled ‘Trust Me I’m Lying‘.