Survey Finds Errors in Wikipedia Articles have Damaged the Reputation of Companies

Fifty-nine percent of respondents who were familiar with their company or client’s Wikipedia article indicated that it currently has one or more factual errors. That’s one finding from a sample of 1,620 public relations professionals conducted by Dr. Marcia W. DiStaso, senior research fellow in the Arthur W. Page Center for Integrity in Public Communication at Penn State University.

Twenty-eight percent of respondents claimed their article has had at least one potentially reputation-damaging error and 38 percent of those stated that an error in a Wikipedia article has damaged their company or client’s reputation.

Additional findings from the study, published this month in Public Relations Journal, are summarized here.