Wikipedia and marketing: fair play or shameless self-promotion?

Greetings, MPP Digital and anyone else who might be reading. This week, I’ve been charged with blogging about a Wikipedia article of my choosing. Armed with my shiny, new Wikipedia username, I started to poke around the 4,000,000 + online compendium and arrived at the humbling conclusion that there are a lot (and I do mean A LOT) of people who know a lot more than I do about pretty much everything.

The hive mind. Go figure.

After a search for my pre-Fletcher employer, Root Capital, came up short, I decided to focus on one of our peers/competitors instead. Because they happened to be there, and I thought that was interesting.

Acumen Fund was founded just a couple of years after Root Capital, and the two organizations do similar work in the impact investing world (though Root’s portfolio is bigger, and they are focused on somewhat different geographies). So why does one organization have an article while the other does not? I suppose the obvious answer would be, because someone created an article for Acumen Fund (while Root’s had no such luck). The next logical question: who created the Acumen Fund article?

At the very top of the article, Wikipedia astutely points out that it “appears to be written like an advertisement” and “needs additional citations for verification.” While that makes my job of evaluating the article a bit easier, I’d like to go beyond content analysis and conclude by considering the implications of this type of article from a marketing and communications perspective.

The article’s content is structured in a fairly comprehensive manner: there are six sections, which include history, investments, goals, fellows program, and chapters of Acumen Fund. I was, however, surprised by two things: 1) the article makes no mention of impact investing (and, consequently, it forgoes the opportunity to discuss its leadership role in the space, e.g. contributions to the Global Impact Investing Network‘s Impact Reporting and Investment Standards taxonomy), and 2) the section on its investments is essentially Acumen Fund marketing copy. Building on this last point, four out of the article’s eight cited sources are Acumen Fund’s website. High quality? Yes. Neutral? Debatable. Granted, the article does link to estimable sources such as The New York Times, but I’m reminded of what the Talking Heads have to say about facts: “Facts all come with points of view / Facts don’t do what I want them to.” I’m slightly uncomfortable with sourcing that’s weighted in the organization’s sales pitch. Especially when there *are* other sources. Forbes profiled Acumen Fund’s Founder Jacqueline Novogratz just last year, and the organization recently co-authored a study with the Monitor Group on the case for philanthropy in impact investing. Neither of these meaningful “hits” appears under references.

Despite its questionable neutrality, the Acumen Fund article is readable and well written (no doubt thanks, in large part, to the organization’s fantastic communications team). The formatting all appears in the Wikipedia style, and the article also includes Acumen Fund’s logo.

So where does that leave us? Ultimately, we’ll never know who created Acumen Fund’s article on Wikipedia. Parts of it read like self-promotion, though in reality any user with access to the organization’s website could have copied and pasted material, thinking they were doing us all a favor by adding to the compendium. The “who,” as it turns out, is irrelevant– what matters it that the article exists, and that it is both self-promoting (like an “advertisement,” says Wikipedia) and incomplete. Wikipedia is many things, including a communications platform. Acumen Fund neglects its article at its peril.