I’m raped! Thanks to Wikipedia
It took me over six years to build my reputation with the boss of being a hardworking, intelligent and innovative guy in office. But in a matter of just five minutes my repo has been raped. Thanks to wikipedia and thanks to my non-serious colleague. I am working with a leading commerce website and on one fine day to further enhance my repo with my boss and to consolidate my position in the company, I decided to write a piece on the role of b2b portals.
I wrote the intro and on the insistence of my colleague, a very experienced fellow, added more to the article. He assured me that I will earn name and fame after adding the paras to the article. He assured me the article is fresh, not copied nor published anywhere. I trusted him totally unaware of the danger accompanying my trust I had on him. I published the article in Wikipedia after creating a username and password. And viola the article looked good and I was damn sure that it will get approved and my name will jump the queue in my boss’ good books.
Without thinking twice, I copied the url and send it to my boss waiting for the “very good” reply that he usually gives. In between, one of colleague ran up to me and said that Wikipedia has placed a message that the article has been copied. I felt been struck by lightning. I went blind at that moment. I couldn’t hear. Hoping against hope I checked the page and to my horror Wikipedia was indeed displaying that message. To add to my woes, it has even displayed the page from where the content has been copied. Frighteningly, I clicked the url and the page was found to be on our competitor’s website.
At the same time, I got reply from the boss not the usual one but “they are calling it copy”. I called up my colleague and he assured me that he has not copied it. After almost an hour of argument, we found that the article was written by us long time back and has been copied by a person who was then working with this competitor and presently working with us! I replied explaining my position to my boss. He gave no reply. But then why did Wikipedia mark our article as duplicate? I asked myself. I checked and found that the page was removed from our site and now only the competitor website has the page with the same article. But it was not my fault and to an extent neither of my colleague’s. I challenged the deletion and requested for removal of duplication tag. But we do not have any evidence that the article was originally written by us.
As expected, Wikipedia removed the article without hearing our cries for justice. Hence my repo was raped. I am now labelled as the one who copies content. A cheater. The repo that I had build, saved from prying eyes of my envious colleagues has been lost. I am planning to go for the reconstructive surgery to restore my repo with my boss. Any suggestions are welcomed.
