It’s only fair and right, after castigating hordes of big law firms over their woeful Wikipedia entries back in May, to let the world know when law firms learn to get Wikipedia right. So step up, CMS Cameron McKenna.

Eve MacKinnon at CMS wrote to me back in June (while I was on holiday) to say that the firm had looked at its Wikipedia entry – which I had said was ‘not good’, was ‘way too brief’ and had a long-standing ‘lack of sources’ tag from Wikipedia central – and redone it. Now it’s a paragon of ‘how to do a Wikipedia entry’. It’s not holding tonnes more content in terms of numbers of words but it looks a heck of a lot better, it’s far better laid out and it’s a lot more ‘informative’, to my mind. So well done, CMCK.

Going back over the article I wrote about firms and their Wiki entries, I am struck by one comment, by Michael J ‘Orange Mike’ Lowrey, who says he’s ‘one of the thousands of volunteer administrators’.

Orange Mike sums up, to me, why Wikipedia is not somewhere that marketing people can carelessly write rubbish about firms, and shows how seriously Wikipedia admins take their ‘work’ – and rightly so.

Orange Mike, however, is not best pleased with our advice that law firms should write their own entries:

[Forgive Mike’s Americanised spelling] ‘Wikipedia has very strong rules against conflict of interest, self-aggrandizement and just plain advertising. If your article advised your readership to create or edit articles about their own firms… you [Mike means me, here] behave incredibly irresponsibly… such actions, when spotted, are reversed expeditiously; and persistently abusive editors can and will be blocked.

If your readers persist in abusing this invaluable resource for PR purposes (such as by ‘adding links to your firm’s own website, blog posts and notable references’), their firms can find themselves blocked, and any links to them blacklisted in the most appalling and shameless cases. We call this spamming, and patrol against it militantly.

If your readership is intelligent, then please contribute to our coverage of the law. Just don’t try to misuse us as a PR tool.’

In essence, Mike is saying that law firms should not write their own entries. Now, I think it’s being completely unrealistic to expect a law firm not to either make its own Wikipedia page or make sure it’s accurate and ‘good’. So I think Mike’s being very unrealistic about what law firms should and shouldn’t do. Also, all my advice on Wikipedia entry creation was based on the fact that either firms will do this themselves and do it badly, and get kicked off, or do it ‘properly’, and (hopefully) not. I’m just trying to push, or perhaps nudge, firms in the right direction on a road they’re already on.

But Mike, and people like him, are running this show, and that is why I wrote so vehemently that firms must ‘tell it straight’. Because, if they don’t, they’ll have the Mikes of this world on their case.