Wikipedia's gotten friendlier over the years

One of the most interesting aspects of the IPPRC is that the research you heard about 4 years ago, is now into its 3rd or 4th phase and you can really start to see meaningful movement. Marcia DiStaso and Marcus Messner's paper on Wikipedia,
is a perfect example of that. I heard their first presentation two years ago and have been quoting it ever since. Now they've updated their data and its very interesting. The first thing they did was look at where the Wikipedia entry on the Fortune 10 showed up in  search. A 2006 Google search would find  the wikipedia entry on the second page, probably 9th or 10th. Today that same search would put wikipedia 4th.
In the intervening 2 years, Wikipieda has also gotten more positive and less negative on the Fortune 10. They conducted a content analysis of the Wikipedia entries for those top 10 and found that entries are twice as likely to be positive, and 3% less negative. They also found significantly more Wikipedia entries about CSR, legal issues, scandals and financial performance, and fewer ordinary corporate entries.
Even more interesting was when they benchmarked the Wikipedia content against the Encyclopedia Britannica and found that there were just as many errors in Britannica as there are on Wikipedia.