•Skittles Product Placement on Wikipedia
Product Placement News, NV
Skittles, the Mars-owned candy brand, has turned its Wikipedia page into its home page in an effort to get more consumers. The campaign, which was crafted by Agency.com, is a total revamp of the site. It has links to other social networking media, ...

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Oh dear... This is pretty messed up. If you go to Skittles.com, it pops up with a page that looks like Twitter, and may actually be Twitter, except that they want you to enter your birthdate and agree to their "terms and conditions," which essentially are that they're not responsible for anything you say or do... while on Twitter?

I'm just glad they didn't try this with something that's actually good, like those dark chocolate Snicker's bars.

Try clicking on one of the items in the "products" tab; that's what brings up Wikipedia. Just why anybody would want to use their site which just consists of other sites with their annoying overlay over them, I don't know. (Clicking on the "friends" tab brings up their Facebook page.)

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It is a pretty annoying website. Obviously they emphasis social media more so than most similar products. This might be the key to depressing Wikipedias Google Juice however. Wikipedia was the 6th ranked Google result for Skittle while Snickers, Mentos and any other candy I could think of came out with Wikipedia in the top three.

Not to mention the WP article is shitty. It's littered with citation tags for the most easily verifiable information, like flavors. How stupid. Of course, I suppose when you can't verify the information on the company's own website, because it redirects to Wikipedia, there's really not much one can do.

This seems epically stupid. Why would you direct your website to an ugly, boring, poorly written "encyclopedic" article rather than design a cool, interactive page with guaranteed accurate information? How silly.

Dig out every bit of criticism you can find and add it to the article. I suspect that when they realise their webpage is linking to "Skittles contain so many toxic ingredients the recipe had to be changed for the British version" (reliable source), they might drop the link PDQ.

I'm not sure why anyone would want to punish them by encyclopedia. They are only guilty of trying to make use of Wikipedia for their own purposes. Well, that and destroying the teeth of children.

I wouldn't advocate "punishment by encyclopedia" for anyone – if Wikipedia's ever going to be viable, it needs to start taking that "neutral" bit more seriously – but that's not the same thing as reminding them that when you link to an external site you have no control over what you're linking to. (The article probably should have a pros and cons section – both "what makes Skittles so successful when most British food products launched in the US fail miserably?" and "are they really psychoactive in children?". At the moment, it's just a list of flavors.)

Not really. No matter how cool you make such a website, the WP article on your product will still beat it on a Google search. This is known by Mars, the candy company.

Say, speaking of candy companies, has anybody noticed how much Wikipedia resembles Willie Wonka's chocolate factory? The gnomish editors are the Oompa-Loompas. Jimbo, of course, is Willie. The newbies destined to be chewed up and spit out when they do something in excess are the entitled who think they have a Golden Ticket. See JoshuaZ reduced in size after watching the computer screen too much. Question: who's going to end up with the Factory after Der Big Willie retires? Where's Charlie?

Did anybody notice that SlimVirgin was beginning to turn a little violet, there, toward the end?

Wasn't there a company that put its Wikipedia article in a frame on its site years ago?

I seem to recall that this caused a lot of controversy back in 2005, perhaps on WikiEN-l. IIRC, some Wikipedians thought that this was a misuse of Wikipedia's bandwidth and slapped some sort of disclaimer box on the article about how readers would have to navigate to en.wikipedia.org to get to the real Wikipedia. Drama ensued.

Did you mean this to go on the Skittles thread?

As I dimly recall, the company was doing some kind of back linking or transclusion of a lot of WP content. There is a discussion about it somewhere in WR.

Jon

Modernista.com

It looks like they now appropriate their own Facebook page on their homepage. Generally, how much of a problem is this kind of "bandwith conversion" viewed as among site owners? What about (aside from copyright problem) using the url of an image and incorporating it into the content of another page?

But wait a minute. Something even more odd is going on here. I just removed a link from my post because it looks like it was appropriating some content from the last page I viewed in a preview of the post. I'm not sure what is up here. I looked at the page source and lots of javascript I couldn't follow.

See this thread.

Jon

Oh lord, that was in 2008. I assumed Wikipedia was less "OMG, it's a corporation!" by last year. Guess not.

I remember that--it wasn't even using Wikipedia in most cases, it was just a cute referrer trick.

I guess someone should now chastise Skittles for using their own terrible Wikipedia article as part of their home page? Slap on the disclaimers. Or not...hopefully.

If they were soooo desperate to make Wikia a success, they would be begging
for corporations to do this exact thing. There being no fixed procedure or policy,
I think a corporate lawyer would say it's not worth it to battle with the flakes who
run WP, just to get a licensing agreement for an ad campaign.

The owners of Skittles must think it's "edgy" and "youth-oriented" to use WP.
(I just tried skittles.com--and I get Twitter instead.)

And please, never ever mention caffeinated candy.
Just reminds me of all the stomach pains I get from M&Ms
or Snickers bars. Not to mention this.

Me too - I wonder if they redirect people to Wikipedia only during business hours, when they can have their people monitoring it? And then on weekends (today is Saturday) they switch it over to Twitter or Facebook? I'll have to check on Monday... regardless, skittles.com was already the top Google result on the word "Skittles," so this whole idea looks more than a little bit stupid to me.

I mean, the latest bit of so-called vandalism lasted almost 11 hours, and it will only get worse with all the additional attention.

Curiouser & Curiouser Dept.: An IP that geolocates to Germany, 141.130.250.10, reverted two other recent "unhelpful" edits over the past week. Those two edits are the only ones listed for that IP on Wikipedia... It belongs to a company called Festo AG, who apparently manufacture things like pneumatic drives, positioning systems, and valve terminals. I guess they've got someone there who really likes Skittles, though I guess it could be some new form of industrial espionage we haven't encountered before.

It is quite likely that Festo makes a great deal of automated production-line equipment
for Masterfoods---which is, likely, used to manufacture Skittles.

Someone who works at Festo is probably watching Wikipedia for Masterfoods, so they
can get "vandalism" reverted without the reversion being traced back to Masterfoods.

It's easy to test---just go and vandalize the WP page for another Masterfoods or Mars
product, and see who reverts it.

It gets worse every day. Trying hanging out at WP:UAA, and you will very soon know why the accumulation of new editors is slowing.

Wikipedia at its finest. UAA is full of wannabe Defenders Of The Purity Of Wikipedia.