Who is Using Wikipedia to Promote Autodesk Inventor?

A few days ago while browsing Wikipedia searching for information I landed on the Autodesk Inventor page.

not exactly an encyclopedic and objective style

Going through the text I was surprised when I found a series of statements that looked as though they have been written by a marketing department. I don't think people at Autodesk (ADSK) are approaching Wikipedia the way Microsoft did (paying a blogger to edit a page). An Inventor fan must have done the editing. When I discovered the page, there were a few statements like:

… Inventor is based on newer, more advanced parametric modeling techniques... Inventor takes these concepts to the next level …

Well, not exactly an encyclopedic and objective style, I would say. And again:

Generally considered a latecomer to the market, Inventor has been developed using a newer technology-base to allow for unique innovations.

What is acceptable for a product brochure is not obviously good for an encyclopedia.

After the discovery, as a Wikipedia member, I cleaned up the page and removed the boldest marketing statements. Thanks to the Wikipedia revision history system, you still can see the original version of the page.

Also, using information from Wikipedia I was able to trace back to the anonymous author of the marketing statements. On February 16, 2007 the mysterious author edited the Inventor page from a computer in Brunswick or Cleveland, OH. Interestingly enough, this is the only contribution of that user to Wikipedia.

Franco Folini

Comments

[ralph grabowski]

Here's my guess: an Inventor fanboy copy and pasted text from Autodesk marketing materials.

After all, if you're an Inventor fan, no marketing hype is too shallow for you! (Same goes for fans of any other technology, whether Apple, SolidWorks, Palm, Microsoft, or whatever.)

[Josh]

haha, that's funny. I wouldn't doubt it if that is on the list of a lot of marketing plans. ...the secrets out, I better update mine :)

[Franco Folini]

For Ralph:
Before posting I run a few searches on Google for the catchy sentences on the Inventor page and none of them returned a result pointing to an existing document. Those sentences have been created specifically for Wikipedia.

[Sean Dotson]

Franco,

I have done a lot of work on the Autodesk Inventor Wikipedia page and totally agree that these "marketing" terms and phrases should have been removed. I thank you for cleaning them up.

However I also noticed you removed links to many of the user's pages in the External Links section including links to Kent Keller's and Charles Bliss' sites. Why? These are great resources to which users should have access. For the record I have added them back.

[Franco Folini]

Sean,
I'm not an authority of Wikipedia and I may have been too strict in applying the Wikipedia guidelines for external links.
You are the authority in the Inventor community, therefore I fully respect your decision to restore the links.
BTW, the kitties on Charles Bliss website are very cute.

[Sean Dotson]

I guess I considered these sites to fall under the category of #4 "Sites with other meaningful, relevant content that is not suitable for inclusion in an article, such as reviews and interviews."