Telstra has revealed the addition of almost one million new mobile services in the six months to December 2011, but Sensis revenues plummeted 24 percent in 12 months.
Nevertheless, Telstra’s threats seem to have had the desired effect: Sol Trujillo’s entry is now very bland, and an earlier section, on controversies, has been removed entirely.
The timing of the legal threat is curious when placed in context with subsequent events. The Australian newspaper’s City Beat column reported on 23 April that “Tarnya Dunning of [Telstra’s] public affairs office logged on to Wikipedia...offering to sort out some of the confusion surrounding her great leader.”
City Beat suggested that Trujillo’s page was “arguably one of the most disputed on Wikipedia” and said that Dunning had posted an entry on the discussion section offering to contribute information to “improve the quality of Telstra-related pages” but promising not to edit any of them.
When I checked Trujillo’s entry on that date it was as innocuous as it is today. Entire sections on his role as CEO of Telstra and on “controversies” had been expunged. However I was able to retrieve these from a Google cache taken a few days earlier, which I have retained. While they certainly were not complimentary they do not appear to have been defamatory, and all simply referenced information about Trujillo that was already in the public domain: no value judgements or opinions on the man were expressed.
The Wikipedia entry did say: “it been suggested that some of the information in the ‘controversies’ section be merged into other sections to achieve a more neutral presentation.”
Today, there are references to a few newspaper articles published shortly after Trujillo became CEO of Telstra, but none to any of the many critical articles published at that time. So whatever means Telstra has used to pull Wikipedia into line, it seems to have been successful and to have gone well beyond the removal of defamatory statements.
David Bass
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