Unless you've spent this week hiding in a cave or trapped in a clothes horse, the chances are that you'll have seen The Independent's series of front page "scoops" exposing PR behemoth Bell Pottinger.

Now there isn't time to go into all the whys and wherefores of each of these stories. But a couple of things struck us today at Octopus Towers after reading this piece on Bell Pottinger's track record of editing clients' Wikipedia pages.

1. What's the big deal?

So some PR people have been paid to amend some facts on their clients' Wikipedia pages. So what? That's hardly PR at its best but surely the whole point of Wikipedia's self-policing system is that it is, well, self-policing. You probably won't get away with making things up. And there seems to be no evidence that anyone at Bell Pottinger added anything untrue. And as long as it's true and has been referenced according to Wikipedia's own rules and guidelines on how PR people should use the site, what's the big deal? I mean, everyone knows that you should take everything you read on Wikipedia with a pinch of salt.

Which leads me on to point two...

2. You should take everything you read on Wikipedia with a pinch of salt

Any GCSE history student will tell you that you need to consider who your source of information is when deciding what to believe. Whether intentional or not, everyone has some inherent biases and no one can be 100% trustworthy. Given that Wikipedia is written by thousands of people that we don't know, it's only sensible to treat any information you get from it with a bit of caution, whether it is from a paid PR person, an angry blogger or just someone who happens to be really interested in snails/mushrooms/the back catalogue of The Small Faces. In fact, the nature of the industry means that a paid PR person is probably the least likely of those people to include things that haven't been independently verified.

Which brings me on to point three... (see how this works?)

3. PR people are not, I repeat not, the devil

The very fact that The Independent thinks this story is worthy of space in its newspaper is a worrying sign of how PR people in the UK are perceived: as shadowy, amoral and Basically A Bad Thing. Now, like any industry, I'm sure PR has its share of dodgy people and organisations. But for the most part, PR exists because a lot of companies and organisations are not very good at talking about themselves and want some help in doing just that. Maybe as an industry we need to start telling people that more often and much more loudly in order to combat this image of nefarious ne'er-do-wells that has somehow become the stereotype.

(Disclaimer: I've never edited a Wikipedia page. Not for a client and definitely not for my own personal pleasure.  Neither have I met anyone from, or claiming to be from, an oppressive regime in the former soviet union. And I do not know Prince Andrew.)

Phil