Steve Rubel has a post titled Wikis Pose a Threat to Costly Media Directories.

Media directories must evolve into wikis or they risk becoming extinct. They are spending a lot of money paying researchers. Why not also bring customers (e.g. PR people) into the fold and enable us to edit listings, share insights and knowledge via a wiki? In the future, PR professionals - and even consumers - will create their own media directories.

One possible legal issue with the 'open source' PR directory is making sure the data is not copied directly from the existing sources such as Bacons.

It would be real easy to have Bacons' directory open in one browser window and the wiki in the other. Bacons has spent a great deal of money developing their directory and also generate revenue from selling access to it. They are very keen to protect their listings. Of course they have the standard copyright disclaimer on their site, but individuals who are intent on stealing the data pay little attention to that.

So how would the offending wiki author get caught? In the past, when working with clients who where publishing member directories or other database content online we would always build in some safegaurds. One simple trick to is purposely enter errors in the data that could only be tracked back to the original source.

In most cases we would pick an address from a known member or perhaps even the address of the organization and add a false Suite number. For example:

Member Organization
100 Avenue A NW
Hometown, FL, 33888

would become

Member Organization
100 Avenue A NW, Suite 137
Hometown, FL 33888

We would be careful that this suite number would not interfere with legitimate uses of the directory. By this I mean 'Member Organization' was in their own building so the 'phantom suite' would not be a problem.

If another party illegally copied the data from the directory, they usually are too lazy to verify the data. If the organization thinks that somebody is using data copied from their database on another web site, all we needed to do was check those 'special' records.

So be careful where you 'borrow' your information from.

Update: Just a quick clarification. Before you think we had client data just filled with errors, the ratio was usually around 1 intentional error for every 10,000 records.

Update 2: One great example of this was when the makers of Trivial Pursuit were sued for copying questions from an existing trivia book. The book publisher had intentionally inserted incorrect answers to questions to catch any plagiarism. The most well know of these was about the type of car Burt Reynolds drove in 'Smokey and the Bandit'. The correct answer is a Trans Am, but the book intentionally put Camaro. Guess what was on the Trivial Pursuit card?