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Providing information to the public is one of the main "charitable objectives" of many charities, particularly medical-related charities. So it was interesting to see the recent announcement by Cancer Research UK of an initiative to tidy up some of the key pages on cancer on Wikipedia.

The challenge is that for typical cancer related searches, Wikipedia comes second, whilst Cancer Research comes around eighth. Wikipedia gets many more visits as a result of the higher search result ranking (3.5m per month over its 1,500 cancer-related pages), but Wikipedia articles are not necessarily accurate or well written. Cancer Research's cancer information website is authoritative and under its control, and in general a charity will want to focus on driving traffic to its own website.

Wikipedia has trained a number of Cancer Research's experts in best practice for editing Wikipedia pages and the objective of the initiative is to improve the overall quality and coverage of cancer on Wikipedia.

Wikipedia is renowned as being difficult to "control", with many stories of battles over the content of particular articles. So, whereas it is laudable for Cancer Research to want to improve quality, it is by no means an easy objective to achieve. Looking at one of the pages they created - The Hallmarks of Cancer - there have been 49 changes by 25 authors in the 2 months since it was created. To keep tabs on these changes would need a significant amount of effort. From an SEO perspective, the only realistic way of linking back from the articles to the Cancer Research website is to add appropriate references; there is no direct mention of Cancer Research in the article.

So it will be interesting to see how Cancer Research views the results of the initiative and where the best balance is for the use of its effort - Wikipedia or its own website.

This dilemma is an example of the broader debate within charties on how best to harness social media and user-generated content without marginalising their own websites.