Microsoft created a stir last week when the public discovered the company had attempted to pay someone to rewrite its Wikipedia article.

Wikipedia -- an online encyclopedia that allows anyone to add or edit articles about a wide range of subjects -- is a popular online reference tool for students.

Microsoft contacted Rick Jelliffe, chief technical officer of a computing company based in Australia, to help correct alleged factual inaccuracies the company noticed in Wikipedia's entries, Catherine Brooker, a spokeswoman for Microsoft, said.

When Jelliffe revealed in an online blog that Microsoft had contacted him to change the entry, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales denounced the company's behavior, causing public embarrassment to Microsoft officials.

"We were very disappointed to hear that Microsoft was taking that approach," Wales told The Associated Press.

Microsoft fired back, saying Wikipedia failed to help flag the alleged mistakes, so it took a different course -- hiring an independent expert to decide whether changes were needed.

Peter Crabb, associate professor of psychology at Penn State, said he was not surprised at Microsoft's actions.

"I think that's exactly the way Microsoft operates," he said. "They have been bullies and thugs from the beginning."

Crabb said he is distrustful of the information on Wikipedia regardless of whether or not companies are paying to have their entries written. He said students for the most part blindly trust the information and are not critical of its accuracy.

"They find the easiest and most accessible information. They don't look at the source that it came from," he said.

He said that if paying to write entries on Wikipedia became commonplace, he did not think that student's use of the Web site as a source of information would change.

John Carroll, professor of information sciences and technology at Penn State, said that there is a basic difference between how people view a communal information source like Wikipedia and services that are paid for.

Carroll said people are more connected with resources that they create rather than ones they can subscribe to or pay for.

"The world that we construct is very close to us. With the things we pay for there is a much more abstract relationship," he said.

He said this is the reason why Microsoft's actions created such an uproar.

Carroll said in Microsoft's defense, because the company is so big, people tend to view its actions with skepticism.

"What Microsoft is doing is typical of a big company blundering into nonprofit endeavors, but it is an issue of whether the information is correct on Wikipedia. It may just be that [Microsoft] feels the information isn't correct," he said.

Rob Frieden, professor of telecommunications, said Microsoft's actions are nothing new and that there probably are many examples of paid entries that never are discovered.

He said paid Wikipedia entries would affect the novelty of the service but not people's trust in the information. He used Google and its sponsored links as an example of what a Wikipedia model that embraced paid articles would look like.

"I know when I click on a sponsored link somebody has paid, but it might be something I am more attuned to. Not every time is payment behind the scenes bad," he said.

He said students may have trouble finding bias in the entries.

"I'm finding that students are unsophisticated when it comes to distinguishing between biased and unbiased sites," Frieden said.

Becky Crouse (freshman-animal science) said she does not usually use Wikipedia, but when she has used the source for classes, the information has seemed accurate.

Crouse said she thought people should be able to pay someone to write their Wikipedia entry.

Dana Fadlalla (freshman-chemical engineering) is from the United Arab Emirates and said she uses Wikipedia to look up words or to find out about movies.

Fadlalla said the information she finds on the Web site is accurate and that the entries are detailed. She said she did not approve of what Microsoft had attempted to do.

She said did not believe that students rely too much on Wikipedia, stressing that there are other useful sources of information.

--The Associated Press contributed to this report.