[WikiEN-l] "How to promote your company in Wikipedia" - pretty clueful blog post

[Ian Woollard]

On 02/07/2008, Andrew Gray <shimgray at gmail.com> wrote:
> 2008/7/1 Ian Woollard <ian.woollard at gmail.com>:
>
>> I find it leaves out the truism that if people that own or work for
>> the company have to create the article themselves, it's very unlikely
>> to be truly notable. (Irrespective of whatever the policy says today).
>>
>> There's a lot to be said for organic growth and shamefacedly poking
>> you or your company in the wikipedia is in no way organic.

> More seriously, they're going to do it anyway, whether we tell them to
> or not. We may as well encourage people to tell them how to do it
> effectively and without causing trouble or producing actively bad
> material.

My point about organic growth is that if an article isn't linked in,
then in a hypertext environment like the wikipedia, it shouldn't be
there. And there's a lot of companies sitting there, unlinked, because
every time they linked themselves, somebody went 'who cares'  or 'link
spam' and unlinked them. That doesn't happen with truly notable
companies though.

I think any guidelines should start from another article, whereas
right now it starts from the company. Just adding in data along the
lines of 'there exists a company called X that makes Y, and Z said
they were really good!' into the wikipedia is ultimately useless.

> --
> - Andrew Gray
>  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk

-- 
-Ian Woollard

We live in an imperfectly imperfect world. If we lived in a perfectly
imperfect world things would be a lot better.