On 10/2/06, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
Yes. What is the point of such a rule in a TOS? It won't stop deliberate violation. So how is it planned to enforce it?
Right now we're hardly even telling advertisers no.
There are many organizations with reputations and pocketbooks that they need to protect... the first step in keeping their behavior acceptable is giving them clear direction.
You're right, we can't stop bad people from being bad, but that doesn't mean that we can't keep employ measures to encourage the honest people to stay honest.
Or are you also opposed to doors that lock? ... with the exception of high security doors, a locked door actually does fairly little to prevent a determined attacker from getting inside, and yet locked doors have been demonstrated over and over again to be effective.
Or another way of looking at it: One of the more clearly stated arguments against us running advertising on Wikipedia ourselves is the potential creation of bias, or at least the creation of the appearance of bias. It strikes me as odd that people will scream so loudly against the introduction of advertising which would bring us lots of useful money without a definite introduction of bias, and yet folks are not willing to take maximal measures against the abuse of Wikipedia as an astroturfed advertising medium... when the latter does create a clear bias in our content.