I've worked with people from Elsevier, and other publishers, and university departments and other sources of potential COI, on helping them improve their articles, and once things have been explained to them, they usually do very well. They need to change their accustomed writing styles, but they are perfectly capable of writing acceptable basic articles. What's needed is to watch them. I sometimes ask them to rewrite articles on their talk pages before reinsertion, and I edit what they do as i would any article. I really hate commercial and non-commercial PR nonsense spam, but I like real information about what organizations do. Same with people and their bios, and all other COI. I does not prevent writing a good article, though it certainly makes it more difficult--difficult in both directions--using these articles as an example, they both inserted stuff that wasn't meaningful, and didn't insert the necessary material that would have shown at least some of these periodicals to be really important, such as their very high impact factor and very widespread library holdings. (The articles were written before I became active here, and i had not gotten around to examining these. The discussion this AM also went to fast for me to comment on WP. )
For university departments, all efforts by anyone to get their PR people to be professional have sometimes been ignored--and then the articles tend to get deleted. Most large businesses have more sense--they just need to be taught.
(I will say that for publishers it helps me get attention because I use my real name, and I am known to be a public critic of various business practices of many scientific publishers on various fora.)
On 8/26/07, Marc Riddell michaeldavid86@comcast.net wrote:
On 8/25/07, Matthew Brown morven@gmail.com wrote:
I hope no long-established editors who know the lay of the land are criticising you for this.
-Matthew
on 8/26/07 11:45 AM, K P at kpbotany@gmail.com wrote:
Hell, yes, the ones called "administrators." Always in there to defend the socks and spammers and vandals in the face of editors who call crap crap. Now that I think of it the same administrator who argued for leaving a guy's comment about a girl he knew that she'd been killed and had her body stuffed in a garbage can. I give up.
But there are plenty of other editors who can do what I did, and I don't matter--and it's nice to have it so firmly established to me that this is the case.
Oh, and the DG supporter who always pipes in with only nasty comments whenever anyone gets upset about the state of Wikipedia? Don't bother, you're so predictable one could set a clock by you.
I agree with your sentiments here, KP. To question the state of the Project is to question the order of things; and there are those who, for their own personal reasons, like it just the way it is.
However, as was pointed out by someone in another thread, Wikipedia is no longer a fledgling project trying to find its place in the world. And those who would continue to behave as though it were, will find that the old formulas for control simply do not work anymore.
Marc Riddell
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