Geoff Burling (geoff@agora.rdrop.com) [041129 06:36]:
On Sat, 27 Nov 2004, Sean Barrett wrote:
Mark Pellegrini stated for the record:
what is to stop them from starting large, organized astroturfing on Wikipedia? I think it would be a good idea to having some contigency plans in place should that happen.
From the back of the bottle of contingency plans: "Revert, ban, repeat."
Internet users hate spam and *despise* spammers. As each of these ... creatures ... is identified, I predict they will be rapidly dealt with by natural immune response.
Based on what I know of manipulating public perception, & the challenges of the Internet, I think we ought to look at our accumulated experience with another group: Scientology, & the related Wikipedia articles. I have stayed away from this topic, except for the occasional peak & the minor edit or two (I find typos & bad grammar in other people's writings far quicker than in my own). However, to my knowledge none of the Scientology-related articles have turned into the no-man's land that some of our fiercely disputed articles have become. I believe David Gerard has been monitoring the Scientology-related articles; perhaps David could offer some ideas of how to deal with possible astroturfing -- whether initiated by Microsoft or another corporation -- based on his experience.
The Scientology articles were mostly started by Modemac or Chris Owen, who have been around the Scientology vs the Net thing for years (much like you or me, Geoff ;-) and so know it backwards.
The thing is that the articles are half-decent to very good because they were written with good NPOV and references in the first place. Thus, there was (a) a structure (b) a level of expectation set by that structure for future additions to measure up to.
Not that they're anything like perfect or even Featured Article status, but they're better than bad!
In the corporate case, obvious corporate hagiography will get a severe NPOVing and egregious cases will be VFDed.
In the case that brought this up - [[Mozilla Firefox]] - the current version is a hideous piece of open-source hagiography that needs a severe NPOV of this sort.
- d.