--- Gregory Kohs thekohser@gmail.com wrote:
do so in the interest of some interesting Wikipedia analysis, and fair play (feel free to rip me a new one in the blog's Comments section). Here is the blog post:
http://mywikibiz-com.blogspot.com/2006/09/gaping-void-in-wikipedia.html
You have a point about the lack of business/organization depth as compared to the huge amount of fan articles, relatively few of which qualify as either [[WP:NPOV]] or [[WP:V]].
If, however, you (or another wiki business) are receiving money to give a company/organization a presence on Wikipedia, you are working as an agent of that company, making it as much a conflict of interest as if they had hired any other PR or ad firm to do it.
I don't know if this is fixable. Businesses want to make money. And so do the businesses that report on businesses. So the people who are capable of filling in the gaps actually have a motivation to decrease the amount of useful information in Wikipedia. Or, of course, not add to it.
That leaves it up to each business itself. Does it want to spend time and money including itself in Wikipedia or would it prefer to spend it on search engine manipulation and their own site. There was a clear answer to what the current preference is (i.e., not WP) elsewhere in this mailing list recently.
I think Wikipedia needs to spend some time, and donation money, on actively promoting users to go out and research and add more business articles. That or wait for market forces (like Pokemon cartoons involving coal) and the Associated Press to make each business an item of popular interest.
~~Pro-Lick http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/User:Halliburton_Shill http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Pro-Lick http://www.wikiality.com/User:Pro-Lick
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