On 3/12/07, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
But when a company pays someone to write articles about them, that's PR however you slice it.
Yes. Now, suppose we made the following rules: 1. You can't create the article yourself - go through AfC. 2. You have to notify us before you edit the article, and tell us which editor will be making the changes. 3. We can and will block that editor if we feel that the changes are not in conformance with our policies.
Would that not reduce the problem?
I'm not necessarily opposed to banning all "PR" editing, but I wonder if it would be more effective to tolerate it and monitor it, rather than forcing it "underground".
It would be nice for companies to fund people just writing stuff. I suspect it would take an intermediary so the financial effect of not writing nice things about the sponsor would be buffered suitably.
Yeah. And to be honest, I don't think a small amount of COI is that major a problem. If Microsoft wants to fund someone to thoroughly document all sorts of parts of Windows that we have scrappy coverage of - and in the process make themselves look good - well, is that so bad? For many companies, a well-written, comprehensive, spell-checked, roughly neutral article about themselves is probably a reward in itself, regardless of whether it meets their PR goals. Currently, if there's a really crappy article about a company, it doesn't sound like there's any real way they can improve it. They can post requests on the talk page, but if no one follows them up?
I'm viewing this 'no paid editing' article as another way of phrasing existing rules.
WP:COI barely touches on paid editing. What other "existing rules" cover this?
Steve