Steve Bennett wrote:
On 3/13/07, Jake Nelson duskwave@gmail.com wrote:
My thought is to require a central list, and anyone who's being paid to edit Wikipedia needs to be registered on that list with username, who's paying them to edit, and the reason that they are being paid to do this.
I would keep the requirements not too onerous. We *want* them to disclose what they're doing, because they're going to do it anyway. So ask them nicely to register themselves. Then quietly keep on eye on them, and just revert them whenever they violate our policies, politely.
I've been around too long not to be worried about those of our colleagues who believe that firing squads are a pre-trial solution.
The whole idea here is that when they turn some crappy stub into a longer article, it may certainly be slanted towards their viewpoint. But it's a lot easier to just deslant it, than it would have been to write it from scratch. So we let them build it slanted - and when they're finished, we just gently nudge it upright. They do all the hard work. We get the benefit.
There's a lot of perfectly neutral information that companies can give us: Who's on the Board of Directors, where they have facilities, what they produce, technical specifications of their products, ...
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