On 8/21/06, Jimmy Wales jwales@wikia.com wrote:
I think we need to be very clear in a lot of different places that PR firms editing Wikipedia is something that we frown upon very very strongly. The appearance of impropriety is so great that we should make it very very strongly clear to these firms that we do not approve of what they would like to do.
I'm CCing Sheldon Rampton of PR Watch on this. Sheldon is a leading expert on the PR industry and also hosts a wiki, sourcewatch.org, that deals specifically with these organizations. Given his many years of experience, I think he can give us some good advice on which approaches will work and which ones won't.
My take on it is that if we push PR industries to far to the outside, they will just do their work clandestinely. This will damage Wikipedia's reputation far more if it becomes known, especially when an article that has 200+ revisions was started and carefully groomed by a paid propagandist.
I don't see a compelling reasons why we need to force PR people to start articles _outside_ Wikipedia and go through some "trusted Wikipedian". In fact, it seems to me that doing so is more likely to lead to untraceable transactions. We must not just care about appearances, we must also care about the facts. Having a clean track record is better than some muddy variant of Chinese whispers.
I think a separate article creation process as described under WP:COI might work best: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Conflicts_of_interest
The user space has historically allowed POV material. It would give us a good record of all PR groups operating within Wikipedia. Surely it is in our interest to have such a record?