On Jan 24, 2008 11:56 PM, White Cat wikipedia.kawaii.neko@gmail.com wrote:
There is a duplicate thread of this on foundation-l. I utterly and wholeheartedly oppose inline crediting either for image or article authors. It is impractical and problematic for many ways.
Contributing to wikipedia for the sake of self promotion feels like a conflict of interest to me. Such a goal is not inline with the goal of ''free encyclopedia''
Everybody has ulterior motives for contributing. People want to promote the place they live, or somebody they are a fan of etc. None of it is completely altruistic.
This may lead to corporate donation of images simply to spam. Wikipedia will no longer be free (as in freedom) if we start allowing corporations to dictate or manipulate our content for a price. Such a thing would actually be in conflict with NPOV among other things.
What kind of dictating an manipulating are you concerned with? Google and Yahoo have already made major donations. If they withdrew their continued support, it would constitute a serious challenge to Wikipedia. Right now companies are making POV edits and it is not clear that they are. If they were credited in the article for the edits they made, they would have second thoughts.
The history link is there for a reason. Do you have any idea how many authors some articles have?
Look at the bottom of any major article and Britannica and you will also see twenty or thirty contributors or more. I don't see why Wikipedia couldn't handle a couple of hundred. Especially since the really minor contributors and vandals would not be credited.
Regards, Ezra