I've copied this back to wikien-l, as some of this is going to get more specific for en.wikipedia than the foundation, though there are some points for both in my reply. People may want to edit followups if they're not cross-appropriate.

On 10/6/06, Jimmy Wales jwales@wikia.com wrote:

[...] Now imagine that someone sets up a website that strongly implies that paying him will get a company a good article in Wikipedia, and follows that up by posting blatant PR puffery and claiming that it is NPOV. That's a very serious problem, especially in an era when we are seeing increasing attention paid to "how to manipulate wikipedia for the good of your client" by the lower dregs of the PR industry.

I think we've been missing something.

This is happening because of the law of supply and demand. Wikipedia is important enough now that companies see not being listed as being a Real Problem. Not really understanding Wikipedia, they're willing to pay someone some money to fix that problem, and someone's willing to accept money to do it.

I think that companies are right, that Wikipedia is important enough, and not being listed is legitimately an actual marketing / PR / customer information seeking problem for them.

So, what can we structurally do to resolve the problem that they're seeking to use an ethically challenging commercial method to fix their lack of entries?

I just went perusing through http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requested_articles/Business_and_Econo...

A lot of those are on first inspection not notable, but a lot of them are quite notable. How long have they been sitting on the list?

Should we give them a better entry point than wandering around, trying to figure out what Requested Articles is and where it is, and then figuring out how to add themselves to the list?

Would it be unethical for a business to charge $25 or $50 to add a requested article entry, along with a bunch of reference source links, but not create or edit an article directly?

Are en wikipedia's notability standards appropriate still? There are around 6,000 NYSE and NASDAQ listed US companies; is en-wikipedia WP:CORP as it stands still the right filter, or should it be somewhat loosened up? Would roughly 6k companies be inappropriate in 1.5 million total articles? Is mere listing on a major stock exchange enough notability?