What is however true is that if they write it themselves, it usually is not a very good article, and tends to leave out a lot of the things that do make for demonstrated notability. Most commonly, it doesn't include links to the trade magazine and newspaper article that do exist, it uses vague adjectives instead of factual information on market share and prominence in the industry, and emphasizes a list of the officers of the company down to the junior vice-presidents. Good PR people can, however, be taught to write for an encyclopedia. It's just that they never had to do so before--they're new at it, without the experience of people who work on Wikipedia on a range of topics. The key advice in that posting was to start by writing on different subjects of personal interest to get the feel of things. On Tue, Jul 1, 2008 at 8:44 PM, Thedjatclubrock Enwiki <tdjacr.wiki(a)gmail.com> wrote: -- David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG

On 02/07/2008, Tim Starling <tstarling(a)wikimedia.org> wrote: The bright line is money. My town doesn't pay me. My language doesn't pay me. My company does pay me. That's not conducive to truth or accuracy or referencing reliable sources. -- -Ian Woollard We live in an imperfectly imperfect world. If we lived in a perfectly imperfect world things would be a lot better.

Ian Woollard wrote: So should I cease writing on my academic specialty? It is directly in my monetary and professional interest if my area (which is fairly small) gets more publicity, and Wikipedia can probably help with that. However, it *also* happens to be the area I'm most professionally qualified to edit in (being vaguely close to receiving a PhD in it), and I also have a genuine desire (apart from self-interest) to increase the coverage and accuracy of information on the subject---I picked it, after all, because I find it interesting. (I've also edited articles on universities that pay me money, and countries of which I'm a citizen.) But I'm not quite sure on which side of the bright line this falls. -Mark

2008/7/1 Ian Woollard <ian.woollard(a)gmail.com>om>: Oh, I don't know, "organic" traditionally involves shovelling a lot of crap... *ahem* More seriously, they're going to do it anyway, whether we tell them to or not. We may as well encourage people to tell them how to do it effectively and without causing trouble or producing actively bad material. (This sounds impressively like the celibacy-sex-education debate, doesn't it! We don't want them to, but they're going to, so let's make sure they do it safely...) -- - Andrew Gray andrew.gray(a)dunelm.org.uk

Ian Woollard wrote: Then add the links, and quit worrying about those ignorant fools that obsess about link spam. <fact> If the X and Y are substantially on the mark that part of the article should not be removed only because of a badly written Z. At worst one should remove Z's comments. Better would be to introduce neutrality with offsetting information, but that requires work. Ec

Delirium wrote: It seems that those interested in a "bright line" are more interested in quick fixes than real solution about how to deal with companies. They've taken their anti-corporate biases and admittedly bad experiences with the advertising industry, and blown them out of all proportion into a prejudicial view that anything from corporations is evil. What real experience have these critics ever had with corporations? Do they ever read the financial pages of the newspaper? Have they ever looked at the public reports which these companies are legally required to produce? When your only exposure to a company is its advertising campaigns you are bound to have a very distorted view of the company. There has to be more to our treatment of companies than ivory-tower idealism. The lowly cubicle jockey writing about his company is unlikely to have his personal fortunes thereby advanced, and the CEO has better things to do with his time. Strong biased attitudes on either side of the fence help to perpetrate myths about companies. Maybe a food product company understates the amount of salt in its product contrary to objective consumer testing. We do better to highlight such discrepancies (with verifiable sources from both sides) than to dwell on fatuous arguments to the effect that a company is not notable if we only have its side of the story. If some statement is company propaganda we identify it as such, and welcome alternative views instead of pretending that by suppressing information we are doing a great service to neutrality. Those blinded by their own bright lines need to stop deceiving themselves. Ec