David Gerard wrote:

So, regular editors. How do we set up a page or forum where companies and people written about can express editorial concerns (rather than e.g. legal ones), such that they know people will at least look over them with thought and improve the articles from there?

Dare I play the devil's advocate here and say that we should allow this sort of thing?

Hear me out: all we need to do is say that we do not condone, promote, discourage, or prohibit paid editing by firms, but make it explicitly clear that such edits are, at best, treated as any other, and, at worse, watched closer than other edits by the general community. All edits must still conform to [[WP:V]], [[WP:NPOV]], must be licensed via the GFDL, and may be rejected completely if [[WP:C|consensus]] is as such, regardless.

It's an interesting situation. On one hand, we have a pile of posts on the en mailer talking about the necessity for accuracy and citation. On the other hand, we're quite militant about not letting third parties commission other third parties to provide information that may not be as easy for Joe Sixpack to grab and add to an article.

And yes, I know, MyWikiBiz, etc - I'm not convinced it was handled properly, but this isn't the thread for that discussion - but I'm not sure we shouldn't be tolerant of this sort of thing. After all, Microsoft merely got caught - it's likely happening anyway without our knowledge. -Jeff