This is a bit of a straw poll. Is there a need to tighten up notability guidelines for commercial organisations? Yes/No/Maybe?
Alan Liefting
On 4/27/12, Alan Liefting aliefting@ihug.co.nz wrote:
This is a bit of a straw poll. Is there a need to tighten up notability guidelines for commercial organisations? Yes/No/Maybe?
Some reasoning would help. i.e. Why tighten up, why loosen, why keep as is? And what are the current notability requirements? Straw polls should either follow discussion, or link to discussion/pages on the topic.
Carcharoth
A more neutral way to put it would be "is there a need to review the notability requirements for commercial organisations". Tighten up rather skews the debate.
As for why we should be discussing this, a lobby group for paid editors has published a somewhat flawed report dissing Wikipedia and Wikipedians, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Wikipedia_Signpost/2012-04-23/In... the whole issue of COI and paid editing is somewhat topical. Whilst I normally consider myself one of the more inclusionist members of the community, I'd concede that we have an unusual situation re business related topics, and that a more deletionist approach might be helpful. In my view:
1. The ratio of volunteers whose hobby it is to write about business to hired hands operating covertly is probably not as healthy for Wikipedia on general business issues as it would be re hill forts, classic cars or hurricanes. 2. Some businesses have annoyed people, and I suspect that articles on businesses in general get more hostile unbalanced editing than do articles on extinct megafauna, asteroids or mathematical formulae. 3. There are areas where our coverage is, or aims to be, comprehensive, and there are areas where we merely cover the most notable. with crinoids, cathedrals and corsairs this doesn't bring up a fairness issue. But with business it does. If we only create articles for the "main players" in a market then we are potentially giving them an advantage over smaller or newer rivals, especially if those articles emphasise the positive.
In my view it would be fair and reasonable to respond to the existence of paid editing in business related articles by upping our minimum requirement for referencing new articles on businesses. So following on from the sticky prods we introduced for BLPs, we could introduce a BizProd; Any article created after 1st June 2012 where the subject is a currently trading business needs at least one independent reliable source. This would be a tougher and simpler standard than for BLPs, but that reflects the reality that some of these authors are actually paid to edit, and if our rules clearly state that they must be able to cite a reliable source such as a newspaper then it is reasonable to expect them to do so. It doesn't directly address the fairness issue, but IMHO there is more of a responsibility on the community to keep business articles neutral than there is for articles on waterways or wrestlers, and requiring a reliable source is a step in the right direction.
If we did this then we would not need to simultaneously review the notability criteria. Also the NoIndex until patrolled feature that is likely to be implemented would take away some of the incentive for businesses to create articles knowing they would only be up for a few days to take advantage of search engines
WSC
On 27 April 2012 05:17, Alan Liefting aliefting@ihug.co.nz wrote:
This is a bit of a straw poll. Is there a need to tighten up notability guidelines for commercial organisations? Yes/No/Maybe?
Alan Liefting
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The obvious solution is for more volunteers to write the articles. But those who try get very discouraged when their articles on clearly notable businesses get sent for deletion because people think the notability standard should be even higher than it is .
I doubt that making the standard even higher will produce more editors; it is much more likely to chase away those we do have. We need to make it easier to write articles--not just to write them technically, but to get them accepted.
On Sat, Apr 28, 2012 at 8:44 AM, WereSpielChequers werespielchequers@gmail.com wrote:
A more neutral way to put it would be "is there a need to review the notability requirements for commercial organisations". Tighten up rather skews the debate.
As for why we should be discussing this, a lobby group for paid editors has published a somewhat flawed report dissing Wikipedia and Wikipedians, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Wikipedia_Signpost/2012-04-23/In... the whole issue of COI and paid editing is somewhat topical. Whilst I normally consider myself one of the more inclusionist members of the community, I'd concede that we have an unusual situation re business related topics, and that a more deletionist approach might be helpful. In my view:
1. The ratio of volunteers whose hobby it is to write about business to hired hands operating covertly is probably not as healthy for Wikipedia on general business issues as it would be re hill forts, classic cars or hurricanes. 2. Some businesses have annoyed people, and I suspect that articles on businesses in general get more hostile unbalanced editing than do articles on extinct megafauna, asteroids or mathematical formulae. 3. There are areas where our coverage is, or aims to be, comprehensive, and there are areas where we merely cover the most notable. with crinoids, cathedrals and corsairs this doesn't bring up a fairness issue. But with business it does. If we only create articles for the "main players" in a market then we are potentially giving them an advantage over smaller or newer rivals, especially if those articles emphasise the positive.
In my view it would be fair and reasonable to respond to the existence of paid editing in business related articles by upping our minimum requirement for referencing new articles on businesses. So following on from the sticky prods we introduced for BLPs, we could introduce a BizProd; Any article created after 1st June 2012 where the subject is a currently trading business needs at least one independent reliable source. This would be a tougher and simpler standard than for BLPs, but that reflects the reality that some of these authors are actually paid to edit, and if our rules clearly state that they must be able to cite a reliable source such as a newspaper then it is reasonable to expect them to do so. It doesn't directly address the fairness issue, but IMHO there is more of a responsibility on the community to keep business articles neutral than there is for articles on waterways or wrestlers, and requiring a reliable source is a step in the right direction.
If we did this then we would not need to simultaneously review the notability criteria. Also the NoIndex until patrolled feature that is likely to be implemented would take away some of the incentive for businesses to create articles knowing they would only be up for a few days to take advantage of search engines
WSC
On 27 April 2012 05:17, Alan Liefting aliefting@ihug.co.nz wrote:
This is a bit of a straw poll. Is there a need to tighten up notability guidelines for commercial organisations? Yes/No/Maybe?
Alan Liefting
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On Saturday, 28 April 2012 at 13:44, WereSpielChequers wrote:
1. The ratio of volunteers whose hobby it is to write about business to hired hands operating covertly is probably not as healthy for Wikipedia on general business issues as it would be re hill forts, classic cars or hurricanes.
I concur with this: my primary issue with all the paid editing/CREWE etc. discussions is it means that unpaid volunteers including admins will have to pick up the slack. Legitimising it turns it from a trickle to a flood, and we now need to find more humans to police the crap these PR folk turn out.
Think about it by comparison to drug legalisation. The argument goes like this: we legalise pot and the government can tax and regulate the sale of marijuana, and reduce the law enforcement costs for policing it. The cops can spend their time policing actually important crime and the government get a new tax stream.
Explicitly permitting paid advocacy editing gets us the opposite bargain: it increases the 'cost' for 'law enforcement', admins have to spend more time policing. And what's our tax payoff? Lots of borderline spammy, business articles. Great. Because, you know, we haven't got hundreds of those in the NewPages backlog and the WP:AFC backlog that nobody can be bothered to deal with...
2. Some businesses have annoyed people, and I suspect that articles on businesses in general get more hostile unbalanced editing than do articles on extinct megafauna, asteroids or mathematical formulae. 3. There are areas where our coverage is, or aims to be, comprehensive, and there are areas where we merely cover the most notable. with crinoids, cathedrals and corsairs this doesn't bring up a fairness issue. But with business it does. If we only create articles for the "main players" in a market then we are potentially giving them an advantage over smaller or newer rivals, especially if those articles emphasise the positive.
I'd say one of the problems with business articles is they are so badly written. It's all dynamic providers of made-to-measure solutions. I'd want to reducify the instantiation of literary constructions that do not meet our best practices.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:B2B