In a message dated 3/11/2007 8:00:16 P.M. Pacific Daylight Time, Bartning@aol.com writes:
There's been a lot of talk about paid editors, but what about conflicts of interest with Wikipedia when it accepts donations from corporations? There's already belief that the organization gives large companies a lot of perks, e.g. allowing them to upload their logo, even mentioning them in an article, but how do donations from them influence Wikipedia?
The readers don't hold the purse strings like in a regular encyclopedia, and that's one area where I see a major conflict of interest in the format of Wikipedia as a source of information. There's less incentive to write for the readers, and certainly it's deteriorated as far as I'm concerned. I'd say that Wikipedia hit its peak sometime ago right now, not that it's necessarily in permanent decline, mind you, but it's going to take taking things more seriously or justice or something to correct the fall right now, IMHO.
Vincent Bartning <BR><BR><BR>**************************************<BR> AOL now offers free email to everyone. Find out more about what's free from AOL at http://www.aol.com.
On 12/03/07, Bartning@aol.com Bartning@aol.com wrote:
The readers don't hold the purse strings like in a regular encyclopedia, and that's one area where I see a major conflict of interest in the format of Wikipedia as a source of information. There's less incentive to write for the readers, and certainly it's deteriorated as far as I'm concerned. I'd say that Wikipedia hit its peak sometime ago right now, not that it's necessarily in permanent decline, mind you, but it's going to take taking things more seriously or justice or something to correct the fall right now, IMHO
You are wrong on two counts. You are wrong to say that our readers don't hold the purse strings since we rely on our reader's donations. You might respond that traditional encyclopedia's more rely on customer satisfaction since proportionately more readers pay larger quantities of money to read the encyclopedia (although many will do so free of charge in public libraries), but ultimately if readers aren't satisfied enough to donate, we collapse.
Secondly, this kind of feed back quality control that traditional encyclopedias matters less to us since it is our readers who edit our content. Almost all of our readers are able to correct a mistake if one is seen. It seems that our model ensures that content is written to our reader's satisfaction because it is our readers who create our content.