On 16/01/2008, Chad innocentkiller@gmail.com wrote:
I don't. For any company you Google who happens to have a Wikipedia article, you see a page with their logo and a company description. Now, it may be a neutral description, but the company is still there. People pay SEOs truckloads of money to get that kind of Google ranking for their companies, and an entire industry has emerged from search engines (as you know).
The thing is, this isn't really the issue. Search engine optimisation is trying to ensure that wilsonpharmaceuticals.com (a hopefully fictional site) gets a good google ranking when someone searches for "medication" or "drugs" or one of our beloved spam-product names - Google would not automatically rank them highest, so you need to game the system to make it so.
It *isn't* trying to ensure that wilsonpharmaceuticals.com is the top Google hit for someone looking for information *about Wilson Pharmaceuticals* - that is exactly the behaviour Google is intending to give, and any company which is spending stupid amounts of money to ensure they have a good search result for their own name is... not spending its advertising budget sensiblyy (well, outside of naming conflict issues etc - remember prince.com?).
You mean to tell me that these companies who are otherwise paying very heavily to get that top-ranked spot aren't getting free advertising from us?
Only if we start out by defining it as "advertising"! This seems to be falling into the trap of assuming that any writing about an organisation acts advertising for them - arguably the case - and therefore is to their benefit and therefore a bad thing - somewhat less apparent.
(Subjects get all kinds of subtle small benefits out of us having an article on them, mostly entirely coincidental. Should we be restricting our coverage to only things which don't benefit - or, I suppose, suffer - in any concievable way from the article's existence?)
We may not be getting paid for it, but companies left and right are advertising all over Wikipedia and this must stop.
How, exactly, would we "stop" it? Stop writing about anyone who we might think has a motive to advertise themselves? Hold companies ransom - "pay up or we won't write about you?" Deliberately restrict what we write unless they pay us and make it "honest" advertising?
I really don't see how this would work.