Jimmy Wales wrote:
There are two entirely separate issues here. Imagine
that a grant is
secured to hire people as "evangelizers" and initial admins in, say,
African languages. Great. Or, imagine that a health education
organization decides that the best way to educate the public on health
issues is to have staff contribute their work to Wikipedia. Great.
Now imagine that someone sets up a website that strongly implies that
paying him will get a company a good article in Wikipedia, and follows
that up by posting blatant PR puffery and claiming that it is NPOV.
That's a very serious problem, especially in an era when we are seeing
increasing attention paid to "how to manipulate wikipedia for the good
of your client" by the lower dregs of the PR industry.
Those are some pretty extreme oppositions, though. What if a company
decides that the best way to educate the public on what their company
does is to have their staff contribute a neutral article on the history
of the company to Wikipedia? Your first email seemed to suggest that
this is always wrong. It's true that a company paying someone to edit
an article about themselves is at great danger of producing a
non-neutral article, but I'd argue many NGOs and non-profits present
similar risks, since many have specific political aims they wish to
promote as part of their mission.
-Mark