Daniel Mayer wrote:
No it is not a policy and it never will if I have
anything to do with it. I'm sure Jimmy was
talking about companies paying PR firms and similar ilk to promote them by writing
sanitized and
glowing Wikipedia articles about the company paying the bill.
That's right.
I would *love* to see many groups pay or
otherwise get people to edit Wikipedia to add NPOV and
verified content; esp in areas and in languages we now have poor coverage in.
Absolutely.
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.
<snip>
Exactly. Allowing this sort of thing leads to phone calls to Danny along
the lines of "I paid X thousand dollars for an entry in Wikipedia, why
has it been changed/deleted?"
--
Alphax -
Contributor to Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia
"We make the internet not suck" - Jimbo Wales
Public key: