Hello,
Hardly surprising or new, but something we need to be aware of: Wikipedia is being edited by a large lobbying company, Bell Pottinger. It removes negative coverage of its clients:
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/caught-on-camera-top-lobbyists...
Bodnotbod
The article about them is... amusing. It's almost entirely sourced to press releases...
Tom
On 6 December 2011 10:14, Bod Notbod bodnotbod@gmail.com wrote:
Hello,
Hardly surprising or new, but something we need to be aware of: Wikipedia is being edited by a large lobbying company, Bell Pottinger. It removes negative coverage of its clients:
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/caught-on-camera-top-lobbyists...
Bodnotbod
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On 6 December 2011 10:14, Bod Notbod bodnotbod@gmail.com wrote:
Hardly surprising or new, but something we need to be aware of: Wikipedia is being edited by a large lobbying company, Bell Pottinger. It removes negative coverage of its clients: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/caught-on-camera-top-lobbyists...
This appears itself to be churnalism. How's their actual editorial record look? Is there substance to these claims, or is this just bragging?
(I eagerly await WikiProject Press Agency NPOV, dedicated to reviewing every word written about any Bell Pottinger client ...)
- d.
It would not be an unreasonable corrective action to take their boastful claims at face value and stick dirty great COI notices on the top of every Wikipedia article about each of their clients; with a suitable explanation on every talk page pointing to the newspaper source until a credible assessment has been completed to ensure no possible conflict of interest has compromised article neutrality.
Fae
+1 to Fae
This is outrageous. I would say COI notices + Disputed Neutrality notices.
From: faenwp@gmail.com Date: Tue, 6 Dec 2011 11:08:21 +0000 To: foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] WP being edited by lobbying firm
It would not be an unreasonable corrective action to take their boastful claims at face value and stick dirty great COI notices on the top of every Wikipedia article about each of their clients; with a suitable explanation on every talk page pointing to the newspaper source until a credible assessment has been completed to ensure no possible conflict of interest has compromised article neutrality.
Fae _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
On 6 December 2011 11:45, Thomas Morton morton.thomas@googlemail.com wrote:
+1 to Fae
This is outrageous. I would say COI notices + Disputed Neutrality notices.
Lets not get too dramatic.
And anyway; if the purpose of doing such tagging is to punish them for their actions, well, then it's probably not a good thing to do...
I agree, let's not over-react. If you're going to go through and find all the articles, how about reading them and making an assessment? It's usually easy enough to spot a whitewashed article, however "dark" their arts may be.
On Tue, Dec 06, 2011 at 11:08:21AM +0000, Fae wrote:
It would not be an unreasonable corrective action to take their boastful claims at face value and stick dirty great COI notices on the top of every Wikipedia article about each of their clients; with a suitable explanation on every talk page pointing to the newspaper source until a credible assessment has been completed to ensure no possible conflict of interest has compromised article neutrality.
That would be fighting POV with POV. Better to go through the list with a bunch of patrollers, and just NPOVize the lot. :-) [citation needed] and all that. Check page history for misbehaviour as well.
sincerely, Kim Bruning
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