Look, For every new member ROSC gets, we donate $2 to www.wikinews.org. Last I know, no other club did that for wiki. Anthere <Anthere9(a)yahoo.com> wrote: Look Rosc This list is NOT an advertisment roll. PLEASE, do not spam us. You stop that NOW. Thanks Ant ROSC Club Director wrote: _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l(a)wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l Yours Truly, Club Volunteer The Resources of Sheboygan Club Phone: (920) 547-4939 EMail: resourcesofsheboygan(a)yahoo.com Web: www.rosc.znn.com --------------------------------- Yahoo! Messenger with Voice. Make PC-to-Phone Calls to the US (and 30+ countries) for 2¢/min or less.

This is an advertisment nonetheless. And several editors have already asked that you be blocked from the list. So, just do not do it. Incidently, may I ask you how you intend to make sure that these 2 dollars actually get to wikinews ? ant ROSC Club Director wrote:

Then still, how do you plan to make sure the money goes to wiki*news* ? Listening to Anthere's intonation, for the record, she is boardmember of that same foundtaion, I guess that is not very obvious... Effe 2006/10/3, ROSC Club Director <resourcesofsheboygan(a)yahoo.com>om>:

Dear ROSC Club Director, Thanks for your kind wishes towards wikinews. (Are you a regular reader? When did you discover it? What do you like best about it?) It's nice that you are planning to donate some of your club dues to Wikinews. This isn't the right forum for that kind of announcement. Please be careful about how you discuss your own organizations on Wikipedia (even on your own userpage) and on this list. To the list: learning to write in an NPOV fashion is hard. Finding the line between announcing something you are proud of and self-promotion can be tricky. Please assume good faith and be of good cheer, especially with list newbies. SJ +++ ROSC Club Director [03/10/06 14:32 -0700]:

Some people fail to grasp the level of passion that many of our participants feel about advertising. They need to be reminded that a few years ago a significant group broke away at the mere suggestion that the site might carry advertising. The ads never happened, but the group still broke away. Ec ROSC Club Director wrote:

Jimmy Wales wrote: I guess I don't see what's wrong with that. We've said in the past that we would support organizations paying people to write Wikipedia articles on under-covered subjects, so long as they are NPOV (i.e. cover the subject, but don't *promote* it, which is a fine line since some of these "raising awareness" groups really do mean to raise awareness in order to promote particular subjects, and are likely to be loathe to cover viewpoints that directly oppose theirs). Companies paying people to write articles seem likely to have many of the same advantages and/or pitfalls. On a more practical level, it's impossible for me to determine as a Wikipedia editor whether the person writing an article is being paid to do so or not, nor do I much care---it's either a good article or it isn't, and I edit it or don't accordingly. Seems a lot easier than trying to track down who wrote it. -Mark

On 10/5/06, Anthony <wikilegal(a)inbox.org> wrote: Methinks there's a slight difference between being paid by a neutral third party to write an article and being paid by an interested party to write an article. In the one, the focus is on promoting article quality and Wikipedia; in the other, the focus is on promoting a company. Big, big difference. -- Sam

Jimmy Wales wrote: This comes as news and a surprise to me. Is it a new rule, or has this been stated before? What is the motivation? How do you detect when people edit Wikipedia for pay, and what sanctions do you have against them? Is this a rule only for the English Wikipedia or a Foundation-wide policy? -- Lars Aronsson (lars(a)aronsson.se) Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se

Daniel Mayer wrote: That's right. 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. We can not and should not engage in witch hunts related to this. But we can and should stand firm on the ethical principles. --Jimbo

Alphax (Wikipedia email) wrote: You can't stop the phone calls or do anything about them. The payment for writing an article is a contract between the complainant and the article writer. If the writer promised something that was beyond his control he misrepresented (perhaps fraudulently) the situation to the payor. Any legal claim is between them; it's not our fight. It might be useful to have a disclaimer somewhere that states that any such arrangements are strictly between those parties. If we want to pay to encourage articles in an underrepresented language that could be mentioned in the relevant project. Ec

On Fri, October 6, 2006 22:36, Ray Saintonge wrote: Whilst it might be accurate I doubt it wuold be sensible. Those who hadn't thought of it might see this clause and believe we were condoning such activity and go search for someone whereas before they might not have even thought of it. Alison Wheeler

On 08/10/06, Ray Saintonge <saintonge(a)telus.net> wrote: [[WP:BEANS]] - d.

2006/10/6, Jimmy Wales <jwales(a)wikia.com>om>: The scary thing is... This already exists. Maybe I should have notified the list or the board or whoever before, but having a GoogleNews subject 'Wikipedia' gave me a link to the following advertisement-thinly-disguised-as-press-release shortly before the Wikimania conference: http://www.24-7pressrelease.com/view_press_release.php?rID=16892 I checked http://www.mywikibiz.com and they do indeed claim to be in business, charging $49 for a stub, $79 for a full article and $99 for a full article with some extras... Then again, checking [[en:User:MyWikiBiz]] tells me you already were notified of this recently. -- Andre Engels, andreengels(a)gmail.com ICQ: 6260644 -- Skype: a_engels

Jimmy Wales wrote: I agree, but the difference is apparently not about being paid, but about the contents of the resulting articles. We all agree that articles should be encyclopedic, NPOV and cover relevant topics. Contributors who cannot learn to comply with this can ultimately be blocked and banned, and will have their edits reverted. If they market themselves as Wikipedia-based PR agents, something they cannot legally deliver, there are laws (in some countries, at least) against false marketing. However, it seems more likely that they would market themselves as PR agents without even mentioning Wikipedia as part of the package. This probably happens already. Do we know where all the detailed articles on various BMW car models come from? Why does the [[en:Saab 9-5]] article "require cleanup", while all BMW articles are good? I don't want to start any witch hunt. I'm glad that there are good articles about BMWs. I don't care who wrote them. Let's hope other brands can radiate the same inspiration to contributors of good articles. When I edit Wikipedia, it's in my free time, when I could decide to work instead, so I'm already paying a price (to myself) for editing. Some people cannot afford this free time, but are forced to have double jobs. Northern welfare states (Canada, Sweden, Japan) have more people with computers, education, and free time available to edit Wikipedia, so these societies will be covered in more detail than other regions. If I get a scholarship, I can spend more of my time editing Wikipedia. Next step, if the tourist board of my region (or a health eduction organization) would pay me, I could focus on covering topics relevant to them. And perhaps some hotel chains (or drug companies) can add to that money. Since I'm giving talks and technical consulting, I could also advice PR firms on how to understand and interact with collaborative Internet communities. I don't see that I would step over some sharp border, were I to go from paying myself to receiving scholarships or corporate sponsoring for writing on Wikipedia. The sharp border is if I'm starting to write bad articles. It is possible that we should all openly declare any money we receive for Wikipedia-related activities. Are there any guidelines for this already? Would that include personal wealth that enables us to spend time and resources on Wikipedia? Do other organizations (churches, Red Cross, ...) have such ethical guidelines? But which are the ethical principles here? -- Lars Aronsson (lars(a)aronsson.se) Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se

2006/10/7, Anthony <wikilegal(a)inbox.org>rg>: I think there is. Knowing that and knowing Wikipedia, one can adapt one's style to the Wikipedia style and go further in removing/avoiding PR buzzwords than one would in another publication. The hard part is not writing the text (that's something that has often already been done), but writing it in such a way that it is suitable for Wikipedia. Well, we could have a stricter policy against advertisements. That might make it less profitable for companies to hire someone to write about them on Wikipedia. Then again, it might also mean that abovementioned "wikipedia styling" might become *more* interesting. And then there is the possibility that companies switch to less obviously advertizing articles. Like writing an article not about the company, but about the product in which it happens to be a major player. Or, as someone else suggested, a pharmaceutical company sponsoring articles about the conditions they sell treatments for (in the Netherlands we had for example one company paying quite a lot of money in television commercials intended to have people with [[onychomycosis]] visit the doctor about it (whom they hoped would then prescribe their drug). -- Andre Engels, andreengels(a)gmail.com ICQ: 6260644 -- Skype: a_engels

On 10/7/06, David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote: Worth remembering. It is hard to find a kind of product that SOMEONE isn't geeky about. When researching what vacuum cleaner to buy, I found some really scary vacuum-cleaner nerds, including people who wired UK-compatible 240-volt sockets in American homes in order to use British appliances ... -Matt

I've copied this back to wikien-l, as some of this is going to get more specific for en.wikipedia than the foundation, though there are some points for both in my reply. People may want to edit followups if they're not cross-appropriate. On 10/6/06, Jimmy Wales <jwales(a)wikia.com> wrote: I think we've been missing something. This is happening because of the law of supply and demand. Wikipedia is important enough now that companies see not being listed as being a Real Problem. Not really understanding Wikipedia, they're willing to pay someone some money to fix that problem, and someone's willing to accept money to do it. I think that companies are right, that Wikipedia is important enough, and not being listed is legitimately an actual marketing / PR / customer information seeking problem for them. So, what can we structurally do to resolve the problem that they're seeking to use an ethically challenging commercial method to fix their lack of entries? I just went perusing through http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requested_articles/Business_and_Econ… A lot of those are on first inspection not notable, but a lot of them are quite notable. How long have they been sitting on the list? Should we give them a better entry point than wandering around, trying to figure out what Requested Articles is and where it is, and then figuring out how to add themselves to the list? Would it be unethical for a business to charge $25 or $50 to add a requested article entry, along with a bunch of reference source links, but not create or edit an article directly? Are en wikipedia's notability standards appropriate still? There are around 6,000 NYSE and NASDAQ listed US companies; is en-wikipedia WP:CORP as it stands still the right filter, or should it be somewhat loosened up? Would roughly 6k companies be inappropriate in 1.5 million total articles? Is mere listing on a major stock exchange enough notability? -- -george william herbert george.herbert(a)gmail.com

--- Jimmy Wales <jwales(a)wikia.com> wrote: Sorry Jimmy, but yeah they are so long as what is contributed follows our content policies (NPOV being the most important). Remember NPOV? It was developed as a social mechanism to allow reasonable people of different POVs to work together. Getting paid to edit does not necessarily mean a person can't be NPOV or follow our policies. That said, it does at least have the appearance of impropriety when a person is editing an article about their employer or a client. That should be frowned on for sure. But banned? Even if it were possible to do that I think it would be bad in that it tends to give-up on the concept of NPOV as a social construct. We should *certainly* NOT at all try to create a culture where users start to which hunt for people who get paid to edit. A great many organizations could help us attain our goals by hiring people to add content in areas where we are now weak. Heck, I think the foundation should do that for some smaller languages and even in certain areas in larger languages where our coverage currently sucks. All editors need do is follow our content and social policies. That is it. I'm sorry, but that stance is not at all something that will help us attain our goals. We should embrace good content at face value and not question the motives for its creation. Questioning people's motives is placing ideology over substance. -- mav __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com