Yes some interesting comment by Trillium. Where the articles mainly promotional? Yes very. A number of them were copied and pasted from press releases by the companies in question.
Were a number of the editors from the developing world? Also yes. This is because they are willing to work for less and Orangemody was hiring from sites like Elance.
I guess the fundamental question is, is Wikipedia a workspace to provide employment for those in the developing world who are willing to do PR piece work for some unknown PR firm? Or is Wikipedia an encyclopedia.
Why not make it a bit more difficult for them to do their foul play? Maybe enwiki needs a stricter rule enforcement system for sources in articles about promotion-worthy entities like living people, existing businesses/organizations, etc. Just allow only external, reliable, and confirmable sources and throw everything else out. Even if it is plausible. No exceptions. Of course, someone would need to go through all articles in question... And check the noteworthiness of the entities while you're at it. :) It's some work, but I think it's worth the efforts.
Why not make it an event, maybe even with a little prize for people who throw out the most unsourced statements in such articles. ;) But jokes aside. Seriously, there could be (and I guess is) a large number of paid-edited promotional pieces of text in enwiki (and certainly other language versions, too). Get rid of it the hard way, otherwise the problem won't go away, but grow by the day.
Th.
2015-09-03 2:07 GMT+02:00 James Heilman jmh649@gmail.com:
Yes some interesting comment by Trillium. Where the articles mainly promotional? Yes very. A number of them were copied and pasted from press releases by the companies in question.
Were a number of the editors from the developing world? Also yes. This is because they are willing to work for less and Orangemody was hiring from sites like Elance.
I guess the fundamental question is, is Wikipedia a workspace to provide employment for those in the developing world who are willing to do PR piece work for some unknown PR firm? Or is Wikipedia an encyclopedia. -- James Heilman MD, CCFP-EM, Wikipedian
The Wikipedia Open Textbook of Medicine www.opentextbookofmedicine.com
As of July 2015 I am a board member of the Wikimedia Foundation My emails; however, do not represent the official position of the WMF _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
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