Improve, don't remove. Unless the paragraphs they add are unsalvagable, rewrite them. They are indirectly countering systemic bias.
2008/2/7, Andreas Hoerstemeier ahoerstemeier@spamcop.net:
Florence Devouard wrote:
Hmm. In other words, we'll be happy that the content improve in Thai related articles :-)
That what I would call the optimistic view. But I have seen the first edits yesterday - three out of four editing the wrong article, the one about the town instead of the province which they planned to do, and all the text sounds like it comes from a tourist brochure, with very POV statements. So I had to reword (and thereby shorten) the text completely, work it into the existing text to remove duplicates, as they did not care at all that there was other text before. I am talking about [[Petchabun Province]], the other three misguided edits went to [[Pathum Thani]], [[Narathiwat]] and [[Songkhla]]. Also, many of the photos uploaded seem to be copyright violations, or at least uploaded without understanding the license stuff at all.
The worst - I have tried to talk with each of the new contributors, and they all seem to either not understand at all what that yellow bar "you have new messages" means, as they just continued despite my revert and notification.
BTW - they did hire students for doing the edits, it is not done by TAT employees directly, though I wonder if anyone at TAT ever tried to edit before making this press release, or they are ignorant on how Wikipedia works and just know that "everyone can edit" and thought that'd be a good idea for spreading their brochure texts.
I have sent an email to the contact listed on the TAT announcement page http://www.tourismthailand.org/news/release-content-466.html yesterday to offer my help in making them edit without disrupting, cleanwashing articles or turning encyclopedic articles into tourist brochures, so far I did not get a reply yet. But I still hope that if handled correctly the TAT could really help to contribute on the articles.
Andreas Hoerstemeier
[[User:Ahoerstemeier]] http://tambon.blogspot.com
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