[Foundation-l] Free advertising on Wikipedia

[Anthony DiPierro]

On 4/30/06, daniwo59 at aol.com <daniwo59 at aol.com> wrote:
>
> Over the past few weeks, OTRS has seen quite a few messages concerning
> companies that are putting information about themselves onto Wikipedia for
> advertising purposes, insisting that it is their right to do this. An article in  an
> online SEO (search engine optimization) magazine described how to mine
> wikipedia to get web traffic. We have had emails from such diverse groups as  talent
> agencies (we will take the copyright off our own website, as long as it  is
> included in Wikipedia), a Dominatrix, a vaporizer (I have no choice but to
> keep inserting my links on your site so as to fend off the competitors), and
> many others. In fact, this appears to be a growing trend in Wikipedia, as is
> evidenced by similar phone calls to the office (I did not write the article
> about my, my PR firm wrote it, and I paid them good money so you can't take it
> off). Shoppingtelly.uk has written that as long as we allow links to the BBC,
> they will insist on their "rights" to put links to their site on Wikipedia.
>
> This is a worrying trend on the English Wikipedia which raises issues of
> POV, notability, and verifiability. Ironically, we do not allow paid
> advertising, but we are buckling when people use our site in order to get free
> advertising.
>
> I do not know the solution to this problem--several have been raised, but  in
> my mind none is completely satisfactory. I am simply posting this here in the
>  hope that it will elicit discussion and, perhaps, a real policy decision to
> counter this worrying trend.
>
> Danny

Are the current solutions failing?  Do you have some examples of
violations of Wikipedia policies which have remained in the
encyclopedia for any significant amount of time before being removed?

It seems to be my take on things that while the phone calls might be
annoying to you the rest is pretty well handled by the normal wiki
processes, and will be best handled by improving those normal wiki
processes.  Closing down VFD so people have more time to focus on
ensuring that the information in the wiki is NPOV and verifiable would
probably increase the efficiency a lot too.

Anthony