[Foundation-l] Mywikipediaspace

[Alphax (Wikipedia email)]

Jimmy Wales wrote:
> Daniel Mayer wrote:
>> No it is not a policy and it never will if I have anything to do with it. I'm sure Jimmy was
>> talking about companies paying PR firms and similar ilk to promote them by writing sanitized and
>> glowing Wikipedia articles about the company paying the bill.
> 
> That's right.
> 
>> I would *love* to see many groups pay or otherwise get people to edit Wikipedia to add NPOV and
>> verified content; esp in areas and in languages we now have poor coverage in. 
> 
> 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.
> 
<snip>

Exactly. Allowing this sort of thing leads to phone calls to Danny along
the lines of "I paid X thousand dollars for an entry in Wikipedia, why
has it been changed/deleted?"

-- 
Alphax - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax
Contributor to Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia
"We make the internet not suck" - Jimbo Wales
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