[Foundation-l] Mywikipediaspace

[Andre Engels]

2006/10/7, Anthony <wikilegal at inbox.org>:

> > However, it seems more likely
> > that they would market themselves as PR agents without even
> > mentioning Wikipedia as part of the package.
>
> Moreover, the hard part is *writing* the article.  Simply adding it
> into Wikipedia is easy, and need not be done by the same person who
> wrote the article.  In fact, there's little benefit to having the
> person hired to write the article know it's getting put into Wikipedia
> in the first place.

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.

> In the end, short of disallowing anonymous/psedonymous editors,
> there's probably little that can be done to stop people from getting
> paid to create Wikipedia articles, even if it were something we wanted
> to do.

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 at gmail.com
ICQ: 6260644  --  Skype: a_engels