[Foundation-l] Mywikipediaspace

[Ray Saintonge]

Alphax (Wikipedia email) wrote:

>Jimmy Wales wrote:
>  
>
>>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.
>>    
>>
>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?"
>
You can't stop the phone calls or do anything about them.  The payment 
for writing an article is a contract between the complainant and the 
article writer.  If the writer promised something that was beyond his 
control he misrepresented (perhaps fraudulently) the situation to the 
payor.  Any legal claim is between them; it's not our fight.

It might be useful to have a disclaimer somewhere that states that any 
such arrangements are strictly between those parties.

If we want to pay to encourage articles in an underrepresented language 
that could be mentioned in the relevant project.

Ec