[Foundation-l] Mywikipediaspace

[Anthony]

On 10/6/06, Lars Aronsson <lars at aronsson.se> wrote:
> If they market themselves as Wikipedia-based PR agents, something
> they cannot legally deliver, there are laws (in some countries, at
> least) against false marketing.

They would also be on pretty thin ice regarding trademark law, if not
outright in violation of it.

> 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.

Of course, getting the article to *stay* in Wikipedia might be harder,
depending on how obvious it is that it's a PR article, but hiring
someone to edit war over an article or otherwise vandalize Wikipedia
is pretty obviously wrong.

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.

Anthony