[Foundation-l] Corporate vanity policy enforcement

Fri Sep 29 19:23:51 UTC 2006

 That does not solve any problems. The problem is not that they want to be online. Many of them have their own websites which get considerable traffic. The problem is that they want to be on Wikipedia. That is all they want. And as long as they are not on Wikipedia, they will keep coming back, regardless of whether they are on Yellowiki or not. 

 -----Original Message-----
 From: gerard.meijssen at gmail.com
 To: foundation-l at wikimedia.org
 Sent: Fri, 29 Sep 2006 3:15 PM
 Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Corporate vanity policy enforcement

  Hoi,
By saying that we are big and they are small, it must be clear that it 
is NOT a solution right ??. So the solution is to be blunt and destroy 
all the effort that these people did put into what they hoped to be 
acceptable for Wikipedia.

By moving it to Yellowikis, Yellowikis gets content that it wants to 
have; their content is GFDL as well so there is NO problem in doing 
exactly this. By providing an alternative we give less of a reason to 
complain and we provide Yellowikis with the content that is what they 
are there for. What you could appreciate is that by having such a teflon 
strategy, we will be better able to ruthlessly remove from Wikipedia 
what is not encyclopedic in the first place.

Thanks,
    GerardM

daniwo59 at aol.com wrote:
>  What Gerard suggests is NOT a solution. There are reasons people are spamming 
Wikipedia and not adding content to Yellowiki. We are the fourteenth largest 
website in the world, while Yellowiki does not count in the top one hundred 
thousand. We have a consistently high google rating and our links ensure that 
they will have a high google rating, Yellowiki does not. We can offer some 
modicum of respectability, while they cannot Compare these two statements: "Look 
at me! I'm in the encyclopedia!" v. "Look at me! I'm in the phonebook! " 
>  
>  The fact is that they do not want to be on Yellowiki, which no one has ever 
heard of. They want to be on Wikipedia, which is a household name. And for that 
we need real solutions.
>  
>  Danny
>     
>  -----Original Message-----
>  From: gerard.meijssen at gmail.com
>  To: foundation-l at wikimedia.org
>  Cc: bpatrick at wikimedia.org
>  Sent: Fri, 29 Sep 2006 1:48 PM
>  Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Corporate vanity policy enforcement
>  
>   Hoi,
> There are two issues that may be addressed. There is an apparant need for
> organisations to be VISIBLE. They want to use Wikipedia for that while we do
> not consider them to be of relevance in an encyclopedic setting. The content
> that they created would be of some value to Yellowikis. This is where this
> information is welcomed.
>
> By moving it sideways, we do exactly what is current practice for other
> content that does not fit Wikipedia. We are not as confrontational as we
> could be, but the teflon quality of our projects would be increased and this
> may lead to fewer angry people in our projects as well.
>
> PS I am totally behind the notion that we should not have non-encyclopedic
> content in Wikipedia.. for me it is a matter of strategy.
>
> Thanks,
>    GerardM
>
> On 9/29/06, Jeffrey V. Merkey <jmerkey at wolfmountaingroup.com> wrote:
>   
>> Brad,
>>
>> One very easy solution to all of this is to segregate the live edited
>> wikipedia site from the published site scraped by the
>> search engines.
>>
>> In other words, setup the community server "anyone can edit" at
>> something like draften.wikipedia.org and publish reviewed
>> dumps of the community server to a read only external server for
>> scraping like I am doing at Wikigadugi. I have ZERO
>> vandalism problems , ZERO content dispute problems, and ZERO vanity page
>> problems and I host the entire English
>> wikipedia as well as several other languages.
>>
>> Very simple solution. People won't waste the time creating vanity pages
>> when they know they may not get published in the
>> "official" external official site.
>>
>> Jeff
>>
>> Brad Patrick wrote:
>>
>>     
>>> Brad Patrick wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>>       
>>>> Dear Community:
>>>>
>>>> The volume of corporate vanity/vandalism which is showing up on
>>>> Wikipedia is overwhelming.  At the office, we are receiving dozens of
>>>> phone calls *per week* about company, organization, and marketing
>>>> edits which are reverted, causing the non-notable, but
>>>> self-aggrandizing authors, to scream bloody murder.  This is as it
>>>> should be.  However, I am issuing a call to arms to the community to
>>>> act in a much more draconian fashion in response to corporate
>>>> self-editing and vanity page creation.  This is simply out of hand,
>>>> and we need your help.
>>>>
>>>> We are the #14 website in the world.  We are a big target.  If we are
>>>> to remain true to our encyclopedic mission, this kind of nonsense
>>>> cannot be tolerated.  This means the administrators and new page
>>>> patrol need to be clear when they see new usernames and page creation
>>>> which are blatantly commercial - shoot on sight.  There should be no
>>>> question that someone who claims to have a "famous movie studio" and
>>>> has exactly 2 Google hits - both their Myspace page - they get nuked.
>>>> Ban users who promulgate such garbage for a significant period of
>>>> time.  They need to be encouraged to avoid the temptation to recreate
>>>> their article, thereby raising the level of damage and wasted time
>>>> they incur.
>>>>
>>>> Some of you might think regular policy and VfD is the way to go.  I am
>>>> here to tell you it is not enough.  We are losing the battle for
>>>> encyclopedic content in favor of people intent on hijacking Wikipedia
>>>> for their own memes.  This scourge is a serious waste of time and
>>>> energy.  We must put a stop to this now.
>>>> Thank you for your help.
>>>>
>>>> -Brad Patrick
>>>> User:BradPatrick
>>>> Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.
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