[Foundation-l] Fundraising & Networking updates

[Andrew Gray]

On 16/01/2008, Chad <innocentkiller at gmail.com> wrote:

> I don't. For any company you Google who happens to have a Wikipedia
> article, you see a page with their logo and a company description.
> Now, it may be a neutral description, but the company is still there.
> People pay SEOs truckloads of money to get that kind of Google
> ranking for their companies, and an entire industry has emerged
> from search engines (as you know).

The thing is, this isn't really the issue. Search engine optimisation
is trying to ensure that wilsonpharmaceuticals.com (a hopefully
fictional site) gets a good google ranking when someone searches for
"medication" or "drugs" or one of our beloved spam-product names -
Google would not automatically rank them highest, so you need to game
the system to make it so.

It *isn't* trying to ensure that wilsonpharmaceuticals.com is the top
Google hit for someone looking for information *about Wilson
Pharmaceuticals* - that is exactly the behaviour Google is intending
to give, and any company which is spending stupid amounts of money to
ensure they have a good search result for their own name is... not
spending its advertising budget sensiblyy (well, outside of naming
conflict issues etc - remember prince.com?).

> You mean to tell me that these
> companies who are otherwise paying very heavily to get that top-ranked
> spot aren't getting free advertising from us?

Only if we start out by defining it as "advertising"! This seems to be
falling into the trap of assuming that any writing about an
organisation acts advertising for them - arguably the case - and
therefore is to their benefit and therefore a bad thing - somewhat
less apparent.

(Subjects get all kinds of subtle small benefits out of us having an
article on them, mostly entirely coincidental. Should we be
restricting our coverage to only things which don't benefit - or, I
suppose, suffer - in any concievable way from the article's
existence?)

> We may not be getting paid
> for it, but companies left and right are advertising all over Wikipedia and
> this must stop.

How, exactly, would we "stop" it? Stop writing about anyone who we
might think has a motive to advertise themselves? Hold companies
ransom - "pay up or we won't write about you?" Deliberately restrict
what we write unless they pay us and make it "honest" advertising?

I really don't see how this would work.

-- 
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk