[Foundation-l] LA Times article / Advertising in Wikipedia

[David Goodman]

Librarians approve the purchase of anything regardless if the material
in it is needed. Its one of our basic principles, that we pay no
particular heed to the economic basis of the publication. Even so most
of us prefer to differentially support projects from the non profit
publishers rather than the large corporate publishers, and to keep a
certain amount of the money to support open access--the usual is about
1 to 5 5 of the total.
There are certain business practices we do not do, or at least many of
us dont. we normally do not buy material that requires the user to
personally identify himself to the publisher. we normally do not buy
material that is not going to be available to the entire community we
are responsible for.

But advertising does not invalidate the quality of a source--it lowers
it slightly, depending on its nature. advertising from google in WP
will not ruin it altogether. It will decrease its value somewhat, as
would any other stain on its possible objectivity.

Thus, local newspapers are not reliable necessarily for covering all
the embarrassing events of their community.  And so for WP we do not
altogether trust them for local events where they may not be
objective.

On Wed, Mar 12, 2008 at 4:09 PM, Mike Godwin <mgodwin at wikimedia.org> wrote:
>
>  David Goodman writes:
>
>  > We certainly do teach them about the factor of medical advertisement
>  > as it affects the content of medical journals.
>
>  I'm aware of this, since I've done a lot of work with librarians in
>  free-speech, copyright, and technology matters (most recently for
>  ALA's DC office).  But I am under the impression that librarians
>  nevertheless routinely approve the purchases of subscriptions to
>  medical journals that may contain advertisements.
>
>  > The effect of advertisements on news reporting
>  > in general is another well known phenomenon.
>
>  This of course is an excellent reason to cease citations in Wikipedia
>  to journals that do news reporting.
>
>  ;)
>
>
>  --Mike
>
>
>
>
>
>
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-- 
David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG