Jim wrote:
On 8/9/06, Jimmy Wales jwales@wikia.com wrote:
Dabljuh wrote:
On Wed, 09 Aug 2006 14:58:44 -0400 Jimmy Wales jwales@wikia.com wrote:
(stuff)
So what is the agreement?
He agreed not to edit Wikipedia articles when he is being paid to write by the subject of the article, and to help the companies he works with understand that it is probably not a great idea for them to edit their own articles as well. He will write articles and post them on his own site, under the GNU FDL, and to ask trusted prominent and independent Wikipedians to add the articles, on their own independent judgments of the merits of the articles.
From what I understand on another thread, MyWikiBiz was committed to
producing neutral articles. And would only do so under the MyWikiBiz username. I, personally, liked the idea of the edits being entered by MyWikiBiz - that way they could be tracked openly and checked using the user contributions feature. Having an anonymous editor input the information into wikipedia seems more likely to result in articles that are not neutral.
I can see some benefit in that trolls would target articles created by MyWikiBiz for deletion and other crap - but that seems outweighed by the benefit that many users would also be able to quickly identify the articles submitted by MyWikiBiz and would seek to protect wikipedia's reputation and make sure our policies are followed. They could only do this if there is transparency in submitting material.
*Is the feeling that being paid to write articles for wikipedia is against community standards in general.* What if a wikipedian submitted a grant to a govt agency or non-profit to edit/contribute x amount of information to articles around a specific topic? I can see this as being a huge benefit to wikipedia and to our goal to preserve knowledge by creating a high-quality comprehensive encyclopedia.
For example, I could see the following as having great benefit: http://www.foodsovereignty.org issues a grant to write on locating water sources, low-water agriculture, high temperature yields, etc. http://www.eere.energy.gov/ issues a grant to write on alternative energy sources - http://nationalzoo.si.edu/default.cfm issues a grant to write on a specific list of endangered animals ... of course there could be harm as well http://www.nnsa.doe.gov/ issues a grant to make sure specific information is deleted from articles on nuclear power and to promote non-proliferation http://www.ispu.us/pages/reports/2855/articleDetailPB.html issues a grant to influence the articles on islam, christianity, etc.
For all these open acknowledgement of the finanicial relationship and transparency is a better protection for our neutralilty standards, IMHO.
Jim
I had a very similar thought. The idea that eventually paid academics might be allowed to spend some amount of their compensated time contributing is not unrealistic. Look at all the the programmers that are paid by large corporations to work on open source projects. Thought his is quite a different thing than a company paying someone to write an article about them (which they would probably not want to be paying for if it was not going to benefit them and thus putting NPOV in question). I think the best option for a company that wants an article on wikipedia is to simply request it.
Dalf