On 8/9/06, Jimmy Wales <jwales(a)wikia.com>
wrote:
Dabljuh wrote:
On Wed, 09 Aug 2006 14:58:44 -0400
Jimmy Wales <jwales(a)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