[WikiEN-l] More about PR firms

[Erik Moeller]

On 8/21/06, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:

> I think we need to be very clear in a lot of different places that PR
> firms editing Wikipedia is something that we frown upon very very
> strongly.  The appearance of impropriety is so great that we should make
> it very very strongly clear to these firms that we do not approve of
> what they would like to do.

I'm CCing Sheldon Rampton of PR Watch on this. Sheldon is a leading
expert on the PR industry and also hosts a wiki, sourcewatch.org, that
deals specifically with these organizations. Given his many years of
experience, I think he can give us some good advice on which
approaches will work and which ones won't.

My take on it is that if we push PR industries to far to the outside,
they will just do their work clandestinely. This will damage
Wikipedia's reputation far more if it becomes known, especially when
an article that has 200+ revisions was started and carefully groomed
by a paid propagandist.

I don't see a compelling reasons why we need to force PR people to
start articles _outside_ Wikipedia and go through some "trusted
Wikipedian". In fact, it seems to me that doing so is more likely to
lead to untraceable transactions. We must not just care about
appearances, we must also care about the facts. Having a clean track
record is better than some muddy variant of Chinese whispers.

I think a separate article creation process as described under WP:COI
might work best:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Conflicts_of_interest

The user space has historically allowed POV material. It would give us
a good record of all PR groups operating within Wikipedia. Surely it
is in our interest to have such a record?
-- 
Peace & Love,
Erik