[WikiEN-l] More about PR firms

[Death Phoenix]

On 8/21/06, Erik Moeller <eloquence at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> 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?
>

Yes, that does sound like a decent idea. Instead of having, say, Gregory
post up an article on his web site then asking a trusted Wikipedian post it,
we could have Gregory working in his own userspace, for everyone to see, in
a place like [[User:MyWikiBiz/Norman Technologies]], then if he thinks it's
of sufficient quality, he can send a message to someone (or a bunch of
someones, maybe even a formal peer review) and have them edit it to
appropriate Wikipedia standards. I think that is more in line with how we
already handle articles that have been userfied.