On 8/21/06, Erik Moeller <eloquence(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On 8/21/06, Jimmy Wales <jwales(a)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.