[WikiEN-l] Astroturfing -- fabricating your own sources

[Daniel R. Tobias]

On 8 Dec 2006 at 09:09, Luna <lunasantin at gmail.com> wrote:

> Assuming your summary of events is accurate, it seems that the source isn't
> neutral. That being the case, I'm of the opinion that it might be reliable
> in some cases, but not in others. For example, I doubt you'd find many
> objections to using a company's own information page, when looking for the
> date a company was founded; for more complex or potentially controversial
> information, however, getting information from third party, neutral sources
> is probably preferred.

Even such simple things as founding dates could in some cases be 
subject to spin, manipulation, and debate.  A company or organization 
with a complex history (with mergers, splits, acquisitions, 
reorganizations, buying the rights to a name from a completely 
different entity and renaming the parent company accordingly, etc.) 
can have several different dates that can with some logic be claimed 
as their "founding date", and an official corporate site will use the 
one that their marketing flacks think fits their current desired 
image; if they want to emphasize that they've been around a while 
they use the earlier of the possible dates, while if they want to 
claim to be all new and different they use the newer one.  However, 
Wikipedia should never be beholden to the current corporate image as 
opposed to the true facts.

-- 
== Dan ==
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