On 9/19/06, Phil Sandifer Snowspinner@gmail.com wrote:
On Sep 19, 2006, at 6:16 PM, Steve Summit wrote:
(In other words, while there may well be a void, is it "gaping"? I don't think so.)
Well, sure... but if we have someone willing to fix it, why would we turn them away? Are we only allowed to fix the gaping holes?
Of course not. But I think there is good reason to be suspicious when people contract Wikipedia entries to companies (for better or worse) -- it looks like a path down a road to PR firms and people using their full-time jobs towards editing agendas into Wikipedia. "Sure, there are more of us than there are of them," one could say, but then again, most of us only edit Wikipedia as a hobby.
The appeal to only the not-for-profit companies makes it sound very innocuous but if we're talking about firms, politicians, etc. it suddenly looks a little more questionable.
In the end, though, the money will find one way or another to work on Wikipedia. If Wikipedia continues to have such a high pagerank and is one of the few sites about sites that can be modified, it will no doubt become part of a standard PR campaign to slip some edits into Wikipedia, and no doubt people will be more subtle about their POV pushing as time goes on. I doubt it will ever become a place to just plaster advertisements—those are easy to spot and easy to kill—but I'm sure some sort of edits-for-hire must already be going on outside of MyWikiBiz and I'm sure there are more to come.
FF