On 1/24/07, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
On 1/24/07, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
You'd think Microsoft would know better than to think this was a good idea in the first place, but ah well. We all learn as we go.
I'm curious whether you mean that in terms of public perception, or whether it would actually work. I sort of feel that for any article which has not achieved some state of perfection (ie, complete NPOV coverage), then anyone paying someone to add material is probably not that harmful. If the article *was* bad, and biased, than the other side paying someone to "correct the balance" is probably a good thing, isn't it? Even if they overshoot the mark and make the bias point the other way, the article probably ends up closer to where we're trying to get to than it was already.
But I accept that public perception of conflict of interest is a sensitive issue and shouldn't be treated lightly.
Steve
I'm not sure if this will even end up getting us closer to NPOV. There are already people calling (at least on IRC) for the deletion of some Microsoft related articles, saying they're astroturfing (though of course they have no proof or even reason to think that MS is paying anybody besides Jelliffe, and they're not talking about XML related articles. I fear that we'll lose some good content in a backlash against Microsoft because of this.