On 1/24/07, Steve Bennett <stevagewp(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On 1/24/07, David Gerard <dgerard(a)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.