[WikiEN-l] "How to promote your company in Wikipedia" - pretty clueful blog post

[Todd Allen]

On Wed, Jul 2, 2008 at 10:17 AM, Ian Woollard <ian.woollard at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 02/07/2008, Tim Starling <tstarling at wikimedia.org> wrote:
>> Wikipedia has thousands of articles about towns written by people who live
>> in them, languages by people who speak them and academic fields by people
>> who work in them. I don't see any bright line between that, and writing
>> about a company you work for, in terms of notability.
>
> The bright line is money. My town doesn't pay me. My language doesn't
> pay me. My company does pay me. That's not conducive to truth or
> accuracy or referencing reliable sources.
>
>> -- Tim Starling
>
> --
> -Ian Woollard
>
> We live in an imperfectly imperfect world. If we lived in a perfectly
> imperfect world things would be a lot better.
>
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And if your town did pay you (for example, if you were employed in
some way by it), you shouldn't be writing about it. I believe you've
found the exact correct dividing line. I may live in Denver, but I
have no particular interest in promoting it, and no one's paying me to
do so, so me writing about it would not involve any particular
conflict of interest. I may speak English, but again, I won't get paid
more if English is somehow promoted, so there's no possibility of a
conflict of interest if I edit the article on the language. On the
other hand, I would certainly refrain from editing the article on my
employer (aside from simple stuff like reverts of obvious vandalism),
because whether real or not, there would be a possible conflict of
interest in that scenario. Better to let others who aren't involved
write that article, there are many others I can write instead. If I
were to own my own business, or became notable enough for there to be
an article on me personally, I would similarly refrain from editing or
creating any such article, because there simply wouldn't be the
objectivity there that we all should strive for.

-- 
Freedom is the right to say that 2+2=4. From this all else follows.