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

[Delirium]

Ian Woollard 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.
>   

So should I cease writing on my academic specialty? It is directly in my 
monetary and professional interest if my area (which is fairly small) 
gets more publicity, and Wikipedia can probably help with that. However, 
it *also* happens to be the area I'm most professionally qualified to 
edit in (being vaguely close to receiving a PhD in it), and I also have 
a genuine desire (apart from self-interest) to increase the coverage and 
accuracy of information on the subject---I picked it, after all, because 
I find it interesting. (I've also edited articles on universities that 
pay me money, and countries of which I'm a citizen.)

But I'm not quite sure on which side of the bright line this falls.

-Mark