[WikiEN-l] Accusations of 'advertising'

[Matthew Brown]

Going through AfD today, I was struck by frequent accusations of
'advertising' being thrown at articles about companies and commercial
products, and contributors to those articles.  (The case I especially
noticed was [[Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Roland System-100]], but
that's only one specific example; it's an endemic problem).  I think
this is a problem, an assumption of bad faith, and an unnecessary
biting of newbies.

I think that Wikipedia being constantly bombarded by genuine spam has
put us in an overly defensive mindset, which is also fed by the
free-software anti-commercial attitude of some contributors.  Spam is
when an article is created to garner publicity or hits.  It's not
documenting anything anyone cares about, it's instead trying to give
false respectability to something our readers don't want to see.

We delete huge amounts of things as 'Spam' and 'Blatant advertising'
that are not.  They are well-meaning attempts by someone who is
interested in something to document it in Wikipedia.  By calling their
attempts to help by such names, we are burning people.  We're taking
someone who might become a useful contributor and slapping them
because they had the temerity not to know the rules, including the
unwritten ones.

Some of these articles shouldn't be created at all, because no
reliable sources exist for them.  If that's the case, that's what we
should tell the contributor.  In other cases sources exist but the
creator didn't cite them; this is a cleanup issue.  In yet other
cases, the information belongs in Wikipedia, but not where the
contributor placed it; an education issue.  And yes, I realize that
workload means that new page patrollers etc. may have to work in a
hurry - templated messages that don't assume bad faith can be made,
and even deletions can be done without insulting.

In many cases what's deemed 'advertising' isn't advertising at all, as
in the above example; that Roland synth hasn't been sold in almost 30
years, and nobody's trying to make money by writing a Wikipedia
article about it.  What's actually the case is that the article has
been written by someone who doesn't know our house style.  It reads
like an article on a vintage-synths website, written by an enthusiast.
 The difference between enthusiast-site writing and encyclopedia
writing has to be learned.

Can we start to not assume that peoples' motives are bad unless they
show that they are?

-Matt