[WikiEN-l] Notability of commercial organisations

[Tom Morris]

 On Saturday, 28 April 2012 at 13:44, WereSpielChequers wrote:

1. The ratio of volunteers whose hobby it is to write about business to
hired hands operating covertly is probably not as healthy for Wikipedia on
general business issues as it would be re hill forts, classic cars or
hurricanes.

I concur with this: my primary issue with all the paid editing/CREWE etc.
discussions is it means that unpaid volunteers including admins will have
to pick up the slack. Legitimising it turns it from a trickle to a flood,
and we now need to find more humans to police the crap these PR folk turn
out.

Think about it by comparison to drug legalisation. The argument goes like
this: we legalise pot and the government can tax and regulate the sale of
marijuana, and reduce the law enforcement costs for policing it. The cops
can spend their time policing actually important crime and the government
get a new tax stream.

Explicitly permitting paid advocacy editing gets us the opposite bargain:
it increases the 'cost' for 'law enforcement', admins have to spend more
time policing. And what's our tax payoff? Lots of borderline spammy,
business articles. Great. Because, you know, we haven't got hundreds of
those in the NewPages backlog and the WP:AFC backlog that nobody can be
bothered to deal with...

2. Some businesses have annoyed people, and I suspect that articles on
businesses in general get more hostile unbalanced editing than do articles
on extinct megafauna, asteroids or mathematical formulae.
3. There are areas where our coverage is, or aims to be, comprehensive,
and there are areas where we merely cover the most notable. with crinoids,
cathedrals and corsairs this doesn't bring up a fairness issue. But with
business it does. If we only create articles for the "main players" in a
market then we are potentially giving them an advantage over smaller or
newer rivals, especially if those articles emphasise the positive.


I'd say one of the problems with business articles is they are so badly
written. It's all dynamic providers of made-to-measure solutions. I'd want
to reducify the instantiation of literary constructions that do not meet
our best practices.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:B2B

-- 
Tom Morris
<http://tommorris.org/>