[WikiEN-l] Current consensus on PR editing?

[Tom Morris]

On 13 June 2012 15:51, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Came up at the London meetup. Opinion ranges talking to PR people to
> injecting formic acid into their eyeballs. So I'm going to stay we are
> still at the lot of shouting stage.
>

Following on from that discussion, one thing I think I suggested was
that if we were to come up with a list of "good admin practices"
towards PR folk, it might be easier to derive good practice that way.

If instead of saying "what do we think of PR people editing
Wikipedia?" we said "under what circumstances should administrators
act on the requests of PR people?", I think we might have a way out of
the conundrum.

So, here's a real life example of how I've dealt with someone
representing a PR company.

An acquaintance of mine who works for a PR company emailed me asking
why the Wikipedia article about their company had been deleted. I
explained that it was due to lack of notability, per the GNG, and
explained in detail what AfD was.

They asked whether it was possible to appeal the decision in the AfD.
I explained DRV to them. I said that while I can undelete the article,
there wouldn't be community consensus for me to do so.

I suggested that if they want the article deleted, they locate five
sources that specifically meet the requirements of the GNG.

I'm waiting on them to send said sources. If they do and I'm genuinely
satisfied that these five sources meet GNG, I'll start a DRV that
explains that I know this person in real life but don't have any
business or financial connection with them, and list the sources.

This sidesteps all the canards about "paid editing"* and COI editing
and so on. I think if we could find all the various common issues that
happen with these kinds of editing and work out some rough formulas of
how to resolve them, we can solve most of the problems without animus.

* There's nothing wrong with "paid editing" in my view. If Bill Gates
were to set up a fund that paid a living wage to a group of
Wikipedians to write neutral, high-quality, referenced articles on,
say, science, maths and history, I don't see a problem. The problem
with paid editing isn't the pay, it's the articles they are editing.
Shilling is the problem, not being paid.

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