[Foundation-l] This is not an Advertisement

[Tomek "Polimerek" Ganicz]

Brion Vibber wrote:
>>> It's about free/open educational content. It's about making materials
>>> open and available for use by the public, including the creation of
>>> derivative works and redistribution.
>> Exactly, but you you miss the point completely Brion. It's advertisement at a 
>> location where the free content is CREATED, not redistributed/mirrored. 
>> Actually I don't care about if people make money with Wikipedia content, the 
>> same applies for Linux distributions, but we are talking about advertisement 
>> on the location where the content is created. That kills our reliability, so
>> far we have that allready.
> 
> How? Please explain.

Well. I think it would be interesting to take a very close look how this 
    "non-advertisement" in sitenotice affects the content of the article 
of "non-advertised" company or organization.

Take a look on:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virgin_Unite

which was created first on 14:35 December 2007, and had almost 100 edits 
till now. I am quite sure that it would have never be edited so 
extensively if the logo of this organisation hadn' been used in 
sitenotice. This is rather obvious that this logo indeed has quite 
enormous effect on the content of this particular article. I am not 
judging if this effect was good or wrong.

What we may be afraid of:
*The company "non-advertised" on sitenotice might be interested to keep 
the article about itself in the shape they would prefer, and they may 
expect that someone from Foundation will take care of it
*It may end-up in agressive edit war, which may result in blocking this 
  article
*There will be more such articles, so the problem will grow soon.

This was not discussed yet, but if Foundation make a decision to put 
some "real" advertisement on Wikipedia and other projects, how it may 
affect the articles about advertised companies and organisation as well 
as biographic articles about the people conected with these companies 
and articles about products/services they provide?

It is really difficult to evaluate this without any experimental data, 
but I think many people fell that it may create some sort of conflict of 
interest.

-- 
Tomasz "Polimerek" Ganicz
http://pl.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Polimerek
http://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedysta:Polimerek
http://www.poli.toya.net.pl/
http://www.ptchem.lodz.pl/pl/TomaszGanicz.html