[Foundation-l] Fundraising & Networking updates

[Thomas Dalton]

> I don't. For any company you Google who happens to have a Wikipedia
> article, you see a page with their logo and a company description.
> Now, it may be a neutral description, but the company is still there.
> People pay SEOs truckloads of money to get that kind of Google
> ranking for their companies, and an entire industry has emerged
> from search engines (as you know). You mean to tell me that these
> companies who are otherwise paying very heavily to get that top-ranked
> spot aren't getting free advertising from us? We may not be getting paid
> for it, but companies left and right are advertising all over Wikipedia and
> this must stop.

It's publicity, it's not advertising. There is a difference. If they
pay us to put their logo on our article about them, that's advertising
and has all kinds of issues associated with it (it's not neutral, for
a start - the decision on whether or not to have a logo on a given
article should be based on editorial concerns, not financial ones). If
it's there purely by our choice, that's free publicity for them,
certainly, but it's neutral and pretty much uncontroversial.