QUOTE(EricBarbour @ Wed 31st August 2011, 4:33pm)
QUOTE(thekohser @ Wed 31st August 2011, 1:17pm)
What is it with Coren and Jimbo and other Wikipediots who think that every notable person, company, organization, or activity has this horrifying laundry list of "unflattering" skeletons in the closet, just waiting to be "outed" on Wikipedia?
Well, you know what to do.
Take 100 WP articles about companies, using the RANDOM button.
Read them, and tote up the sentences that appear to be "neutral", the
ones that appear to be company-generated puffery, and the sentences
that appear to be hostile or defamatory.
Make a pretty color pie chart of the percentages and show it to us.
(It will take a while. Because the percentage of company profiles in
Wikipedia's database is only 1%. There's far more about cartoons
than about the business world. Sorry.)
Eric, I will actually do that (or some reasonable facsimile, such as checking every 5th sentence of each article, as that would be less time-consuming), if someone will have the courage to ask something of Jimbo on his talk page in the next 24 hours...
It appears to me that the big hub-bub about this centers on the word "advocacy". Even Jimbo seems to be saying it's okay to receive compensation or academic credit if your mission is to edit Wikipedia in a neutral way about subjects that do not inherently benefit those doing the compensating. But, it does suddenly become a problem if the editing takes the form of advocacy.
So, the simple question is...
"
Jimbo, what is Wikipedia's stance on advocacy editing of the wholly unpaid and uncompensated variety? If advocacy editing of any variety is not tolerated on Wikipedia, then this notion of 'paid' advocacy being wrong is rather redundant."
Once that question's been posted to Jimbo from an established, long-term WP editor account in good standing, I'll get started on the business article analysis. My work will take many hours to complete. Posting the question to Jimbo would take about 3 minutes.