Paid editing, The encyclopedic version Options

[jayvdb]

Wikipedia:WikiProject_Cooperation/Paid_editing_on_Wikipedia
With sections dedicated to:
Jimmy Wales
Wikipedia Review
Microsoft

More to come:
Vatican
Diebold
CIA
Walmart
AstraZeneca
Britain's Labour Party
Dow chemical
Disney
Canadian government
Industry Canada
Church of Scientology
Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet and Defence in Australia
the US Republican Party
the United Nations
the US Senate
US Democratic Party's
Israeli government
Dog Breeder's association of America
Montana Sen. Conrad Burns'
Fox News
FBI
Dell
Anheuser-Busch, SeaWorld’s owner.
Pepsi
SCO Group (software)
CBS
Washington Post
DuPont
Ohio State (misc)
Paid Illustrators
Bell Pottinger
Portland Communications,
Newt Gingrich
Corporate Representatives for Ethical Wikipedia Engagement (CREWE)
Chartered Institute of Public Relations (CIPR)
Wikiexperts.us
GLAM

[lilburne]

So what is actually the problem here? I looked at the articles for the main companies in my field of software. Each consists of a couple of paragraphs of bumf written by the respective marketing depts, and pretty much that is all that wikipedia will ever have on these companies. Yet at least 3 of them were behind the development of computer graphics going back to the early 1960s. I'll take a couple of competitors and its product as an example:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siemens_PLM_Software
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parametric_Te...ogy_Corporation
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ProEngineer
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parasolid

and compare them against:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_chrome
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_maps


Today, about 5 of the companies mentioned above, produce the software, that makes 90% of everything you buy. You'll never know that from a wikipedia article because the story behind all of that is buried in press releases and other company communications.

[HRIP7]

Some things the page should mention are that

- Wikipedia has had and no doubt continues to have many articles on individuals and corporations that were unfair to their subjects, to the point of being attack pages.

- Wikipedia's anonymous editing concept makes it an ideal venue for defamation, encouraging stalkers, jilted lovers, professional rivals and competitors to edit the articles of people they don't like.

- While there is every arrangement and policy investment designed to protect anonymous editors, there is no comparable policy investment to protect biography subjects: for example, someone complaining at a noticeboard about another editor's "conflict-of-interest" edits or "legal threat" gets a response within 5 minutes, while a subject writing to OTRS may have to wait weeks for a reply; and while a biography subject who threatens to sue an editor for libel is blocked from Wikipedia, someone who is already in a real-life legal dispute with them can edit their biography, the top Google link for their name, with impunity.

- Biography subjects who come to Wikipedia, alarmed that the no. 1 Google link for their name shows them in a worse light than they deserve, find themselves in a disorienting environment where the rules are stacked against them, and frequently end up hazed, mocked, and blocked from editing.

- While Wikipedia has much the same reach as a top newspaper, it is not accountable to the public in any significant way, and people victimised by it have no voice.

In such circumstances, a paid Wikipedia advocate might actually make sense; as would supervision by something like the press complaints commission.