Baker Hughes (T-H-L-K-D).

It certainly looks like a company puff piece.
(Except for the "Criminal Charges" part. I guess that makes it "neutral".)

Heavily edited by Anipilot in 2006-07. Who also argued with others about the Schlumberger article. As if he were dissing a competitor, oddly enough. Which Schlumberger is.

Baker Hughes was also edited by a number of IP addresses, some from Dubai, some from the Houston area. Baker Hughes has its HQ in Houston and a major office in Dubai.

I've seen scores of corporate articles like this. It's routine.

Exactly. That article is total commercialist trash, it reads like it was churned out of a corporate spin-producing machine.

The defenders of paid editing have pointed out that Wikipedia has a page known as the Wikipedia:Reward_board (T-H-L-K-D), on which one can post an amount of money that is to be given to an editor in exchange for performing an editing task. The difference between the Wikipedia reward board is that the editors are private individuals, who are not working to further the aims of a specific cause. The motivation of corporate propagandists working for private public relations firms is to make another corporation, that their bosses have decided to do work for, look good. The editors have biases because they are paid to spam Wikipedia with blather that makes a particular company and/or its execs look like the Good Ship Lollipop. Making paid editing acceptable legitimizes the degradation of Wikipedia's content, as if the quality is not low enough, and it legitimizes the erosion of the noncommercial motivations of most Wikipedians.

But that's not why Jimmy is so adamantly opposed to paid editing.

You seem to completely miss the difference between corporate employees stumbling their way through writing a Wikipedia article, and a paid encyclopedist who is well-versed in the process and procedures who is hired on a one-off basis to create content that conforms with Wikipedia's standards.

You're not Jimbo, are you?

I'm starting to wonder what's so bad about a bunch of information about a company, on an article about a company. If someone wants a bunch of criticism about a company, they should make an article about "Criticism of X".

Feel free to try to figure this one out. Obviously the Magical Jimbo-Fairies haven't.

If they did, they would have a coherent policy dealing with corporations, as well as BLPs.
There would be a well-defined format for the article, that all such corporate bios would be
required to adhere to. But when you go to WP:Paid editing, this is what you see.


Which links to the vague bullshit on the COI page. Yeah, that's very helpful, thanks!

Greg, that would be good in theory (though, due to the removal of criticism of a company or its questionable practices, it would naturally be biased in favor of the company narrative), but what about Wikipedia's notability policy? Is criticism of a company, in itself, notable enough to qualify for an article? Should the notability policy be totally done away with? After all, more encyclopedic information can't be all that bad, unless the information is just a component of the BLP defamation engine. Personally, corporate criticism seems no more worthy of an article than lists of anime TV series episodes, but that really isn't bad in itself either.

Multiple narratives can be included on the same page, without bias in favor of one over the other narrative(s). Editing to insert corporate PR is just churning out propaganda for the commercial practices of a particular company, and not adding high-quality material. There are already enough problems with incompetent editors and unmaintained or poorly maintained articles.

Corporations are motivated by the sole goal of profit. They will exaggerate, lie, bullshit, evade, obfuscate, deny, and deceive as much as possible if being honest is a threat to maximum financial gain. Why would a company be honest about the people that it scams or mistreats, or tell the truth about the forests they destroyed, the water they polluted, or the lives they have ruined, when they can just say "We're working on it. Next question, please"? Adding legitimacy to their exaggeration, lying, bullshitting, evasion, obfuscation, denial, and deception does not improve Wikipedia, which itself already engages in that behavior and whose management (the WMF) acts more like a business than anything else.

That's the mentality of the heretical breakaway Wikinfo site! Next, you'll be proposing some of their other sensible ghastly policies, like giving credit to Larry Sanger!

No it's not.


No they're not.

If it hasn't been noted yet, this seems to be a hot topic on the GodKing page. If I understand correctly, teh Jimbeau seems to imply that paid editors should only edit the talk pages (or perhaps make requests on s33kr1t irc channels).

Is there a Godwin's Law correlate about comparing everything to enabling pedophiles yet?

Well, it really depends on whether you define a "corporation" as a single hive entity that consumes the identity of everyone who works for it, or just the leadership. But, CEOs and management are driven by profit. The business activities that corporations engage in are not goals themselves, but means to attain the goal of profit. They may donate to charity, but they have no obligation to, and it is more the personal generosity of the CEO than a business-related decision, unless it is just about getting that tax break.

Since Wikicrusher is having so much difficulty with this, I'm going to help out. Corporations are motivated by the sole goal of self-interest.

In the case of most corporations, this self-interest is a careful blend of survival or self-preservation, return on capital, sustaining shareholder value, maintaining a believable level of goodwill, and other factors. Any given company could increase profits temporarily by, for example, drastically reducing the quality of materials used. However, this poses a grave threat to corporate self-interest, because of the potential backlash from the marketplace, government regulation, employee loyalty, etc.

For Wikicrusher to say that "profit" is the "sole" motivation of corporations is just sloppy misunderstanding of how actual businesses are run. The same sloppiness pervades Wikipediots' interpretation of how responsible paid editing could work on Wikipedia.

Well said, thekohser. That said, I'm not sure wikicrusher will agree with your understanding of the situation. I think perhaps he sees the world in rather black and white terms, or at least black and red.