[WikiEN-l] Gaping void in Wikipedia

Tue Sep 19 22:43:26 UTC 2006

--- Gregory Kohs <thekohser at gmail.com> wrote:

> do so in the interest of some interesting Wikipedia
> analysis, and fair play
> (feel free to rip me a new one in the blog's Comments
> section).  Here is the
> blog post:
> 
>
http://mywikibiz-com.blogspot.com/2006/09/gaping-void-in-wikipedia.html

You have a point about the lack of business/organization
depth as compared to the huge amount of fan articles,
relatively few of which qualify as either [[WP:NPOV]] or
[[WP:V]].

If, however, you (or another wiki business) are receiving
money to give a company/organization a presence on
Wikipedia, you are working as an agent of that company,
making it as much a conflict of interest as if they had
hired any other PR or ad firm to do it.

I don't know if this is fixable.  Businesses want to make
money.  And so do the businesses that report on businesses.
 So the people who are capable of filling in the gaps
actually have a motivation to decrease the amount of useful
information in Wikipedia.  Or, of course, not add to it.

That leaves it up to each business itself.  Does it want to
spend time and money including itself in Wikipedia or would
it prefer to spend it on search engine manipulation and
their own site.  There was a clear answer to what the
current preference is (i.e., not WP) elsewhere in this
mailing list recently.

I think Wikipedia needs to spend some time, and donation
money, on actively promoting users to go out and research
and add more business articles.  That or wait for market
forces (like Pokemon cartoons involving coal) and the
Associated Press to make each business an item of popular interest.

~~Pro-Lick
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/User:Halliburton_Shill 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Pro-Lick 
http://www.wikiality.com/User:Pro-Lick

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