Is it unethical for, say, a company's "media guy" to update Wikipedia if his company releases a major new project? "On October 1, 2013, Initech released version 2.0 of its flagship product IniIDE Pro(tm)" I think there's a line to draw between adding some pertinent information to keep the page from being outdated, vs. fighting to keep all negative information off the page.
What about listing a company under the product or category page or placing subtle advertisements on the page? An example would be Nest adding links to their wikipedia to the Thermostat wikipedia page. Is that ethical? Is it legal? Is it against wikipedias Terms of Use?
Borderline really. There are clear conflict of Internet guidelines for the project, whilst that isn't an egregious example, I would counsel anyone working for a company to avoid editing any articles related to their company. The PR mess you might cause (even for innocent edits) could well outweigh any gains you may have achieved.
The best thing is to participate on talk pages. Even there, be careful not to respond to inflammatory comments or trolls.
Why? What is unethical about providing the truthful and correct information about company and products? I would understand that if Wikipedia banned all commercial product information, but it does not. So why it is OK for unknown schoolkid (random example) to edit a page with the list of, say, Cisco products (random example), but it's not OK for a person working for Cisco who actually knows what he's talking about and has access to most accurate, correct and up-to-date information possible? Wikipedia requires reputable sources - which means the said schoolkid would be copypasting some info from somewhere anyway - so what's wrong with the most authoritative sources - people actually making things it describes and knowing everything about them?
For the same reason that we frown on politicians from accepting money for making ethical decisions. The issue is that the Wikipedia community do not know whether the information is slanted towards a positive viewpoint by an interested party. In fact, seemingly neutral information may often gloss over important information or give undue positive weight towards a subject.
Bad analogy. If you want to make better analogy, you'd say it's unethical for a politician to give an interview about his own party or write a newspaper column about his own political platform, because that is self-promotion and creates conflict of interests, and makes him gloss over negative sides of his policies and give undue positive weight towards the subject. Sounds silly, right, politicians do that all the time, that's the name of the game.
Of course, editing process can be abused by interested parties - politicians can lie to advance their causes, and wikipedia editors can be (and sometimes are) driven by motives very different from the quest for pure and accurate knowledge. However this can and is happening without any employment relationship, and employment relationship does not add much to it - one can be non-neutral by thousand other reasons (e.g. N happens to be a fan of certain ice hokey team and rewrites its Wikipedia article to extoll its virtues in excess). It seems as one of these reasons - a very real one, but definitely not unique - is being singled out. Is it because money is the root of all evil?
Yes, not the best example. I should have said paid for ethical and unethical decisions alike!
But indeed, those other examples are also frowned on and may get you blocked. These are not new concepts to the Wikipedia community, I was heavily involved 5 years ago and had to setup the admin's noticeboard to coordinate efforts around areas precisely like this.
It's not even money that's the issue, but it is almost certain that the paid editing that was occuring was to whitewash articles to "correct" the impressions given about certain companies.
I've never seen, and doubt I'll ever see, a company that edits Wikipedia articles for money that does it for an unbiased reason. Otherwise, why would you pay the company?
The best I can see is a consulting firm that does no editing but merely advises on the best way to interact directly with the Wikipedia community.
Well, we have changed here from "employee of X can't talk about X on Wikipedia" to "company that edits Wikipedia for money", which is different thing.
>>> Otherwise, why would you pay the company?
I can name a bunch of reasons. To deliver correct information and ensure it is correct. To weed out mistakes and misinformation that may hurt clients of a company. To make people more likely to consume products by making them familiar with true variety and features of the said products. There are a lot of reasons to put absolutely true information out there, and there are a lot of companies that make money on doing exactly that. Of course, there are also those who put out false and misleading information for money. But presenting it as if any information that somebody paid for disseminating must be false is not correct.
And again, I see no reason why random person can just come in and edit anything, but random company can not. If I were Wikipedia, I'd rather do the opposite - make companies that are interested in providing input into certain pages identify their official representative, clearly mark it as such (maybe even charge for the privilege of having "verified account" or something) and engage them in the process. Of course, if the said rep seems to be bending the truth, it would be at his own peril - imagine how embarrassing it would be for a company to have their official verified rep banned from Wikipedia? So the incentive to cooperate would be on both sides.
So I want to point out that I wasn't thinking of hiring some outside company to make you look good, I was talking about Bob in PR putting in a link to the press release when they retire product X. There's no bias in "On January 15, 2013, Initech announced end-of-life for X[12]".
I'm not a wikipedia editor, so they may think of things differently, but when I see a news story about a company, I generally think, "Interesting."
I don't think, "Ooh, I better check if this is in their Wikipedia article yet." Now, maybe the most devout of wikifiddlers will do that, but why not just make it part of your process? If it's not notable, presumably someone will delete that bit eventually. It's better than going to an article and finding that there's no news since 2009 or whenever the article was first written.
Maybe if there's a process for a pull-request like feature, similar to github, but what a company thinks is newsworthy may not be, or it may be newsworthy for a different reason than the company thinks it is, like a product that exploded on the launch day.
