Telecom Italia gets students to write corporate bio, free!

[thekohser]

I really didn't notice this when our own Andreas Kolbe wrote about it, or when Beutler gave it a send-up. I think it merits a discussion thread.

The Italian Wikipedia article Telecom Italia was completely refurbished by six undergraduates at Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, in a cooperative project between Telecom Italia and (I presume) a professor at the university, with guidance from Wikimedia Italia's Cristian Consonni.

Is this the future of "paid editing"? Broker college students as unpaid interns?

[Textnyymi]

Is this the future of "paid editing"? Broker college students as unpaid interns?

They get paid in free bananas at lunchtime

[HRIP7]

This thread is discussed on an Italian blog here.

[Poetlister]

If they weren't paid, it's not paid editing. That's an interesting problem to be sorted out!

[thekohser]

This thread is discussed on an Italian blog here.

The commenters seem to be wringing their hands in anguish.

[EricBarbour]

Hah. This crap is a routine, almost daily, occurrence, and even when pushed in their faces, they refuse to believe it.

not only the changes could easily have been canceled, but the students have explained what they were doing in their user pages

Sometimes they do, sometimes they don't. And no one is checking. Only when an editor who gives a damn stumbles across it and dares to fix it (or someone posts it on this forum and embarrasses the "Wikipedians") is such a problem article likely to be repaired. "Unimportant" articles usually are never repaired otherwise.

[Textnyymi]

"Who should have rewritten the page about Telecom? Someone working for Telecom? Of course
not. There could be a risk to have a hagiographic page. After all the guidelines don't support pages
written by people with a conflict of interest. Have these students gained something from working
on those pages, even if didn't earn any money? Yes, possibly, because they were following a
course about communication sciences and that could have helped them."

"The real question is: Has Wikipedia gained something from all this? The answer is "Yes". There are now more data, information, sources, and users can now know more things (mot "different things", but "things"). Isn't this the objective of an encyclopedia?"

Eh, whatever. The important thing for .mau. is that Wikipedia "gains something".

And of course Tavecchio has a BLP http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlo_Tavecchio
But, I assure you, this banana icon was not made specifically to refer to that incident that involved him

[HRIP7]

Well, this is a two-edged sword. We often criticise the English Wikipedia for being overly persecutory of companies (which drives paid editing underground and/or leads to hatchet jobs), and praise the German Wikipedia for its policy of registered, openly disclosed company accounts editing with full transparency.

Of course there are potential problems with an initiative like this one in the Italian Wikipedia, but on the whole I prefer this approach to the one espoused by the English Wikipedia – as long as it's made fully transparent to the reader.