Wikipedia Gets State Funding in Germany

tmk writes "How can Wikipedia be improved? The German government started a project today to train experts to contribute to Wikipedia. The goal is to write or improve several hundred articles about renewable resources in the Internet encyclopedia. The project is funded by the German Ministry of Nutrition, Agriculture, and Consumer Protection. The German chapter of the Wikimedia Foundation is hiring a Wikipedian to coordinate the efforts. 'The challenge will be to motivate experts who have done good work in other projects to get involved in the community lexicon. As project director Florian Gerlach told heise online, "Such expert reports are usually written, edited, and published in the normal newspapers or even on other websites. But Wikipedia is radically different: articles there continually grow with input from numerous authors, who often remain anonymous. The end product is constantly changing, and third parties can publish their own texts or even change yours." The future authors will therefore receive some training to help them work with Wikipedia.'"

Comments

Re:Defending Germany's POV

[mdielmann]

What exactly gave you the impression that the POV of someone who is paid is less valid than the POV of someone who isn't? Note also that scientists already publish as part of their jobs, just not in such an accessible forum. They also seem to be quite concerned about their reputations in their fields of expertise, almost as if their sources of funding were tied to the quality of their work and their publishing history.
The only problem I see with this idea is that not enough people who fund scientists are promoting it.

Re:Uh...

[Capsaicin]

Out of curiosity, can anyone explain to me how the German government paying people to edit and to write wikipedia pages about a certain topic (in this case, renewable resources) does not constitute propaganda?

Unless you were working on a different definition, we'll define 'propaganda' as "The systematic dissemination of information, esp. in a biased or misleading way, in order to promote a political cause or point of view." (OED). It should be clear that the payment by the government to write stuff is not necessarily propaganda ... it very much depends on what they write. It is not beyond the realm of possibility that the information they produce will be accurate (in that it reflects the best technical view of experts in the field), or where the subject matter allows for controversy, that it will be balanced. Furthermore it is possible that the contributions will not promote any particular political cause. For instance how is the statement "On Earth acceleration due to gravity is ca. 9.8m/s2" propaganda when written by a government funded writer (but apparently not when written by anyone else)?

In other words you'll have to see what is produced before you can judge it. The mere fact of government funding doesn't make communication propganda.