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:Uh...

[mi]

It is better than what Microsoft did, because they improve Wikipedia (at least that's what I expect, being neutral and respect WP:NPOV)

NPOV is an unreachable ideal. These German-trained contributor's POV will coincide with Germany's and will, no doubt, leach into their contributions.

Defending Germany's POV

[mi]

Yeah, they will probably totally buy into and disseminate propaganda such as "Global Warming" and other such nonsense that clearly only exists to further the German government's grip on power.

In other words, in your POV, Germany's POV makes sense. True or not, that is irrelevant.

What is discussed here, is that Germany has found a way to "pay the piper" — to further its POV. Perhaps less sloppily, but not entirely unlike the other astro-turfers. Again, whether that is a good or a bad POV is not, actually, relevant.

Re:Defending Germany's POV

[mi]

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?

The payee's POV is likely to, at least, consider the POV of the payer. As simple as that. For example, whenever various studies are discussed on this and other forums, the source of funding is often mentioned as a significant source of bias.

Being paid does not completely destroy one's credibility, of course. But it does diminish it, even though a number of other factors (such as the desire to keep credibility, and the good old-fashioned honesty) usually compensate.