This page is for discussing the contents of Community Guidelines/Business promotion questions.
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2009-12-12 11:30:54 I need a little help understanding something. Apartment rent prices are ok because they are educational. Bicycle service hourly rates were identified as not being ok. To someone living in an apartment who has a bike with a flat what is the difference? If I can look at the pages of the pages in town that sell bicycles looking through them for the place that I want to go to get my flat fixed isn't that educational? I'm assuming that haircut and other salon services would be grouped with bike repair, but I'm a little unclear on that. —JasonAller
2009-12-12 23:34:35 I think the difference is presentation. The "price rule" is there to just keep things from going a bit too far — it's a good litmus test of whether or not a page is promotional-y. For the most part, any prices that non-business-associated people add will likely be valuable to the community and educational. However, when business owners/employees begin adding lots of price details, etc it is almost always promotional in nature. So, if we say, "hey, avoid adding prices" then it tends to keep things in check.
As an aside, none of this is a legal or strict requirement (we could ignore the IRS restriction entirely and likely be fine, as Amy indicated in her letter). We follow the rules (as rough and vague as they may be) to show diligence on our educational purpose. —PhilipNeustrom
2010-01-29 05:40:53 I too think it's somewhat of a blurry line. A potential out that seems to divide things well: 1) no prices on the individual page. 2) creation of "comparison" pages that have tables of price comparisons for, um, things. How much does a burrito cost at restaurants X, Y and Z? That's educational and not tied to the page/business directly. —WesHardaker
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While my current state of mind on this is below (and if you're reading through this, read that first!), I'd like to respond to one of your points: a blurry line within the context of community editing and standards is not a terrible thing. Yes, it can result in "fairness" issues, but I think that there are always fairness issues in a "somebody has to step up and do something" volunteer system. This is just another case where people make judgement calls and if they go far enough out of bounds of the combined view of the community standards, somebody calls them out on it. This is also a top down Wiki Spot guideline, but that's true of other restrictions like "must have an intended community". The interwiki gnomes who are tagging and watching for abuse are making judgement calls there too (and sometimes cross checking or disputing each other). Each community can decide how far to push, and if some wiki goes way overboard and becomes a pure business listing service (Redding was a bit close in direction at one point, actually), then at that time it can be addressed. I'm pretty sure that your points are more oriented toward a "inside a member community" perspective specific to Davis Wiki, but the question of "what are our restrictions?" is going to pop up for new and maturing communities as well. I'd like to see flexible yet clear guidelines develop rather than creating One True Format for entries which all Wiki Spot communities must follow. -jw
2010-01-29 14:21:36 It almost puts me in mind of the difference between using material (like a speech) and copying material. If the focus of the writing is on the prices, or they are a large portion of the body of the work, then it's basically a promotional sales tool. If there is substantial body to the work and it has prices in it as a minor aspect of the writeup, the work is about he subject, and the prices part of that documenting of the subject. IRS aside, there has always been a reluctance to have wiki entries (and entire wikis) become mere commercial sales material. Philip, since you spoke to the various parties most, would you characterize the concern here as being that of purpose and/or intent, and the later back and forth was an attempt to define a stated restriction that blocked the purpose and/or intent of wiki content from being commercial in nature? On a more practical aspect, I think that an entry that reads like a newspaper article about a subject (I'm thinking a hair salon here) is fine, even if it includes prices and events (which is typical for newspaper articles, typically using a limited set of representative prices to illustrate the price range). If the entry looks like a block ad, with a focus on a simple list of services and prices and marketing verbage to promote special events with very little else — well then, it is a problem. In the past those have lingered in the idea (as least in my mind) that somebody would eventually come along and add more community oriented content. If that's no longer an option, and the community content has to come first... well... I'm not sure that's a bad restriction, as it might make for a higher quality wiki at any given time (including those that are new and growing). —Evan 'JabberWokky' Edwards
Yeah, it's generally about intent. It's just so that the pages' mention of prices is either educational, super in the community's interest, or provide consumer protection / comparison. At least for now. We can change this guideline later on if this doesn't work out for us. But, for now, thinking about prices lets us have a kinda defined line around where pages cross into promoting business rather than providing useful community information.
2010-02-09 00:26:04 Ah, just found the talk page on this. Seeing what Wes noted above. I think prices are good to have. A lot of restaurants have menus available and I think its useful. Yeah, maybe somewhat blurry line, but I think people want to know what things are going to cost. I am completely for not turning daviswiki into a bunch of commercials, but I think prices can be very nice for users, and does more good than bad. —jefftolentino
The guideline is:
For-profit businesses are always free to contribute, respond, and help maintain pages about their business on a wiki. These pages are maintained by the community as a whole, and the pages should be written in the voice of the community, not in the voice of the business. Pages about businesses should serve to inform and teach the community as a whole, not promote a particular for-profit business.
What's this mean? This means that adding stuff like promotional material (without any other value, e.g. it's not historical, newsworthy or otherwise interesting) and advertising is generally not okay on pages about for-profit businesses. We tend to consider things like product price lists to be promotional in nature, but there are exceptions.
So there's a lot more to it than prices. Prices are just an example we gave the IRS agent of something we'll avoid — it helps keep us honest. It will likely change down the road as we evolve. Menu pages may be okay, we're still discussing this stuff. We just need to have some kind of formalized limits in place regarding commercial promotion. —PhilipNeustrom
