Cornmacabre

Note to self:

AOL - Primary Industry should include "Online Advertising" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AOL - Consistent with Google DoubleClick - Their display ads division constitutes over 42.2% of AOL’s value (http://www.forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/2015/05/11/aol-earnings-third-party-ads-boost-revenues-yet-again/#654f1c1b3ff4)

Marketing and advertising articles

I wish you every success in your endeavours to improve marketing and advertising articles. Many of these articles are appalling in their scope, concepualisation and execution- with misreprentations, misinterpretations, lack of focus, lack of context, poor written expression and a complete failure to understand the fundamentals.

I began editing with very similar objectives around 18 months ago, but have met enormous resistance to change. As a retired marketing academic, I promised myself that I would work on improving Wikipedia, for the benefit of students of marketing around the world. During my teaching career, I was acutely aware that students relied heavily on Wikipedia for their essays and reports, but were being exposed to misinformation through the poor quality of WP articles.

My experience on Wikipedia has been very intense and mostly unpleasant. I have been stalked, harrassed, bullied, had entire articles deleted, large sections of articles deleted, had my every move become the subject of constant reporting on the Wikipedia External Links Noticeboard and been subject to other forms of harrassment. From time to time, I quit editing for a few weeks or months, in a vain attempt to have my harrassers look elsewhere for their sport. But every time I resumed editing, my harrassers were waiting in the wings, clearly with the intention of escalating their bullying antics.

In spite of all that, the articles that I have expanded and repaired, have doubled, tripled or even quadrupled the average number of monthly page views - which suggests that ordinary users appreciate solid content even if Wikipedia editors don't. Now, I have slowed right down and have almost had enough. The pressure has become too much - for so little reward. It's a shame because I have the time, skills and experience to fix a great many marketing related articles - but it seems that most editors do not want to see substantive improvements - or at least they define improvements in a very narrow manner (i.e. whether the article has punctuation marks in the "correct" place, or whether it is written in British vs American English or whether the reference is primary or secondary are considerations that appear to assume a much higher importance and consierably more debate than whether the subtantive content is accurate on on-point).

Editing on Wikipedia is not for the faint-hearted. If you can be satisfied just with the knowledge that your improvements are useful to every day users, you can get a lot of satisfaction from it. But, you will never be able to please the Wikipedia community because there are just too many contradictions inherent in WP's plethora of policies, and too many editors with diverse and contradictory opinions about what is "correct" and what "should" be done. In addition, there are far too many vindictive editors who use bullying and harrassment as a means of ensuring that their editing decisions stand. BronHiggs (talk) 19:43, 30 June 2018 (UTC)