The politics are so bad because the stakes are so low... I have a hard time believing that there's any grave risk to throwing open the doors on Wikipedia, simply because not all Wikipedia articles are equal.
I've been on the other end of this. The shitty little start-up I worked on for many years somehow managed to squeak past the finish line of notability and keep its shitty little Wikipedia entry from being deleted (despite the fact that it was mostly written by the marketing department). And you know what kind of difference it made? Absolutely none. To the best of my knowledge, precisely 0.0% of the site's traffic came from the 'external link' in the Wikipedia entry. We got precisely 0 phone calls or emails from potential customers who heard about us on Wikipedia. VCs did not magically dump piles of money on us because we were listed on Wikipedia. Engineering candidates -- even bad engineering candidates -- never spontaneously sent us their resume after reading our Wikipedia entry.
Conversely, given that my startup benefitted not one bit from having a Wikipedia entry, I'm quite confident that if a competitor had wasted 15 minutes of his time to deface our Wikipedia article, it would have hurt us as a business not one lick.
Well that same thing also wouldn't hurt me either but I'm not Coca Cola. That's what I'm talking about. No one cares about small businesses or startups at all. If you're a company that no one even searches for on Google Places this doesn't apply to you.
It is a fact that these things happen and whether it's harmful or not it isn't right and it's the reason for these policies.
I've been on the other end of this. The shitty little start-up I worked on for many years somehow managed to squeak past the finish line of notability and keep its shitty little Wikipedia entry from being deleted (despite the fact that it was mostly written by the marketing department). And you know what kind of difference it made? Absolutely none. To the best of my knowledge, precisely 0.0% of the site's traffic came from the 'external link' in the Wikipedia entry. We got precisely 0 phone calls or emails from potential customers who heard about us on Wikipedia. VCs did not magically dump piles of money on us because we were listed on Wikipedia. Engineering candidates -- even bad engineering candidates -- never spontaneously sent us their resume after reading our Wikipedia entry.
Conversely, given that my startup benefitted not one bit from having a Wikipedia entry, I'm quite confident that if a competitor had wasted 15 minutes of his time to deface our Wikipedia article, it would have hurt us as a business not one lick.