excellent!

you must read that as if mr. burns was saying it.

wait, so they took down the wiki or the wiki people took it down?

i don’t doubt that LLBean is a bad company – look who wears that crapp.

but i don’t really trust anything on wikipedia.

maybe you should find some documentation outside of wiki. just in case some one challenges you on it.

Yeah… Josh, I don’t know how many Wikipedia article discussion pages you’ve read, but here’s how they typically go:

1. someone said they edited an article to include something
2. someone else reverts it back
3. person A changes it back to their includes (*this being where we are now*)
4. person B changes it back, adds to talk page saying the includes either violate Wikipedia’s NPOV (neutral point of view) policy or Wikipedia’s verifiable sources policy.
5. person A either whines, argues or gives up. Or we go back to step #1 with a new person.

It’s fairly unlikely that it was an L.L. Bean employee’s actions that edited this, there’s a horde of volunteers that do such edits as well.

To be fair, where you wrote:

“This hardly sounds like a company with fair labor practices. The question has to be . . . is paying $29 for a t-shirt worth 30 days a month, 16 hours a day, of another human’s life?”

is about as far from a neutral point of view as you can get. It’s somewhat preachy and not even close to being in-line with the controversy sections of other company’s wiki articles.

Other than that, you don’t cite the source properly (direct link to article in question, put as a [1] citing at the end of the sentence it’s pulled from), and you don’t cite where you got the average price of their shirts.

On a more positive note, I suggest going to the talk page, and saying ‘look, I want my edits to stick, can someone help me get them in line with Wikipedia’s policies.’

thanks for the tip eric. i didn’t put that info in there before about my opinion. i put it back in there cause it pissed me off. and i cited it differently before and it got brought down so i thought i’d try to cite it differently this time.

any maybe L.L. Bean didn’t take it down though. but i have no idea who else would do it and blame it on insufficient citation. unless they had something to gain from it. i mean i know the wiki contributors are a pretty hardcore lot. but i certainly wouldn’t think they’d be spending time on L.L. Bean’s page sifting through links for insufficient citation.

mike.
i agree. although studies have shown that it’s 90% accurate. i’m not using the wiki as a source. i’m using responsible shopper and the national labor committee. i just modified the wiki since that’s what most people use to find info on something. but didn’t use it for a source or proof texting.

My fly fishing vest is from L.L. Bean. While I am a little leary of “facts” I find on Wiki, they do have some basis in truth. Just check the tags and see where it’s made, that tells you enough. 3rd or 4th world, poverty, big corporation, money changing hands. Come on. I’m with Josh on this one. Only the most naive believe that corporations in this country are fair to those they exploit in other lands. Coke (based in Atlanta) hires mercenaries to keep potential union organizers in line down in Central America, and that is documented. Why would L.L. Bean do any different? Kind of takes the polish off the idea of some northern Vermont lake scene. A dad. A son. A labrador. Check out this month’s Sojourners Magazine. Cigarettes made by child slaves in India. Sick.

josh- i don’t think it’s so much that die-hard llbean fans are out there trying to preserve llbean’s image. its more that wikipedia editors watch new material on wikipedia constantly (not manually of course) and try to weed out primarily neutral point of view and citation issues, often in articles they care little about. you wouldn’t believe the resolve some of those folks carry.

interestingly, wikipedia articles tend to be rated more accurate by experts in the field of an article. i.e., if you and i both read articles about graphic design and structural engineering, studies show that you would think the graphic design article is more accurate than i would have, and i would think the structural engineering article is more accurate than you would think. i think that’s pretty interesting. not really related, but interesting.

[...] changes the Wiki pages. This is a link that shows you how companies change and modify their images. Something that I accused L.L. Bean of doing last year. And something that in my cursory glances I found evangelical leaders and prominent pastors doing [...]