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 about draft 

Hi , I like your opinion piece draft!  It's great in providing many quantifications of the promo/commercial articles.  I like how you narrate your WikiProject Poland experience and develop from that.  I like how you call for a major cleanup drive.

At the end, though, you ask the readers to go off separately and do a little bit towards solving the problem.  IMO that is not enough, and you've motivated something bigger, a big cleanup drive, but that should be a lot more.  

Maybe you should compare your proposal to the big drive to address Un-Referenced Biographies of Living People (URBLP)s, a problem that was recognized more and more during 2009, and then blew up in controversy in January 2010, I think it was.  There was one editor deleting them by the hundreds, I think, which made others mad.  And Wikipedia was hammered in the outside news coverage about some salient bad incidents.  The problem was addressed by a big drive, with one element being wp:URBLP Wikiproject's efforts that I happened to join.  The drive was well-focused because there was a known number, 52,000, of unreferenced BLPs in a category, to be addressed, (although there were new ones coming in, and more old ones being discovered of course).  And that one editor agreed to back off, IF the number was reduced by half in six months.  That's my very imperfect understanding of the situation before I joined.  

The drive I participated in worked well.  I tried to help keep focus on the goal, and in several other ways, but some others had far more direct impact than I did.  See Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Unreferenced Biographies of Living Persons/Archive 2#Goal statement.  Every day we could see the current number, and it moving or not, and some big changes were made to reduce the number of new URBLPs coming in, and some other targeted efforts were tried and some clearly made a difference while others did not.  Overall, having the big, numeric public goal that we wanted to meet, and having immediate feedback/gratification in seeing the total category's number change, was key.  It was rewarding and frustrating and a team effort going on, etc., not just a bunch of people working completely separately.  In the end the 6 month goal was finally met though it was very close.  Then I and some others dropped out but the overall problem had been somewhat ""solved"", and it's been better since, and the number was brought all the way down to 0 effectively, and is at about 2,000 now, I see. 

I'm not saying you should talk much or at all about that URBLP problem and its drive, in your opinion piece. But I think your calling for accurate measurement of the current problem, by a one-month effort to get all of the problematic articles tagged, say, the same way, would be reasonable.  There would have to be an enforceable rule made up, that prevented the paid PR persons from deleting the tags on their articles.  There was something like that with the URBLPs...I think anyone seen deleting the URBLP tag was warned and blocked as disruptive if necessary.  And then you can call for something aggressive:  like bringing the ""real"" number down to 100,000 tops within a year, or whatever.  Your estimating the problem size to be 150,000 is helpful towards setting that up.  Or you could call for something quite different.  My main reaction, anyhow, was that I expected at the end for you to call for something big.  Asking people to separately make efforts that would not even be measurable, would not be enough, IMO.  You've earned the right to call for a bigger more organized effort.

Also I'm not sure ""Spam"" is the right title.  You do clarify you don't mean external links spamming, but that's what I think of.  What is the right name for this problem?  You have the opportunity to name it, maybe, perhaps some acronym.  Business Puff Pieces By Paid Editors Probably = BPPBPEP?  Nope.  The problem is talked about at Talk:Jimbo Wales and elsewhere, though, and there may be a good name for it already.

Hope this helps...my two or three cents.  I'll get to the other thing i owe, but probably not until the weekend or next week.  ncram "