Delirium wrote:
William Pietri wrote:
Further, in many ways, we are in the same situation as journalists. Our product only has value to the extend that we have the trust of the public. That means that we need both to actually be trustworthy and to avoid situations whose appearance would undermine trust. Journalists have been wrestling with these issues for many decades, and we can and should learn from them. That's why I posted the relevant snipped from the SPJ ethics code.
I don't think our situation is particular similar to journalists'. We are not doing original research, and we are not writing bylined articles. We summarize sources neutrally, post it publicly, and other people edit our work mercilessly at the slightest hint of a problem with it.
I think there are two questions here. One is about producing good work, and the other is about avoiding suspicious circumstances that would reduce public trust. I think you've addressed only the first, so let's start with that.
I agree that we're not doing original research, but we are still doing research. As you can see in [[WP:COI]], we ask people with conflicts of interest to not edit, for basically the same reasons journalists don't take payment or gifts from people they cover. (By the way, I'm not seeing how a byline works into it; even, and perhaps especially, for publications that aren't bylined, the ethics issues are still the same.)
When you describe the theory of how we work, I don't have a big argument with it. Our transparency and openness are what make Wikipedia possible. But in practice, I think that payment changes a balance that we depend on: that enough people with opinions on all sides of an issue have roughly equal amounts of time and energy to put into an article.
In areas where that's not the case, I think we can end up with pretty bad articles. Take a look at [[PA Consulting Group]], for example. Written in large part by PA staff and sourced mainly from press releases, I see it as a puff piece. But they had a lot more time to put into it than anybody else, and so they managed to [[WP:OWN]] it. Or to take another example from my watchlist, look at the fringe religious group [[Eckanar]]. I'm told by user Andries that it has always been an SPA playground. Just yesterday I hit my 3RR limit removing suspicious SPA edits, and nobody else lept into the gap. Will anybody have time to clean it up? We'll see, but given that the article was started in 2003, I'm not expecting anything to happen soon.
Or just look more generally at the topics where spam is a problem. The number of people with an interest in promoting their pet company or band or theory are much larger than the number of people around to work on articles like that, so we jump on anybody like that with both feet. That's not because we think them particularly bad people individually, but it's the only way we've found to cope with the vast imbalance.
So as far as doing good work goes, I think that avoiding conflicts of interest is just as important for us as it is for journalists. And I think, per[[WP:CSB]], we'd be wise not to introduce another source of systemic bias.
Even if the quality of the work weren't in question, though, we'd still come to the question of appearances.
Take a look at the reception reports get from pretty much any think tank or self-labeled institute. The reaction depends a lot on who is funding them. Global warming research funded by Exxon is not treated the same way as independently-funded research. Or look at the controversies about drug-company-funded research. Academics who consistently take a lot of money from a particular source are treated with a level of suspicion well beyond the norm. Note that this doesn't even imply that any given academic is corrupt. Companies are more likely to fund people who are likely to make them look good, so there's a concern about selection bias as well.
All of this applies, by the way, to the academic realm, where people are putting years of training and their professional reputations on the line. The incentives are stronger for them to get things right. The incentives for J Random Contributor are not nearly as strong. Wikipedia's reputation is not nearly as well established as, say, Harvard. And neither is our internal governance.
So I think even if every one of the edits from paid contributors were very good, I think people would inevitably trust Wikipedia less. And given that I don't feel like we have a huge surplus of public trust yet, I think we should error the side of caution here.
More similar, I think, would be to compare historians who write works on commission. These are generally paid for by an interested party, but with the money given up front with the understanding that they're commissioning an independent historical analysis that will not necessarily show them in a positive light.
I'd be intrigued to read more about this, but my guess is that it would require several conditions for it to work:
1. The company would have to have a clear and special interest in being seeing as completely forthright. 2. The historian would have to be somebody with an established reputation and solid credentials. 3. The historian would do a relatively small amount of work for the commissioning party. (E.g., they would not be a staff historian.) 4. The historian would not primarily do commissioned work.
Note that 1 is not the usual order of things. Companies spend tremendous amounts of money on PR and advertising, and vanishingly small amounts on historians. I'm sure that after WWII German companies had a big need to come clean, but that's not how business normally works.
Items 2, 3, and 4 are about reducing the conflict of interest to manageable proportions. Serious historians have a reputation to maintain. This is a situation notably lacking for freelance commercial writers. By allowing unfettered contributions from people with obvious COI problems, we would be much closer to the latter than the former.
William