Marc Riddell wrote:
On Sat, 3 Mar 2007 "Jaap Vermeulen" wrote:
I have recently been approached by an organisation to improve articles related to the organisation in question (not create new ones). I would receive money for doing so.
On 3/4/07, Guy Chapman wrote:
Ask them for the sources form which this should be drawn, post them to the Talk pages, and request that the company donate the money to the Foundation. How would that do?
on 3/4/07 7:24 AM, MacGyverMagic/Mgm wrote:
If they are as aware of the rules as they appear to be, there's little problems, but you have to be very careful with your editing. And yes, do it in full disclosure. I like the idea JzG posted better though. Even good editors can lose their neutrality when money is involved.
Huh!?!
How would giving away the money you are paid for doing work make that work any more credible? What about the credibility and integrity of the person doing that work? Ever hear of trust!?!
As for "good editors losing their neutrality when money is involved" - to make this statement work you need to remove the word "good".
I agree that giving this earned money to WMF as some kind of Act of Contrition is grossly unrealistic. By and large I find that supporters of open access to intellectual property in its various forms have not grasped the larger economic environment that would make this work. The people who contribute still to make a living, and the number of those contributors that believe in a Marxist paradise where everyone gets what he needs are few and far between. Plese someone, tell me what economic model is going to keep this all alive over an extended time.
Conflicts of Interest, and how we deal with corporations seriously need an injection of common sense. Is it really to our advantage to have people declare their conflicts of interest only to be put to a series of arcane restrictions. Under those circumstances if I were in that position I wouldn't declare my conflict, and just go quietly about my work. If another editor complains that my edits are too favorable to the company I would have no problem apologizing quietly, knowing full well that my more subtle biases will go by unnoticed. With the recent EssJay case his falsehood went undetected for nearly two years, and that only efter he had very effectively climbed the Wikipedia social ladder. Would a corporation's representative be more easily discovered if his pay depended on playing the game so as not to be discovered? The company could even forbid him from doing anything beyond being an admin.
I really don't think that most corporate representatives who come here to edit for their company are here to create a bias. Most of their work will give us uncontroversial Who's on their board of directors. Where does the company have factories. What the company produces. A record of the company's share prices. The additives that a company puts in its products. These are all valuable types of data around which we are notably weak.
With the relatively small part of the material that really is controversial we will have no shortage of editors who are willing to make the discrepancies obvious. What are we afraid of?
Ec