Delirium wrote:
I don't see how prohibiting honest and conscientious Wikipedians from being paid to edit will fix any of that. [...] I wouldn't mind developing some guidelines over the relative merits of different sorts of funding sources.
Just to be clear, I'm not against paying honest and conscientious Wikipedians to edit. What I am opposed to is accepting editorial conflicts of interest.
So if, say, the Ford Foundation wants to pay a dozen historians to write historical articles, I'm all for it. Right up to the point where they edit anything on the Ford Foundation or its funders.
I understand you're saying that with people of sufficient honor, we can hopefully get away with it. It's plausible to me, but I can't see any clear revision to the COI guidelines that will keep only the honorable people doing this, and -- just as important -- keep them from being eventually corrupted. We don't have the mechanisms to enforce honesty that a major research institution does, and I don't think we'll be able to afford to build them for a decade or more.
By all means propose them, but keep in mind all of the self-justifying that goes on in the head of pretty much any shill or flack. As I have said before, I have talked to people, perfectly nice people, who were in our eyes corrupting Wikipedia. They had not the slightest notion they were doing anything wrong. Everybody thinks they are on the side of the angels.
To my mind, the solution is the same one that journalists have: that we write for our readers alone. Anything else invites turning a trickle into a flood.
More similar, I think, would be to compare historians who write works on commission. These are generally paid for by an interested party,[...]
I'd be intrigued to read more about this, but my guess is that it would require several conditions for it to work:
- The company would have to have a clear and special interest in being seeing as completely forthright.
- The historian would have to be somebody with an established reputation and solid credentials.
- The historian would do a relatively small amount of work for the commissioning party. (E.g., they would not be a staff historian.)
- The historian would not primarily do commissioned work.
The last three at least seem to be the case here---an established and well-respected contributor is asking if writing the occasional article for a paid commissioner would be okay. I think the first is actually better to avoid having to decide, since the motives of companies are rather difficult to discern---so long as the writer is not a staff historian, and doesn't do this as their main living, then whether the company is interested in forthrightness or not matters little.
No slight intended to Jaap or any of our contributors but I don't think the comparison is even close. A professional historian with an established reputation and solid credentials has put, what, two decades into getting there? And getting caught distorting the truth means they throw that and their professional future away. Even our very best editors don't have anything like that on the line. For those who are pseudonymous, there is even less penalty for ethical missteps.
And those historians work in a field where academic norms of intellectual independence and honesty have been built up over centuries, with detection and enforcement mechanisms to match. Not to mention years of training in research and writing for every person involved. We aren't even close to having that kind of infrastructure.
As to item 1, again it comes back to conflict of interest. If Intel pays some professional technology journalist to expand our computer science articles, more power to them, as I don't see them as having an interest in distorting them. But as soon as they want changes to anything where there is a conflict of interest, we should say no.
Motivations of companies are actually not difficult to discern: they are there to make money for their shareholders.
William