On 3/5/07, Guy Chapman aka JzG <guy.chapman(a)spamcop.net> wrote:
Yes. Gregory Kohs also thought it was fine to edit
for pay, we banned
him because lots of people disagreed, he was arrogant about it, which
drove off those who might otherwise have agreed and a review of his
edits showed that they were largely PR pieces or directory entries,
not serious attempts at creating neutral articles.
I don't know if that's all true (the one or two articles I looked at
of his were objectively much better than the void that had existed
before them), but in any case, bad edits are bad edits - regardless of
whether anyone was paid to make them. The question is, do good edits
become bad edits just because they were paid for?
I have no doubt that many employees of companies edit
their company's
articles. Most of these edits are not really COI, since they are not
editing *as representatives of the company* or being paid to edit.
They're also probably not neutral. Does it matter? If not, would it
matter if they were paid to make them?
Actually I have no problem in principle with people
occasionally
editing an article where they have some minor conflict of interest,
Me neither.
but edits by the marketing or PR people tend to be
uncritical and
problematic, and being paid for editing specified content is certainly
Yes, about as bad as people writing about their own religion, home
town, favourite basketball team, singer or painter. If only that
problem was confined to professional editors, Wikipedia would be much
better off.
incompatible with Wikipedia's ethos - you have a
situation where the
company will necessarily demand or expect a certain tone of editing;
would they pay up cheerfully if during your researches you found and
included a fact which reflected badly on them? Too many problems down
that road, I think.
Is anyone suggesting that the Wikimedia foundation take money from
companies and edit on their behalf? If a company pays someone, such as
an employee, to edit an article on their behalf, then that's an issue
between them. Our issue is to keep all articles NPOV, whether they
were written on commission or not.
Steve