Ray Saintonge wrote:
It is not a simple matter that editing for money is wrong. What is wrong is editing to impose a particular point of view, or to insure a favorable article for the paying company. How we treat biased editing should have no connection with the payment arrangements between the company and the editor. Biased editing is wrong whether or not the person is being paid.
This is true, but paid editing opens up a can of worms that I don't think we have near the resources to deal with. In the US, PR is a $4 billion industry, growing at 9% annually. And that's a tiny fraction of the $500 billion that will be spent on advertising and marketing this year in the US.
I know many editors feel like we are an unstoppable legion, and when I look at what has been accomplished, I feel that way too. But I think we would be wise to avoid assuming that we can overmatch that kind of money. Indeed, the decision to turn on nofollow is an admission that we can't even keep out those bottom-feeders of the marketing world, the link spammers.
In the Almeda case, would the edits somehow have been any better if they were by an unpaid person?
I'm sure there will be fewer of them.
It is the very rare editor who will turn up daily to push for POV distortion. But as anybody who has ever talked to a telemarketer knows, people will do all sorts of things for money that they would never do on their own. Suddenly they're "just doing their job". Sure, it makes them miserable, and it makes the people they deal with miserable. But when you're two months behind on the car payment and your kid needs new shoes, you can learn to live with that.
We do not need those people editing on Wikipedia.
It discourages people from declaring their conflicts, and has them looking for ways to circumvent Wikipedia policy.
Any scrutiny at all does that. By making it clear that reputable editors and reputable companies should stay well away from conflict-of-interest for-pay editing, I believe many fewer people will even try, keeping the number of bad edits that slip through lower than if we have a gray area.
In the long run there is benefit to be derived from paid editing. Take this example which may be more suited to Wikibooks. [...]
If I thought we were lacking for edits on topics of commercial interest, I'd find this more persuasive. But I don't think our coverage of, say, companies or products or bands is lacking in raw contributions. Wikibooks is welcome to make up their own rules, naturally.
There is no benefit to be derived for anyone from maintaining perpetual confrontation with the for-profit sector.
I don't think we need to make it a perpetual confrontation.
If we tell people paid editing is forbidden, most people will get this. PR people already get that with journalists just fine. Lobbyists and political contributors get it less, but I think that's precisely because the fuzzier rules allow plenty of room for the amoral or cash-hungry to justify it to themselves. Continuously arguing with full-time paid PR people over exactly how distorted they can get away with being, that's perpetual confrontation.
William