Guy Chapman aka JzG wrote:
On Mon, 5 Mar 2007 00:37:03 +1100, "Steve Bennett" stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
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?
Hmmm. No, I think the question is, can we assume that paid edits are good edits. If there is a paid editor, what we actually have to do is shadow them to check for subtle bias - if I were paid to write an article I would not be 100% confident I could write without subtle bias, especially if sources were spoonfed. How do we know that the sources have not been carefully selected to present a desired perspective? It would be rather naive to believe they had not been so selected, in fact.
But that's true of everyone---not just people who are paid. Anyone who has held office for a political party, for example, whether or not they are currently being paid... any computer scientist who has been involved in a major dispute within her field... etc, etc. The general solution we use is to assume good faith, unless evidence warrants otherwise---not to ban all Democrats from editing politics-related articles.
-Mark