Guy Chapman aka JzG wrote:
On Sun, 04 Mar 2007 13:29:57 -0500, Delirium delirium@hackish.org wrote:
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.
True, but the people who then come along and check the edits are at least on the same rate of pay.
Since most politicians and academics get paid, and often their pay depends on promoting their reputations, I don't see how that's true. We've even on occasion *welcomed* paid staff who are editing their articles in a neutral way, even though there may be potential conflicts of interest. In particular there was a mostly positive thread on this mailing list a year or two ago about some museum staff adding information about their museum to an article. People watched their edits just to make sure it wasn't becoming a puff piece of course, but I don't recall people objecting that the museum staff was getting paid to edit Wikipedia while the watchers weren't.
And it would be naive to think that we don't already have people outright being paid to create articles. The only thing we're deterring is being scrupulous about it and disclosing the payment, which prevents anyone from even *knowing* to check the edits in the first place.
-Mark