Guy Chapman aka JzG wrote:
On Sun, 04 Mar 2007 13:29:57 -0500, Delirium
<delirium(a)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