David Gerard wrote:
On 26/01/07, Jeff Raymond jeff.raymond@internationalhouseofbacon.com wrote:
Dare I play the devil's advocate here and say that we should allow this sort of thing?
I see your point, but I'm imagining what the sort of minds who filled our pages with linkspam till we had to switch on nofollow, and who are now whining that we must switch it off again *because* we owe them a living, would do with such a permission, however sensibly worded.
And that's fair as well. I do think that we're being naive with the way we handle this sort of "conflict of interest." The situation you describe helps no one, the situation with Microsoft, at least in theory, helps everyone. I still think it's better to approach it from the vantagepoint that we can get a very strong benefit than to assume that anything that could be construed as a COI is inherently bad, which is the attitude that I get.
I had an off-wiki conversation with someone about a similar issue earlier, so it's interesting that it comes up again here. At the end of the day, shouldn't we worry more about the quality of the contributions in terms of benefit to the encyclopedia (even the poorly written ones) as opposed to who's contributing it? If paying someone $100 to add information to a stubby, but necessary, article improves the quality of the encyclopedia, why are we standing in the way?
-Jeff