David Gerard wrote:
On 26/01/07, Jeff Raymond
<jeff.raymond(a)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
--
If you can read this, I'm not at home.