Oldak Quill wrote:
Other than that, I think an institution paying for vandalism revision and nothing else, is fair enough. What's the difference between them paying a Wikipedian to do it or paying a secretary to do it? The former is more transparent.
Hmmm... I think I should have provided more context.
Almeda University is an unaccredited degree-by-mail "university" that grants degrees for "life experience". They are run from Florida via an Idaho PO Box on behalf of a corporation registered in the island nation of Nevis (a place notable mainly for its lack of corporate transparency). In most of the US, it's illegal to use their degrees for anything more than a place mat. They have been repeatedly ordered to stop operating in various states, and they once gave a degree to a dog.
What they are paying for isn't vandalism reversion. It's for someone else to do the blatant POV manipulation that they have so far failed to achieve themselves under a variety of accounts. And they want it done 365 days a year. This isn't about preventing vandalism; it's about paying somebody to distort a reference work so that their $3 million/year "novelty degree" business isn't harmed by people actually getting a factual, NPOV description of what's going on.
With that background, I find their work solicitation pretty sinister, sinister precisely because they can make such a reasonable-sounding case for it:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Almeda_University#Paying_freelancers_to_re...
This sort of willful refusal to understand what we are trying to do is a bad enough problem now when we have to beat back each individual partisan. Unless we make it clear that any sort of paid conflict-of-interest editing is strictly forbidden, we will open a door to endless trouble. Spam email was a problem when people did it themselves. But it only really became a monster when the legal and moral ambiguity allowed professional spammers to set up shop.
William