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_r…
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
--
William Pietri <william(a)scissor.com>
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:William_Pietri