Guy Chapman aka JzG wrote:
On Mon, 5 Mar 2007 00:11:35 +1100, "Steve Bennett" wrote:
In my very humble personal opinion, this type of activity is beneficial to everyone, and ought to be encouraged. However, the appearance of conflicts of interest and the perception of erosion of neutrality are so damaging that we don't currently appear able to allow it.
Yes. Gregory Kohs also thought it was fine to edit for pay, we banned him because lots of people disagreed, he was arrogant about it, which drove off those who might otherwise have agreed and a review of his edits showed that they were largely PR pieces or directory entries, not serious attempts at creating neutral articles.
A person who acts arrogantly, or otherwise has minimal social skills is not a good role model for other would-be corporate representatives.
I have no doubt that many employees of companies edit their company's articles. Most of these edits are not really COI, since they are not editing *as representatives of the company* or being paid to edit.
So if a company "allows" certain of its employees to take time from their work day to review Wikipedia material about the company they're not being paid to edit so it's OK. Their use of the company's hardware for "personal" reasons is just given a wink and a nod.
Which in practice means that people like Jaap who would disclose that they're editing for money, and would invite community supervision aren't allowed to. And that others that would do so under the table with no supervision or transparency will keep doing it anyway. So overall we're worse off. Ho hum.
Actually I have no problem in principle with people occasionally editing an article where they have some minor conflict of interest, but edits by the marketing or PR people tend to be uncritical and problematic, and being paid for editing specified content is certainly incompatible with Wikipedia's ethos - you have a situation where the company will necessarily demand or expect a certain tone of editing; would they pay up cheerfully if during your researches you found and included a fact which reflected badly on them? Too many problems down that road, I think.
What constitutes fulfillment of a contract for services is strictly between the editor and the company. Neither has any control over the mercilww processes that an article goes through. I can even imagine where a company would view our material superior to whatever their PR department can produce, and even begin to virally use it in its own corporate publications. Some companies have a hard time finding literate employees.
The bigger problems down the road will probably derive from a failure to take a realistic approach to this matter.
Ec