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