Jeff Raymond wrote:
Let me repeat what I was responding to
No matter what, people will be paid to edit. The questions is whetehr
they'll bother to tell us.... let's make a registration requirement, and ban the hell out of anyone who violates it, and see where that takes us.
This is the best possible solution, I think. Encourage people to be open about it, and we'll run into far fewer problems.
Jeff Raymond wrote:
Ray Saintonge wrote:
What's encouraging about it?
More, better content? More detailed articles about organizations that may not get written otherwise? A more comprehensive encyclopedia?
When someone starts from a position of "banning the hell out of anyon" how can that possibly be encouraging? I very much prefer to assume good faith I know that it was Jake's idea and not yours, and please forgive me if I wrongly interpreted your response as a support of that attitude. Your most recent comment is more in line with what I support.
The clear need to be cautious about corporate behavioue should not translate into anti-corporate paranoia.
Yet that's mostly where it comes from. Maybe not from you, but it's certainly rooted there.
Most of the stuff that will
come from corporations will probably be fairly middle-of-the-road and informative. We already have plenty of rules for dealing with the bad actors.
Right, so why be so firm about trying to discourage it?
Discourage? I support reasonable editing from the corporations. A system for knowing where these edits are coming from is fundamentally a good thing. What really bothers me is the desire of some to keep such a tight control over the process. They appear frighteningly intent on rooting out every bit that they consider to be against the rules. Putting these corporate spokespeople constantly under a microscope and treating them like schoolkids does absolutely nothing to build trust between ourselves. It does not motivate them to work with us.
I find it bizarre now that I, an old fart leftist with sympathies for Marxist causes. The whole debate with some of these doctrinaire and utopian libertarians have a peculiar parallel to the issues that Lenin faced with left-wing communists. See http://www.marxists.org/subject/left-wing/ Sometimes these people who take strong anti-corporate, anti-commercial attitudes strike me as though they just haven't thought things through, and I end up defending corporations. :-[
Ec