William Pietri wrote:
In areas where that's not the case, I think we can end up with pretty bad articles. Take a look at [[PA Consulting Group]], for example. Written in large part by PA staff and sourced mainly from press releases, I see it as a puff piece. But they had a lot more time to put into it than anybody else, and so they managed to [[WP:OWN]] it. Or to take another example from my watchlist, look at the fringe religious group [[Eckanar]]. I'm told by user Andries that it has always been an SPA playground. Just yesterday I hit my 3RR limit removing suspicious SPA edits, and nobody else lept into the gap. Will anybody have time to clean it up? We'll see, but given that the article was started in 2003, I'm not expecting anything to happen soon.
I don't see how prohibiting honest and conscientious Wikipedians from being paid to edit will fix any of that. As you can see, it hasn't worked so far---and in the religious-group case pay quite possibly isn't the issue anyway. People who are paid to edit articles and *don't* disclose it will do it anyway, and we'll have to track down their edits by the fact that they're bad edits; whether because they're bad because of financial interest, religious fanaticism, or just a strange view on the subject I don't much care for. Incidentally, all these same problems exist in fiction-related articles owned by fans, none of whom are being paid, so I don't see how they related to money.
Take a look at the reception reports get from pretty much any think tank or self-labeled institute. The reaction depends a lot on who is funding them. Global warming research funded by Exxon is not treated the same way as independently-funded research. Or look at the controversies about drug-company-funded research. Academics who consistently take a lot of money from a particular source are treated with a level of suspicion well beyond the norm. Note that this doesn't even imply that any given academic is corrupt. Companies are more likely to fund people who are likely to make them look good, so there's a concern about selection bias as well.
What is "independently-funded research"? You seem to admit that all sides are being funded here by someone, and usually by someone with an agenda (or else they wouldn't be funding). So the question is not over taking money at all, or about the funder having an agenda, but presumably a distinction between some funders' agendas being more benign and consonant with the interests of good science than others. And which is the case depends on the research as well; a biotech firm funding drug research is seem as problematic, while Intel funding parallelization research rarely is.
I wouldn't mind developing some guidelines over the relative merits of different sorts of funding sources. For example, eventually I plan to create a bunch of articles on Greek cities and towns. Since there are a lot, some will get created earlier than others, probably by random selection. If some municipality wanted to pay me to create an article, would that be okay? Essentialy, they would be purchasing a higher spot in my article-creation queue, for an article that eventually (but maybe not for years) would get created anyway. Or if an AIDS-awareness foundation wanted to pay me to improve the quality of our AIDS-related articles would that be okay? There are many levels of concern or non-concern besides "money=bad".
More similar, I think, would be to compare historians who write works on commission. These are generally paid for by an interested party, but with the money given up front with the understanding that they're commissioning an independent historical analysis that will not necessarily show them in a positive light.
I'd be intrigued to read more about this, but my guess is that it would require several conditions for it to work:
- The company would have to have a clear and special interest in being seeing as completely forthright.
- The historian would have to be somebody with an established reputation and solid credentials.
- The historian would do a relatively small amount of work for the commissioning party. (E.g., they would not be a staff historian.)
- The historian would not primarily do commissioned work.
The last three at least seem to be the case here---an established and well-respected contributor is asking if writing the occasional article for a paid commissioner would be okay. I think the first is actually better to avoid having to decide, since the motives of companies are rather difficult to discern---so long as the writer is not a staff historian, and doesn't do this as their main living, then whether the company is interested in forthrightness or not matters little.
In any case, I think it would be a grave mistake to push people underground, when much of Wikipedia depends on openness. I know in the current paranoiac climate I would not disclose any funding I got for editing Wikipedia, even if I were 100% convinced that it was on the level and unobjectionable, like a non-profit organization paying me to improve our educational content. That seems unfortunate to me.
-Mark