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:
1. The company would have to have a clear and special interest in
being seeing as completely forthright.
2. The historian would have to be somebody with an established
reputation and solid credentials.
3. The historian would do a relatively small amount of work for the
commissioning party. (E.g., they would not be a staff historian.)
4. 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