William Pietri wrote:
Ray Saintonge wrote:
It is not a simple matter that editing for money
is wrong. What is
wrong is editing to impose a particular point of view, or to insure a
favorable article for the paying company. How we treat biased editing
should have no connection with the payment arrangements between the
company and the editor. Biased editing is wrong whether or not the
person is being paid.
This is true, but paid editing opens up a can of worms that I don't
think we have near the resources to deal with. In the US, PR is a $4
billion industry, growing at 9% annually. And that's a tiny fraction of
the $500 billion that will be spent on advertising and marketing this
year in the US.
Sure. But I think that the PR industry is most successful when it can
control the message, and when nobody is so openly disagreeing with them
as happens here.
I know many editors feel like we are an unstoppable
legion, and when I
look at what has been accomplished, I feel that way too. But I think we
would be wise to avoid assuming that we can overmatch that kind of
money. Indeed, the decision to turn on nofollow is an admission that we
can't even keep out those bottom-feeders of the marketing world, the
link spammers.
That they can overmatch us with their superior funding only works when
we accept that as a criterion. It's much easier to demand
substantiation for a company's claims here than by putting up picket
lines to block entrance into the company's headquarters.
In the Almeda
case, would the edits somehow have
been any better if they were by an unpaid person?
I'm sure there will be fewer of them.
Sure, but that's still only one article. Were they involved in any
other articles? Sooner or later the company has to arrive at the
conclusion that such a tactic is not cost-effective. The smart ones
will find more collaborative ways of dealing with us.
It is the very rare editor who will turn up daily to
push for POV
distortion. But as anybody who has ever talked to a telemarketer knows,
people will do all sorts of things for money that they would never do on
their own. Suddenly they're "just doing their job". Sure, it makes them
miserable, and it makes the people they deal with miserable. But when
you're two months behind on the car payment and your kid needs new
shoes, you can learn to live with that.
We do not need those people editing on Wikipedia.
I suppose I do telemarketers a favour by dealing with them abruptly;
that gives them an opportunity to get at other victims more quickly.
Perhaps the socially responsible thing should be to keep them on the
line longer talking about anything but their product. :-)
True enough that we don't need those who would edit out of desparation,
but I still see these as a small minority.
It discourages
people from
declaring their conflicts, and has them looking for ways to circumvent
Wikipedia policy.
Any scrutiny at all does that. By making it clear that reputable editors
and reputable companies should stay well away from conflict-of-interest
for-pay editing, I believe many fewer people will even try, keeping the
number of bad edits that slip through lower than if we have a gray area.
The reputable companies are less likely to go too far because they
understand the consequences. Almeda's success does not depend on being
reputable. Some companies could very easily provide indirect payment to
an employee by letting go home an hour early so that he can edit the
company's Wikipedia article from his home computer.
We can only control internal processes and rules. I can't see how
attempts to establish criteria based on a person's outside life can ever
get anywhere. We have had a thread on the verification of a person's
credentials. One can at least see a potential benefit to claiming
certain credentials; that benefit can be a motivation for verifying
those credentials. By contrast, what apparent benefit is there to
expressing a conflict of interest.
In the long run
there is benefit to be derived from paid editing. Take
this example which may be more suited to Wikibooks. [...]
If I thought we were lacking for edits on topics of commercial interest,
I'd find this more persuasive. But I don't think our coverage of, say,
companies or products or bands is lacking in raw contributions.
Wikibooks is welcome to make up their own rules, naturally.
My example of software manuals was only the first thing to leap to mind.
There is no
benefit to be derived for anyone from maintaining perpetual
confrontation with the for-profit sector.
I don't think we need to make it a perpetual confrontation.
If we tell people paid editing is forbidden, most people will get this.
PR people already get that with journalists just fine. Lobbyists and
political contributors get it less, but I think that's precisely because
the fuzzier rules allow plenty of room for the amoral or cash-hungry to
justify it to themselves. Continuously arguing with full-time paid PR
people over exactly how distorted they can get away with being, that's
perpetual confrontation.
I'm far more partial to finding accomodations than blindly saying
"No!"
I'm perhaps more concerned about cutting off positive opportunities.
Ec