He agreed not to edit Wikipedia articles when he is being paid to write by the subject of the article, and to help the companies he works with understand that it is probably not a great idea for them to edit their own articles as well. He will write articles and post them on his own site, under the GNU FDL, and to ask trusted prominent and independent Wikipedians to add the articles, on their own independent judgments of the merits of the articles.

His business model still works if the material he writes get used on Wikipedia - the agreement just means now he won't upload it unless we approve it first... as far as I understand it.

Whats so hard about "we welcome text which is good, no matter who or how it was created and we reject or repair text which is bad."?

For or against paid editing? Paid editing is an orthogonal issue. I wish all of our contributors could be better compensated for their fantastic contributions.

If we can't cope with bias coming from known-interested sources then we have no hope... most biased sources do not announce their intentions.

Why do we have to have a clear position? I much prefer a society primarily made of equivocators than ideologues.

On 8/9/06, Jimmy Wales <jwales(a)wikia.com> wrote: producing neutral articles. And would only do so under the MyWikiBiz username. I, personally, liked the idea of the edits being entered by MyWikiBiz - that way they could be tracked openly and checked using the user contributions feature. Having an anonymous editor input the information into wikipedia seems more likely to result in articles that are not neutral. I can see some benefit in that trolls would target articles created by MyWikiBiz for deletion and other crap - but that seems outweighed by the benefit that many users would also be able to quickly identify the articles submitted by MyWikiBiz and would seek to protect wikipedia's reputation and make sure our policies are followed. They could only do this if there is transparency in submitting material. *Is the feeling that being paid to write articles for wikipedia is against community standards in general.* What if a wikipedian submitted a grant to a govt agency or non-profit to edit/contribute x amount of information to articles around a specific topic? I can see this as being a huge benefit to wikipedia and to our goal to preserve knowledge by creating a high-quality comprehensive encyclopedia. For example, I could see the following as having great benefit: http://www.foodsovereignty.org issues a grant to write on locating water sources, low-water agriculture, high temperature yields, etc. http://www.eere.energy.gov/ issues a grant to write on alternative energy sources - http://nationalzoo.si.edu/default.cfm issues a grant to write on a specific list of endangered animals ... of course there could be harm as well http://www.nnsa.doe.gov/ issues a grant to make sure specific information is deleted from articles on nuclear power and to promote non-proliferation http://www.ispu.us/pages/reports/2855/articleDetailPB.html issues a grant to influence the articles on islam, christianity, etc. For all these open acknowledgement of the finanicial relationship and transparency is a better protection for our neutralilty standards, IMHO. Jim

Heh, nice thought. When you think about it, if an academic's mission is to spread knowledge about some topic, writing a Wikipedia article or two would probably be a lot more effective than writing a book which very few people will ever read.

Hey Jimbo, can you confirm that you tried to unblock MyWikiBiz but had problems with your browser, per [[User talk:MyWikiBiz]]? _______________________________________________