Having worked both in publishing, where these conflicts of interest play out regularly, and in Silicon Valley startups, where PR is a necessary fact of life, I believe it is a much stronger conflict. Academics and journalists both have reputations to lose. PR people and other commercial writers don't, not like academics.

Sure they do, if you are talking about established editors who are banking on the fact that they have some degree of respect within the community that allows other to more readily assume good faith about their edits. A paid editor's ability to render services effectively largely rests upon his good name. After all, like it or not, many (perhaps most) editors are more suspicious of significant revisions or new articles by anons than by established, trusted members of the community.

Journalistic and academic reputations are built on the factual quality and accuracy of one's work. There are extensive vetting and enforcement mechanisms in both industries. People in PR and advertising build reputation on their ability to work without regard to factual accuracy, or in spite of it. They are professional POV warriors. We adopt their funding models at our peril.

William

So far as I can tell, no one is talking about the foundation adopting a new funding model. The question is this: will paid editors be afforded the same assumption of good faith that are author's whose motives are not so clear? I am of the opinion that all contributions should be examined on their merits. No one is arguing for a sudden shift in policy that allows for spamlink insertions or POV articles. As others have mentioned, assuming good faith for even paid editors will simply make it more likely that they are forthcoming about whether they have received/are receiving financial remuneration for their work on Wikipedia. This will allow other editors to determine whether the editor is indeed POV-pushing or in fact editing in good faith.

Something else that others have not mentioned as a possible boon to Wikipedia can be predicted even if one assumes that the worse-case scenario comes to pass. Let's assume that paid editors are permitted to operate in the open (rather than under the radar, as some are surely doing now). Let's further assume that all of them initially succumb to the urge to be POV-pushing warriors with little regard for Wikipedia policy/guidelines.

First of all, does anyone doubt that administrators would be any less willing to ban spammers and POV-pushers in that world than the current one? Of course they wouldn't, and if anything, editors disclosing that they are working for Acme Corp. and then proceeding to violate NPOV, RS, or whatever, would be banned with extreme prejudice because it would be obvious what they were doing, and their edits would be obviously unconstructive (presumably).

Now, let's assume that there are people out there who would want to do a Wikipedia edit job for money more than one time in their life. In order to do this, they would have to be able to show some record of success to potential customers. This means these paid editors would have to edit within the bounds of the policies and guidelines for some time in order to show potential clients that they can write in the WP style and in a manner that won't get deleted as cruft/spam/etc. Additionally, since people running any decent-sized company are presumably literate, and presumably would have some rudimentary idea of what Wikipedia is (say, "the encyclopedia that anyone can edit"), does anyone really think that they are going to shell out cash for someone to go in and insert a bunch of spam one time, only to have it deleted and the admins/community alerted to their nefarious intent?

Instead, what is more likely is that editors who exhibited some degree of familiarity with/expertise in the WP community would be paid to clean-up articles of particular interest to the client and then maintain them by, say, deleting vandalism, false defamatory claims, etc. If the paid editors did this sort of thing, is that not in keeping with the goals of the encyclopedia? Are we here to write an encyclopedia, or enforce some communist ideal of editorial egalitarianism? Wikipedia policy is not supposed to be emulating anyone's ideal political system, if I read WP:NOT correctly. That is, there is no reason to have a policy that states that people must reap equal wages (or non-wages) for equal editing work on Wikipedia. Some people can and do edit for what might be seen as altruistic reasons. Some might just want to pretty-up articles that they find useful in hopes that others will do the same. Who is to say which motive is selfish or improper? That is, who decides that editing for pay is somehow a morally inferior motive to editing for Wiki-community glory?

Additionally, assuming that paid editing is or becomes a widespread phenomenon, you will have people paid by competing firms who moderate each other when individuals fail to abide by community standards. After all, a competing firm could rake up some bad press for their rival by producing evidence of improper, bad faith editing by paid agents of said rival. It isn't, as some have suggested, simply a matter of a paid leviathan on one side and poor volunteer wikipedians on the other. I would plead with the community that WP:AGF not be abandoned simply because some Wikipedians have anti-capitalist sentiments. Let's judge edits by their content and editors by their contributions, not by their motive.

Respectfully,

MW

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