If they are as aware of the rules as they appear to be, there's little problems, but you have to be very careful with your editing. And yes, do it in full disclosure. I like the idea JzG posted better though. Even good editors can lose their neutrality when money is involved.

Mgm

On 3/4/07, Guy Chapman aka JzG guy.chapman@spamcop.net wrote:

On Sat, 3 Mar 2007 19:38:37 +0100, "Jaap Vermeulen" jaap.vermeulen@gmail.com wrote:

...

I have recently been approached by an organisation to improve articles related to the organisation in question (not create new ones). I would receive money for doing so.

Ask them for the sources form which this should be drawn, post them to the Talk pages, and request that the company donate the money to the Foundation. How would that do?

Guy (JzG)

http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:JzG

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On Sun, 04 Mar 2007 07:42:40 -0500, Marc Riddell michaeldavid86@comcast.net wrote:

How would giving away the money you are paid for doing work make that work any more credible? What about the credibility and integrity of the person doing that work? Ever hear of trust!?!

Because (a) you would not be doing the work (just posting the sources and allowing others to do it) and (b) you would not personally benefit, the foundation would. So it's pretty much completely clean.

Guy (JzG)

On Sun, 04 Mar 2007 08:02:13 -0500, Marc Riddell michaeldavid86@comcast.net wrote:

I feel you are missing my point. Why would being paid money for any contribution I made to a project make that action unclean?

Because he who pays the piper calls the tune. See my comment elsewhere in this thread: what would you do - and what would they do - if your researches showed that the CEO eats babies?

Guy (JzG)

Marc Riddell wrote:

on 3/4/07 8:28 AM, Guy Chapman aka JzG at guy.chapman@spamcop.net wrote:

...

Because he who pays the piper calls the tune.

That is an incredibly broad statement, Guy. If the persons who pay me called the tune, they would not receive what they are paying for. And, besides, if they tried - it would fall on deaf ears.

You're one in a million, and that's not flattery. :-) While it's theoretically possible to have unbiased edits from a paid source, in practice it hasn't gone well so far, and in these days of corporations looking for every imaginable advertising venue, people are ultra-paranoid.

I think if a leading historian were to announce that he had received a commission to work on a company's WP article, editing under his own name, people would struggle with that one. The historian's overt participation would be a boost to WP's credibility, and the historian is putting personal reputation on the line, but it's also setting a precedent to later accept paid edits from a less-leading historian, then the underpaid instructor at the community college, then the "Company Historian" in the marketing department.

Stan

On 3/4/07, Guy Chapman aka JzG guy.chapman@spamcop.net wrote:

On Sun, 04 Mar 2007 08:02:13 -0500, Marc Riddell michaeldavid86@comcast.net wrote:

...

I feel you are missing my point. Why would being paid money for any contribution I made to a project make that action unclean?

Because he who pays the piper calls the tune. See my comment elsewhere in this thread: what would you do - and what would they do - if your researches showed that the CEO eats babies?

It's all a matter of how you do it. If someone asked you to write an article in a format that is acceptable to Wikipedia (wikicode, NPOV, etc.), I don't see anything wrong with them compensating you for your time. On the other hand, if someone asked you to write the article, post it under your own name, and defend it, then we have a problem. The difference is, are they asking for your service as a writer who knows how to write a WP-acceptable article, or are they trying to rent your reputation in Wikipedia? The former is no big deal, the latter is a problem.

Guy Chapman aka JzG wrote:

On Sun, 04 Mar 2007 08:02:13 -0500, Marc Riddell michaeldavid86@comcast.net wrote:

...

I feel you are missing my point. Why would being paid money for any contribution I made to a project make that action unclean?

Because he who pays the piper calls the tune. See my comment elsewhere in this thread: what would you do - and what would they do - if your researches showed that the CEO eats babies?

That argument is a straw baby. ;-)

Ec

on 3/4/07 11:29 AM, William Pietri at william@scissor.com wrote:

Marc Riddell wrote:

...

Huh!?!

How would giving away the money you are paid for doing work make that work any more credible? What about the credibility and integrity of the person doing that work? Ever hear of trust!?!

As for "good editors losing their neutrality when money is involved" - to make this statement work you need to remove the word "good".

Absolutely. That's why journalists regularly take payments from people they are covering in the news. A "good" journalist would have no problem writing a fair article, no matter who's giving them money. We trust them, so there's no problem.

Wait, no. It's just the opposite. That's called a conflict of interest. And behavior like that is strictly forbidden by any journalistic code of ethics I've ever seen. E.g.:

Journalists should be free of obligation to any interest other than the public's right to know.

Journalists should:

• Avoid conflicts of interest, real or perceived.
• Remain free of associations and activities that may compromise

integrity or damage credibility.

• Refuse gifts, favors, fees, free travel and special treatment,

and shun secondary employment, political involvement, public office and service in community organizations if they compromise journalistic integrity.

• Disclose unavoidable conflicts.
• Be vigilant and courageous about holding those with power

accountable.

• Deny favored treatment to advertisers and special interests

and resist their pressure to influence news coverage.

• Be wary of sources offering information for favors or money;

avoid bidding for news.

(from the "Act Independently" section of http://www.spj.org/ethicscode.asp)

We ignore their historically evolved and time-tested solution at our great peril.

William

We seem to have strayed from Jaap Vermeulen's original inquiry. I still support his ability to receive compensation for his editing. As always, I am going to assume good faith.

Marc Riddell

On 3/5/07, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:

But if someone is being paid to write on a given topic, I find it difficult to understand how that's *not* a conflict of interest.

I find it difficult to understand how the conflict of interest *matters*[1]. As everyone knows, WP is full of crap. Not 100%, but some high proportion. The existence of crap has never bothered us before, and there's every reason to believe that paid, COI edits would still be an improvement, especially if they involve creating new articles.

It would be bad if someone created an article that survived a long time before being noticed and terminated by the AfD mob. It would be bad if someone removed "good" text in favour of some company-preferred "bad" text. It would be bad if a company put significant time and effort into subverting our processes (like AfD or consensus) to achieve their own goals.

However, adding well-copywritten, non-copyright-violating, vaguely NPOV, useful text, even if done with a blatant COI - I don't see the problem.

Steve [1] The acknowledged *perception* of COI aside...

On 3/5/07, Guy Chapman aka JzG guy.chapman@spamcop.net wrote:

These days we have approaching 2 million articles, creating new ones is not an unequivocal good - the majority of new articles are currently, by my reckoning, vanity crap.

Yes. I thought I had implied that I was referring to articles which were going to survive AfD. Obviously creating soon-to-be-deleted articles doesn't help us.

Steve

Steve Bennett wrote:

I find it difficult to understand how the conflict of interest *matters*[1].

Take a look at the professions where we depend on their correct and unbiased handling of information. Journalism, law, medicine, academics, accounting, and law enforcement are all good examples. And all of them have strong codes of ethics to deal with conflicts of interest.

Now look at examples in those professions where conflicts of interest get out of control. Advertorial journalism and paid propaganda. The distortion of medical practice by pharmaceutical companies. Biased academic research. Arthur Andersen and Enron. Crooked cops.

Then look at industries where conflicts of interest are endemic, or essential. Advertising. PR. Lobbying. To a lesser extent, American national politics.

My bet is that saying that we are ok with conflicts of interest will shift us down that spectrum rapidly. We can't even keep fancruft in check, and nobody is paying them to spend 2500 hours a year trying to get maximally favorable articles into Wikipedia.

However, adding well-copywritten, non-copyright-violating, vaguely NPOV, useful text, even if done with a blatant COI - I don't see the problem.

I think the problem is that you won't be able to create a set of rules that filter for only those paid edits.

[1] The acknowledged *perception* of COI aside...

Isn't that enough to stop it right there?

William

on 3/4/07 12:16 PM, William Pietri at william@scissor.com wrote:

Sorry, but I guess I wasn't clear enough.

Jaap's question is, as the subject line says, whether editing for payment of articles related to the payee is a fundamentally problematic conflict of interest. My answer is yes, absolutely.

Further, in many ways, we are in the same situation as journalists. Our product only has value to the extend that we have the trust of the public. That means that we need both to actually be trustworthy and to avoid situations whose appearance would undermine trust. Journalists have been wrestling with these issues for many decades, and we can and should learn from them. That's why I posted the relevant snipped from the SPJ ethics code.

Unfortunately, the assumption of good faith isn't relevant when making this decision. That's a mechanism to defuse conflict and build working relationships. Jaap is obviously acting in good faith. But I have even talked with PR people who were spamming Wikipedia in good faith. They honestly thought that their links and promotional text were true and useful to readers, so there was no harm in including them. The assumption of good faith means that we should be kind to them, to treat them amicably, and to educate them. But it does not and must not mean that we allow the integrity of the encyclopedia to be compromised.

By the way, Jaap, many thanks for being very public about this. A fine demonstration not just of good faith, but good sense.

Nicely put.

Marc

Delirium wrote:

William Pietri wrote:

...

Further, in many ways, we are in the same situation as journalists. Our product only has value to the extend that we have the trust of the public. That means that we need both to actually be trustworthy and to avoid situations whose appearance would undermine trust. Journalists have been wrestling with these issues for many decades, and we can and should learn from them. That's why I posted the relevant snipped from the SPJ ethics code.

I don't think our situation is particular similar to journalists'. We are not doing original research, and we are not writing bylined articles. We summarize sources neutrally, post it publicly, and other people edit our work mercilessly at the slightest hint of a problem with it.

I think there are two questions here. One is about producing good work, and the other is about avoiding suspicious circumstances that would reduce public trust. I think you've addressed only the first, so let's start with that.

I agree that we're not doing original research, but we are still doing research. As you can see in [[WP:COI]], we ask people with conflicts of interest to not edit, for basically the same reasons journalists don't take payment or gifts from people they cover. (By the way, I'm not seeing how a byline works into it; even, and perhaps especially, for publications that aren't bylined, the ethics issues are still the same.)

When you describe the theory of how we work, I don't have a big argument with it. Our transparency and openness are what make Wikipedia possible. But in practice, I think that payment changes a balance that we depend on: that enough people with opinions on all sides of an issue have roughly equal amounts of time and energy to put into an article.

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.

Or just look more generally at the topics where spam is a problem. The number of people with an interest in promoting their pet company or band or theory are much larger than the number of people around to work on articles like that, so we jump on anybody like that with both feet. That's not because we think them particularly bad people individually, but it's the only way we've found to cope with the vast imbalance.

So as far as doing good work goes, I think that avoiding conflicts of interest is just as important for us as it is for journalists. And I think, per[[WP:CSB]], we'd be wise not to introduce another source of systemic bias.

Even if the quality of the work weren't in question, though, we'd still come to the question of appearances.

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.

All of this applies, by the way, to the academic realm, where people are putting years of training and their professional reputations on the line. The incentives are stronger for them to get things right. The incentives for J Random Contributor are not nearly as strong. Wikipedia's reputation is not nearly as well established as, say, Harvard. And neither is our internal governance.

So I think even if every one of the edits from paid contributors were very good, I think people would inevitably trust Wikipedia less. And given that I don't feel like we have a huge surplus of public trust yet, I think we should error the side of caution here.

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.

Note that 1 is not the usual order of things. Companies spend tremendous amounts of money on PR and advertising, and vanishingly small amounts on historians. I'm sure that after WWII German companies had a big need to come clean, but that's not how business normally works.

Items 2, 3, and 4 are about reducing the conflict of interest to manageable proportions. Serious historians have a reputation to maintain. This is a situation notably lacking for freelance commercial writers. By allowing unfettered contributions from people with obvious COI problems, we would be much closer to the latter than the former.

William

Delirium wrote:

I don't see how prohibiting honest and conscientious Wikipedians from being paid to edit will fix any of that. [...] I wouldn't mind developing some guidelines over the relative merits of different sorts of funding sources.

Just to be clear, I'm not against paying honest and conscientious Wikipedians to edit. What I am opposed to is accepting editorial conflicts of interest.

So if, say, the Ford Foundation wants to pay a dozen historians to write historical articles, I'm all for it. Right up to the point where they edit anything on the Ford Foundation or its funders.

I understand you're saying that with people of sufficient honor, we can hopefully get away with it. It's plausible to me, but I can't see any clear revision to the COI guidelines that will keep only the honorable people doing this, and -- just as important -- keep them from being eventually corrupted. We don't have the mechanisms to enforce honesty that a major research institution does, and I don't think we'll be able to afford to build them for a decade or more.

By all means propose them, but keep in mind all of the self-justifying that goes on in the head of pretty much any shill or flack. As I have said before, I have talked to people, perfectly nice people, who were in our eyes corrupting Wikipedia. They had not the slightest notion they were doing anything wrong. Everybody thinks they are on the side of the angels.

To my mind, the solution is the same one that journalists have: that we write for our readers alone. Anything else invites turning a trickle into a flood.

...

...

More similar, I think, would be to compare historians who write works on commission. These are generally paid for by an interested party,[...]

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.

No slight intended to Jaap or any of our contributors but I don't think the comparison is even close. A professional historian with an established reputation and solid credentials has put, what, two decades into getting there? And getting caught distorting the truth means they throw that and their professional future away. Even our very best editors don't have anything like that on the line. For those who are pseudonymous, there is even less penalty for ethical missteps.

And those historians work in a field where academic norms of intellectual independence and honesty have been built up over centuries, with detection and enforcement mechanisms to match. Not to mention years of training in research and writing for every person involved. We aren't even close to having that kind of infrastructure.

As to item 1, again it comes back to conflict of interest. If Intel pays some professional technology journalist to expand our computer science articles, more power to them, as I don't see them as having an interest in distorting them. But as soon as they want changes to anything where there is a conflict of interest, we should say no.

Motivations of companies are actually not difficult to discern: they are there to make money for their shareholders.

William

Delirium wrote:

William Pietri wrote:

So if, say, the Ford Foundation wants to pay a dozen historians to write historical articles, I'm all for it. Right up to the point where they edit anything on the Ford Foundation or its funders.

This is a pretty vague definition, but yes, it's the sort of thing I wouldn't mind seeing expanded. Note that conflicts of interest can be very subtle, though. [...]

Yes, and I think again the journalistic approach is the appropriate one. Declare any interests that might be worrisome, avoid vigorously working on anything where you have a conflict, and absolutely don't go looking for new conflicts of interest.

If our article on [[autism]] was edited by someone paid by a company selling autism drugs, that's a pretty clear conflict of interest. But if it were edited by someone paid by a non-profit group like [[Cure Autism Now]], there would also be potential conflicts of interest; in particular, Cure Autism Now finds views that autism isn't a disease offensive, so would be prone to having those treated in an exclusively negative light if at all.

Right. And although the questions are endlessly complicated, I think the solution is simple. Interests are fine, especially when declared. Conflicts of interest, real or apparent, are forbidden. In practice, this means that if anybody raises a reasonable conflict-of-interest concern, especially one with a pecuniary motivation, the editor steps back and makes their suggestions on the talk page. And that we rule out obvious conflicts from the beginning, in exactly the same way the various journalistic codes of ethics I linked to do now.

William

Delirium wrote:

William Pietri wrote:

...

Right. And although the questions are endlessly complicated, I think the solution is simple. Interests are fine, especially when declared. Conflicts of interest, real or apparent, are forbidden. In practice, this means that if anybody raises a reasonable conflict-of-interest concern, especially one with a pecuniary motivation, the editor steps back and makes their suggestions on the talk page. And that we rule out obvious conflicts from the beginning, in exactly the same way the various journalistic codes of ethics I linked to do now.

My point, though, is that there are *almost always* conflicts of interest, especially with the sort of qualified editors we would most like to attract. Someone who does extensive work in CS and holds an academic job in that position has a conflict of interest when it comes to editing CS-related articles, especially any related to his area of research... but we hardly want to ban experts in CS from editing CS-related articles!

Someone who does extensive work in CS can edit the 99% of CS articles where the do not have a strong conflict of interest. I have absolutely asked passionate topic experts, no matter how qualified, to not edit on their personal pet projects. There are areas where I have strong expertise that I don't touch for the same reason: I'm a partisan.

I don't see monetary influence as being a worse sort of conflict (except for PR reasons).

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.

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

On Mar 4, 2007, at 13:38, Delirium wrote:

I don't think our situation is particular similar to journalists'. We are not doing original research, and we are not writing bylined articles. We summarize sources neutrally, post it publicly, and other people edit our work mercilessly at the slightest hint of a problem with it.

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. Several German banks commissioned historical works about their activities during World War II, and the resulting works were not generally very positive. I don't recall any objections to the funding there---that it was a bank commissioning its own history---and in fact generally people thought the banks *should* be the ones paying for the research. Now add onto that an additional layer of safety, where the work now gets edited by hundreds of other completely unrelated people after being written.

-Mark

I have to agree with this analysis. I've heard it said that it takes about 50 hours to write a featured article. Most people are not willing to spend 50 hours writing something for which they will get no recognition, which will become a huge pain in the rear to maintain if they so choose, for which they will spend countless hours appeasing the whims of a random group of people who have taken it upon themselves to decide what is brilliant and what is not, and which will be immediately set loose upon the masses to be mangled and changed. However, if someone is compensated for those 50 hours they spend, they might do it. I don't see this as a conflict of interest, I see it as incentive. Of course there may not be that much to write about companies, but when faced with having a stub for an article because nobody is interested in the topic, what is the company to do? I don't see anything wrong with paying someone to raise an article to featured status with the terms of payment being that the community agrees that it is neutral, comprehensive, and brilliantly written and not the payer liking what they see. I really do have a hard time seeing any such articles making it to featured status any other way, for that matter. Because who honestly wants to spend their volunteer free time on something as boring as company history, policy, and organization. Or whatever boring topic you choose. So in short, I think there is a way to do paid editing, which will not taint the wikipedia, we just haven't stumbled on it yet. Although I think I'd be extremely jealous of the people who get paid for their editing time when mine is as free as everyone else's. But it's for the good of the encyclopedia.... right? Maybe...

Ray Saintonge wrote:

By and large I find that supporters of open access to intellectual property in its various forms have not grasped the larger economic environment that would make this work. The people who contribute still [need] to make a living, and the number of those contributors that believe in a Marxist paradise where everyone gets what he needs are few and far between. Plese someone, tell me what economic model is going to keep this all alive over an extended time.

As somebody who made his first open-source contribution in 1992 and has done occasional bits ever since, I've given this some thought.

I think the main economic model for the next few years is going to be exactly the one that drove it to the current state: increasing wealth and education allows people to devote substantial time, money, and intellectual power to hobbies.

I don't think it will take the turn that large open-source projects have, where major contributions come from people who are paid with commercial money. The companies that pay for open-source developer time have a direct financial interest in improving the tools at hand. I think that's unlikely here, although I could see it happening with non-encyclopedia free content, like training materials and documentation for popular tools.

Down the line, I think we'll run of gas some with we hobbyists. Not that we won't get and use a ton of that, just that the quality level and topic focus will leave gaps that will become more and more obvious. I think the step over that will either be through advertising on Wikipedia or through large donations from tech billionaires creating an endowment. Either one will result in the Foundation hiring people full time to work on the content. This will expand the caste system in a way that will involve much wailing and gnashing of teeth in the community, but people will eventually get over it because it will actually make the encyclopedia better.

And then my guess is that as long as the funding is stable, things will pretty much stick that way, although as more of the content management responsibility shifts to the Foundation, they'll need to spend more and more in an arms race with spammers, COI types, and POV pushers of all sorts. This will probably involve the development of hardcore editing and monitoring tools along the lines of the current RC patrol and anti-vandal tools, but much more extensive and integrated in to Wikipedia's core.

Under those circumstances if I were in that position I wouldn't declare my conflict, and just go quietly about my work. If another editor complains that my edits are too favorable to the company I would have no problem apologizing quietly, knowing full well that my more subtle biases will go by unnoticed.

And wouldn't that apply just as well if we were ok with declared conflicts of interest? That still involves an increased level of scrutiny that is uncomfortable.

I really don't think that most corporate representatives who come here to edit for their company are here to create a bias.

I don't think they will think of it as a bias because the essence of PR is a pervasive and relentless bias. Expecting them to notice it consciously is like expecting us to think about the air all the time. This isn't a slam, by the way, I have friends in marketing and PR that I like just fine. I just don't want them writing articles on Wikipedia about their employers because they don't have the skills for it.

Just to be clear, I'm fine with some random IBM employee who turns up to correct a detail about some IBM research facility. But that's not what writing for pay will be.

With the relatively small part of the material that really is controversial we will have no shortage of editors who are willing to make the discrepancies obvious. What are we afraid of?

I am afraid of articles like [[PA Consulting Group]]. The number of person-hours we have from good editors is very, very small when compared with the number of people who work in the advertising, PR, and marketing industries, all of which have bias as part of their core.

William

on 3/5/07 10:59 AM, William Pietri at william@scissor.com wrote:

Down the line, I think we'll run of gas some with we hobbyists. Not that we won't get and use a ton of that, just that the quality level and topic focus will leave gaps that will become more and more obvious. I think the step over that will either be through advertising on Wikipedia or through large donations from tech billionaires creating an endowment. Either one will result in the Foundation hiring people full time to work on the content. This will expand the caste system in a way that will involve much wailing and gnashing of teeth in the community, but people will eventually get over it because it will actually make the encyclopedia better.

This is very much the way a hospital functions: A combination of paid staff and volunteers working together to accomplish the same goal - the best patient care possible. How these two groups get along in there interactions is what a culture is all about. Acceptance of this culture requires maturity on the part of the individual participants - and care and nurturing by all.

Marc

On 3/5/07, Guy Chapman aka JzG guy.chapman@spamcop.net wrote:

Yes. Gregory Kohs also thought it was fine to edit for pay, we banned him because lots of people disagreed, he was arrogant about it, which drove off those who might otherwise have agreed and a review of his edits showed that they were largely PR pieces or directory entries, not serious attempts at creating neutral articles.

I don't know if that's all true (the one or two articles I looked at of his were objectively much better than the void that had existed before them), but in any case, bad edits are bad edits - regardless of whether anyone was paid to make them. The question is, do good edits become bad edits just because they were paid for?

I have no doubt that many employees of companies edit their company's articles. Most of these edits are not really COI, since they are not editing *as representatives of the company* or being paid to edit.

They're also probably not neutral. Does it matter? If not, would it matter if they were paid to make them?

Actually I have no problem in principle with people occasionally editing an article where they have some minor conflict of interest,

Me neither.

but edits by the marketing or PR people tend to be uncritical and problematic, and being paid for editing specified content is certainly

Yes, about as bad as people writing about their own religion, home town, favourite basketball team, singer or painter. If only that problem was confined to professional editors, Wikipedia would be much better off.

incompatible with Wikipedia's ethos - you have a situation where the company will necessarily demand or expect a certain tone of editing; would they pay up cheerfully if during your researches you found and included a fact which reflected badly on them? Too many problems down that road, I think.

Is anyone suggesting that the Wikimedia foundation take money from companies and edit on their behalf? If a company pays someone, such as an employee, to edit an article on their behalf, then that's an issue between them. Our issue is to keep all articles NPOV, whether they were written on commission or not.

Steve

On Sun, 04 Mar 2007 09:31:30 -0500, Marc Riddell michaeldavid86@comcast.net wrote:

There also seems to be, in the original argument of this thread, a desire to yield to the larger sociocultural ethic that money is the root of all. Can't we rise above that here?

Actually it's the love of money that is the root of all evil. There's rather a nice little article at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Root_of_all_evil

And it's the motivation, not the money, that is the problem here, as well. Editor A gets paid to write, declaring that bias. Editors B, C and on then have to check every edit for subtle bias. Only editor A is paid. If editor A makes biased edits on his own account, at least all are paid the same rate for the job.

Guy (JzG)

On Mon, 5 Mar 2007 00:37:03 +1100, "Steve Bennett" stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:

...

Yes. Gregory Kohs also thought it was fine to edit for pay, we banned him because lots of people disagreed, he was arrogant about it, which drove off those who might otherwise have agreed and a review of his edits showed that they were largely PR pieces or directory entries, not serious attempts at creating neutral articles.

I don't know if that's all true (the one or two articles I looked at of his were objectively much better than the void that had existed before them), but in any case, bad edits are bad edits - regardless of whether anyone was paid to make them. The question is, do good edits become bad edits just because they were paid for?

Hmmm. No, I think the question is, can we assume that paid edits are good edits. If there is a paid editor, what we actually have to do is shadow them to check for subtle bias - if I were paid to write an article I would not be 100% confident I could write without subtle bias, especially if sources were spoonfed. How do we know that the sources have not been carefully selected to present a desired perspective? It would be rather naive to believe they had not been so selected, in fact.

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I have no doubt that many employees of companies edit their company's articles. Most of these edits are not really COI, since they are not editing *as representatives of the company* or being paid to edit.

They're also probably not neutral. Does it matter? If not, would it matter if they were paid to make them?

I don't know. Companies have disgruntled employees and enthusiastic evangelists. Would it matter if they were paid to write? Yes, because only the evangelists would be paid.

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Actually I have no problem in principle with people occasionally editing an article where they have some minor conflict of interest,

Me neither.

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but edits by the marketing or PR people tend to be uncritical and problematic, and being paid for editing specified content is certainly

Yes, about as bad as people writing about their own religion, home town, favourite basketball team, singer or painter. If only that problem was confined to professional editors, Wikipedia would be much better off.

No, worse. I live in Reading, Berkshire. I feel no particular loyalty to the town, it's just a place where I live. What if Reading paid me to edit their Wikipedia article? Would I write that it's a boring drug-riddled self-obsessed town with a terrible shopping centre and extortionate house prices, or would I write something a little more flattering?

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incompatible with Wikipedia's ethos - you have a situation where the company will necessarily demand or expect a certain tone of editing; would they pay up cheerfully if during your researches you found and included a fact which reflected badly on them? Too many problems down that road, I think.

Is anyone suggesting that the Wikimedia foundation take money from companies and edit on their behalf? If a company pays someone, such as an employee, to edit an article on their behalf, then that's an issue between them. Our issue is to keep all articles NPOV, whether they were written on commission or not.

No articles should be written on commission. I believe Jimbo Has Spoken on that issue.

Guy (JzG)

Guy Chapman aka JzG wrote:

On Mon, 5 Mar 2007 00:37:03 +1100, "Steve Bennett" stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:

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I don't know if that's all true (the one or two articles I looked at of his were objectively much better than the void that had existed before them), but in any case, bad edits are bad edits - regardless of whether anyone was paid to make them. The question is, do good edits become bad edits just because they were paid for?

Hmmm. No, I think the question is, can we assume that paid edits are good edits. If there is a paid editor, what we actually have to do is shadow them to check for subtle bias - if I were paid to write an article I would not be 100% confident I could write without subtle bias, especially if sources were spoonfed. How do we know that the sources have not been carefully selected to present a desired perspective? It would be rather naive to believe they had not been so selected, in fact.

But that's true of everyone---not just people who are paid. Anyone who has held office for a political party, for example, whether or not they are currently being paid... any computer scientist who has been involved in a major dispute within her field... etc, etc. The general solution we use is to assume good faith, unless evidence warrants otherwise---not to ban all Democrats from editing politics-related articles.

-Mark

Guy Chapman aka JzG wrote:

On Sun, 04 Mar 2007 13:29:57 -0500, Delirium delirium@hackish.org wrote:

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But that's true of everyone---not just people who are paid. Anyone who has held office for a political party, for example, whether or not they are currently being paid... any computer scientist who has been involved in a major dispute within her field... etc, etc. The general solution we use is to assume good faith, unless evidence warrants otherwise---not to ban all Democrats from editing politics-related articles.

True, but the people who then come along and check the edits are at least on the same rate of pay.

Since most politicians and academics get paid, and often their pay depends on promoting their reputations, I don't see how that's true. We've even on occasion *welcomed* paid staff who are editing their articles in a neutral way, even though there may be potential conflicts of interest. In particular there was a mostly positive thread on this mailing list a year or two ago about some museum staff adding information about their museum to an article. People watched their edits just to make sure it wasn't becoming a puff piece of course, but I don't recall people objecting that the museum staff was getting paid to edit Wikipedia while the watchers weren't.

And it would be naive to think that we don't already have people outright being paid to create articles. The only thing we're deterring is being scrupulous about it and disclosing the payment, which prevents anyone from even *knowing* to check the edits in the first place.

-Mark

On Mon, 5 Mar 2007 09:41:35 +1100, "Steve Bennett" stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:

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shadow them to check for subtle bias - if I were paid to write an

Why? There are plenty of edits being made with blatant bias. Subtle bias is the least of our problems.

No. Overt bias is usually easy to spot. I would argue that subtle bias is the *worst* of our problems.

--8<-----------------

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No articles should be written on commission. I believe Jimbo Has Spoken on that issue.

Me too. See my original post. I believe Jimbo's point of view was "the appearance of conflict of interest would undermine our credibility". Not "paid editing always produces bad edits".

Indeed. That and, for me, the likelihood of subtle bias.

Guy (JzG)

On Mon, 5 Mar 2007 09:57:15 +1100, "Steve Bennett" stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:

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No. Overt bias is usually easy to spot. I would argue that subtle bias is the *worst* of our problems.

But aren't we talking about companies disclosing their editing? That makes it checkable at least.

The usual recommendation is that they suggest changes on Talk. It avoids the appearance of conflict of interest.

Guy (JzG)