On 18 November 2010 23:09, John Vandenberg jayvdb@gmail.com wrote:
Am I 'paid editing' when I write articles during 9-5 ? Is that bad?
The problem with paid editing is when it violates content guidelines, such as NPOV.
Someone paid to improve the area of linguistics in general? (This has happened.) Fine by me.
Someone paid by (say) a museum to write articles on the contents of their collection? Could risk NPOV, but the idea is probably a net win. And the photos!
Someone paid by a company to monitor their article for negative information and edit it accordingly? Could violate NPOV. The very proper way to do this is to openly introduce yourself as a PR person on the talk page, supply information as appropriate and never touch the article text itself; this can be problematic for you if there's little actual interest in the article, though, and so little third-party editor traffic.
Someone paid by a person to keep rubbish out of their BLP? Trickier. In a perfect spherical Wikipedia of uniform density in a vacuum, they shouldn't go near the article on them. In practice, BLPs are our biggest problems, for reasons I needn't elaborate on. Usually if they contact info@wikimedia.org with a BLP issue it gets an experienced volunteer on the case, and the BLP Noticeboard is an excellent and effective way to get experienced attention to an article.
"Paid editing" is, of course, not one thing.
- d.