Based on the limited information that I have, it seems to me that there are already numerous contribtors who are paid to engage in promotional activity on Wikipedia, whether declared or undeclared, and the community does not have adequate human resources to patrol and investigate all of these. I expect that the problem will continue to get worse unless WMF gets more energetic about investigating TOS violations involving undeclared COI and WMF becomes predictable about extracting financial penalties that are severe enough to deter most of the undeclared COI contributors. Unfortunately, as far as I know, WMF has been largely passive about the problem of undeclared COI and has not announced any plans to become more aggressive. As nice as it would be if everyone could afford and was willing to work for free, this is not the case. If it was then we could safely eliminate the salaries of the entire WMF staff. However, I think that financial support makes sense for some paid staff to handle activities like network operations, interface design, legal defense, and responses to safety problems. Some types of Wikimedia activities are better suited to volunteer work than others. I encourage volunteers to avoid burning themselves out; there are some activities that I did in the past that I would not do again as a volunteer. Better to be an occasional and long-term contributor than to get burned out. I have some ideas about how to pay people to do certain types of work that, so far, WMF has not funded. Unfortunately these are merely ideas and not likely to become reality in the short term. Perhaps later this year or in the next few years I will have specific proposals with reasonable chances for sustainable success. I share the concern that paid participants in the Wikiverse, like staff of WMF and affiliates, WMF grantees, and potentially like the paid contributors that I have in mind, may become so numerous that they can drown out the consensus of the volunteers. Unfortunately I do not have easy solutions for this issue. We could prohibit all paid contributors from participating in RFCs and related decision processes, but we would be largely relying on people to self-disclose their paid status, which seems unlikely to be adequate. Perhaps the issues that we are discussing in this conversation should be included in the Structures and Systems prong of the WMF strategy process. I am pinging Nicole to ask for her input about that idea. However, keep in mind that the strategy process is financially sponsored by WMF, and it is not free of potential conflicts with the interests of WMF. I wish that I could be more optimistic. These are difficult topics. Regards, Pine ( https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Pine ) null