On Thu, Feb 25, 2016 at 10:31 AM, Yaroslav M. Blanter putevod@mccme.ru wrote:
- Possibly POV will be compromised in paid articles.
- Unhealthy situation within the editing community. In the debates with
WMF staff when we disagreed, I always felt awkward, because they were paid arguing with me, and would do it until they convince me or I give up, and I was doing this in my free time, and got tired very quickly. I also had very unpleasant experiences interacting with some chapter people whose only goal was to keep their position. They did not care about the quality, efficiency, anything, only about their personal good. And if somebody defends their personal good, you know, thy usually win, and the quality loses. Now, imagine there is a content dispute between a user who is paid (and is afraid to lose the salary) and a user who is unpaid and have to do the same for free - I am sure a paid user will be way more persistent.
​Yaroslav, we already have a lot of paid editors on the English Wikipedia.
Some are Wikimedians in residence, and this has always been regarded as okay, though I believe they're expected not to edit articles about the institution that employs them.
But we also have a lot of paid PR editing and obvious COI problems because of that, as well as the problems you highlight (e.g. the paid editor being more persistent).
Introducing the Foundation as a broker between organizations that want articles and editors who want to write them would not solve all the problems you highlight, but it would remove the COI aspect. So my thinking was that it would be better than the current situation.
Sarah​