Hoi, The post by Rob Smith is a rambling affair. It is not clear at all what his argument is. The fact that he has been banned from the English Wikipedia and is currently on moderation on the wikien-l does not help understanding either. It does not help his case to come here in this way.
When I go to the archive, I understand that there is an issue with content for payment where there is a direct relation between the subject of the content and the organisation paying the money, they are the same. This seems to me only slightly less problematic from a situation where someone writes about himself or his organisation.
I do not have a problem with people being paid to write content for our projects; the quality of a paid for article will be quite different from what an average vandal produces, as such it is a relief :). Certainly when it is known what is done by whom and why, there needs not be a problem. Remember, a Wikipedia article is to be encyclopaedic, it is to by NPOV and it is not to be original science. When the work is done for Wikibooks or Wikiversity it can be a teacher working on material that is to be used in class. There are many motivations for paying for content, making it a fundamental problem is imho truly fundamentally flawed.
When paid for content is created, it is best to be open about it as the worst thing that can happen is that good content is binned because of some mob justice. There is also a lot of precedent for publicly known paid for content. In all the instances I know of it was known in advance that this was going to happen
Thanks, GerardM
On 3/8/07, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
On 07/03/07, Rob Smith nobs03@gmail.com wrote:
For those wondering, Rob has been banned from English Wikipedia for a long time, and has finally been placed on moderation on wikien-l just a short time ago.
- d.
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