Involving the foundation as a broker would corrupt the Foundation altogether. It would in essence turn it into an advertising agency. We're supposed to be different from Google. Google earns money by letting itself be used as a medium for advertising. It at least hopes to achieve this by while not being evil, and succeeds reasonably well at the compromise.
Wikipedia fortunately does not need to earn money, as ordinary people freely give us more than enough for our needs, and can therefore hope to achieve the positive good of providing objective information on encyclopedic topics that people want to read about, not information that other organizations want people to read. We have no need to compromise.
On Thu, Feb 25, 2016 at 11:15 PM, SarahSV sarahsv.wiki@gmail.com wrote:
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​ _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe