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(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On Thu, Feb 25, 2016 at 10:31 AM, Yaroslav M. Blanter
<putevod(a)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​
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