So for every article we have 960 active editors? I assume you wrote that wrong.
On Thu, Nov 18, 2010 at 6:50 PM, Risker risker.wp@gmail.com wrote:
On 18 November 2010 18:33, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
On 18 November 2010 23:09, John Vandenberg jayvdb@gmail.com wrote:
Am I 'paid editing' when I write articles during 9-5 ? Is that bad?
The problem with paid editing is when it violates content guidelines, such as NPOV.
Someone paid to improve the area of linguistics in general? (This has happened.) Fine by me.
Someone paid by (say) a museum to write articles on the contents of their collection? Could risk NPOV, but the idea is probably a net win. And the photos!
Someone paid by a company to monitor their article for negative information and edit it accordingly? Could violate NPOV. The very proper way to do this is to openly introduce yourself as a PR person on the talk page, supply information as appropriate and never touch the article text itself; this can be problematic for you if there's little actual interest in the article, though, and so little third-party editor traffic.
Someone paid by a person to keep rubbish out of their BLP? Trickier. In a perfect spherical Wikipedia of uniform density in a vacuum, they shouldn't go near the article on them. In practice, BLPs are our biggest problems, for reasons I needn't elaborate on. Usually if they contact info@wikimedia.org with a BLP issue it gets an experienced volunteer on the case, and the BLP Noticeboard is an excellent and effective way to get experienced attention to an article.
"Paid editing" is, of course, not one thing.
I'll repeat what I said on enwp's Administrator's noticeboard here for a different audience:
"We are extraordinarily ineffective at providing neutral, well-written, relatively complete and well-referenced articles about businesses and individuals - even as of this writing we have tens of thousands of unreferenced and poorly referenced BLPs - and equally bad at maintaining and updating them. Given this remarkable inefficiency, and the fact that a Wikipedia article is usually a top-5 google hit for most businesses and people, there's plenty of good reason for our subjects to say "enough is enough" and insist on having a decent article. We've all seen the badly written BLPs and the articles about companies where the "controversies" section contains every complaint made in the last 10 years. We aren't doing the job ourselves, and it's unrealistic to think that we can: the article-to-active editor ratio is 1:960 right now[1], and getting higher all the time. I'm hard pressed to tell someone that they can't bring in a skilled Wikipedia editor, following our own policies and guidelines, to bring an article they're interested in up to our own stated standards. As to COI, one wonders why financial benefit seems to raise all these red flags, when undisclosed membership in various organizations, personal beliefs, and life experiences may well lead to an even greater COI. "Put it on the talk page" only works if (a) someone is watching the article, (b) that someone doesn't have their own perspective that they feel is more valid, (c) and someone is willing to actually edit the article. Those three conditions aren't being met nearly enough (see editor-to-article ratio above). We've created the very situation where organizations and people are no longer willing to accept that they have to put up with a bad article about themselves. And precisely why should they be prevented from improving our project?"
As to the Volunteer Response Team, they are a very small group of volunteers who are usually swamped with requests, and they often wind up having to negotiate with the existing "interested" editors to clear out BLP violations and clean up the articles to meet our own standards, sometimes having to fight tooth and nail to do so. (I should clarify that there is a large group of volunteers, but only a few who are actually responding to tickets on a regular basis, not unlike most wiki-projects.) It is challenging for subjects of articles to find their way to submit a request to have their article fixed, too. And remember that 1:960 ratio - even if every active editor on enwp made it their business to do nothing but maintenance and improvement of existing articles, we couldn't keep up with the workload.
Risker/Anne
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