On Sat, Dec 11, 2010 at 04:37:40PM -0500, David Goodman wrote:
In my experience, it is simply not correct that people who may be paid to edit, even for a nonprofit organization, are unlikely to have a bias. (Of course, so do the unpaid. COI does not require money , but money always produces COI.)
I've seen too many cases of such people adding inappropriate content: inserting more links to the organization than anyone else would do,
... which is when they are doing COI editing ...
There are a lot of situations where a paid editor wouldn't (or doesn't) have a COI. I mentioned a lot of examples.
* I have no issues with people being paid to simply be wikipedians. This happens rarely, but should be encouraged.
Unfortunately, people who are paid to be good wikipedians are outnumbered by
* people paid to market something on wikipedia.
This latter activity should be discouraged. The latter group is clearly ruining it for the former. :-(
sincerely, Kim Bruning