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, using vague adjectives of praise, using the full name of the company as often as possible, adding excessive links to internal sources, trying to mention every possible product and feature and event and minor corporate milestone, using favorable comments made about them from non-reliable sources, adding a list of too many executives, using publications from their company or organization as references disproportionately in articles, and trying to say things 3 times over, in the infobox, the lede, and the main article.
These are the ways we pick up their edits now, and will be able to do so whether or not they declare themselves. I have seen such editors who do not do this but whom I can identify as paid internal or outside editing, and I agree with you there should be no objection to such editing. (I identify from the particular subject concentration, the trick of style, features in subjects I know something about which are characteristically seen in their declared PR and advertising -- and, for external editors, the consistency across different articles. Even when what they add is appropriate, there can still be a pattern.)
As an easy example of what anyone can identify, are political campaign biographies.
On Sat, Dec 11, 2010 at 4:21 PM, Kim Bruning kim@bruning.xs4all.nl wrote:
- Museum Curator: Adding information about artifacts in the collection. This should be fine.