[Foundation-l] Paid editing comes of age

[Michael Peel]

On 18 Nov 2010, at 15:42, Fred Bauder wrote:

>> On Thu, Nov 18, 2010 at 14:09, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> 
>>> On 18 November 2010 11:30, Â <wiki-list at phizz.demon.co.uk> wrote:
>>> 
>>>> Any one signed up yet?
>>>> http://www.ereleases.com/pr/visibility-wikipedia-easier-43135
>> 
>> I could find anything wrong in their code of ethics
>> http://www.wikipediaexperts.com/codeofethics.html
>> 
>> --
>> Amir E. Aharoni
>> 
> 
> Neither do I, which bodes problems for the business. They hire you to
> break Wikipedia rules, not follow them. The question remains: is paid
> editing which does conform to Wikipedia policies and guidelines
> acceptable, even welcome?

What I worry about is the volunteer time that gets taken up tidying things up after something like this goes wrong - or worse, goes somewhat right but not completely (so that a simple revert is out of the question and a major cleanup of an article is needed, or a lot of discussion with the editor is necessary to set things straight). That's volunteer time that could otherwise be spent either productively, or tidying up after other volunteers.

It almost leads into the catch-22 scenario where the paid editors need to guarantee that if their work isn't up to scratch then they'll pay someone else to fix it...

Mike