[Foundation-l] Paid editing comes of age

[David Gerard]

On 18 November 2010 23:09, John Vandenberg <jayvdb at 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 at 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.


- d.