[WikiEN-l] MyWikiBiz

[Steve Bennett]

On 8/9/06, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
> The big problem with paid editing on wikipedia is NOT that someone is
> getting paid to write, but rather that this causes a rather obvious
> conflict of interest and appearance of impropriety.  This was my
> problem, and they immediately saw why this was not in our interest or
> theirs.

I'm not sure why conflict of interest is a problem here. When someone
sits down to write an article about their own religion, there's a
conflict of interest. When they write about circumcision because they
were HORRIBLY EMOTIONALLY SCARRED as a baby, there's a conflict of
interest. Hell, when they realise that their favourite Pokémon somehow
escaped a mention in Wikipedia, we don't expect them to write a
neutral, unbiased piece. We might like it, but we don't expect it.

Somehow Wikipedia survives on all of his "conflict of interest", you
might even say it thrives on it. Some of our best, most referenced
articles come from battles between pro- and anti- groups.

In the case of articles about corporations, what you'd likely find
would be this 1 "conflict of interest" editor being brought into line
with a dozen or more NPOV warriors. In the long term, would any of
MyWikiBiz's clients' articles remain unedited?

> Rather, what we brainstormed about as a nice mutually beneficial ground
> would be for them to charge customers for writing high quality NPOV
> articles about their companies, with sources and verifiability, but for
> them to work with well known and respected wikipedians who are NOT being
> financially compensated to actually enter the articles into Wikipedia
> upon their own independent judgment.  This will avoid, for MyWikiBiz, a

I'm not liking this. Company A pays Company B in order to get
Volunteer C to write an article. (Then, Company D sells the results to
Sucker E...)

> lot of sad fighting with us which is likely to be ugly and unproductive
> all around.

Could the sad fighting not be avoided by constructive discussion,
whereby we conclude that paying people to write Wikipedia articles is
in everyone's best interest, and might even improve our reputation,
giving us a more "professional" appearance?

> This preserves our independence as a volunteer editing body, while at

If "independence" means that we don't have anyone with barrows to
push, I don't think we are "independent". If being a "volunteer
editing body" is now a fundamental aspect of Wikipedia (as opposed to
a fact of life of having no money to pay people), then I'm just
confused.

Steve