[WikiEN-l] Survey about paid editing

[Luna]

On 2/1/07, Cheney Shill <halliburton_shill at yahoo.com> wrote:

> There wasn't a vote for, "Can you phrase the question to be
> more misleading?"
>
> "Is it ok to pay people to post or edit Wikipedia content?"
> - I'd say it's easy to have wrongly interpreted that to be
> a question about whether it's OK for Wikipedia to hire
> editors/posters.  If you phrase it as, is it OK for
> companies to insert undisclosed ads and PR into articles,
> you'll get very different survey results.


Too true. More often than not, it's all in how we phrase a question. Their
choice was rather ambiguous on the count of who was doing the paying.

Personally, I heard a story of a company that had paid somebody to check up
on their article, now and then -- just to make sure it wasn't vandalized and
nobody was saying *blatantly* crappy and false stuff about them. The guy
wasn't supposed to make any substantive edits, only to make sure nothing too
untoward happened to the article. *That* doesn't bother me, provided they
stay with really clear-cut cases like that.

Paid editors can be neutral (take journalists and news reporters, for
example), but being paid (or even employed in the long term) by the very
subject of your writing poses an obvious and inherent conflict of interest.
It may be possible to write neutrally in such circumstances, but it would
have to be the exception to the rule, for one to be able to do so.

-Luna