Delirium wrote:
I don't see how prohibiting honest and
conscientious Wikipedians from
being paid to edit will fix any of that. [...]
I wouldn't mind developing some guidelines over the relative merits of
different sorts of funding sources.
Just to be clear, I'm not against paying honest and conscientious
Wikipedians to edit. What I am opposed to is accepting editorial
conflicts of interest.
So if, say, the Ford Foundation wants to pay a dozen historians to write
historical articles, I'm all for it. Right up to the point where they
edit anything on the Ford Foundation or its funders.
I understand you're saying that with people of sufficient honor, we can
hopefully get away with it. It's plausible to me, but I can't see any
clear revision to the COI guidelines that will keep only the honorable
people doing this, and -- just as important -- keep them from being
eventually corrupted. We don't have the mechanisms to enforce honesty
that a major research institution does, and I don't think we'll be able
to afford to build them for a decade or more.
By all means propose them, but keep in mind all of the self-justifying
that goes on in the head of pretty much any shill or flack. As I have
said before, I have talked to people, perfectly nice people, who were in
our eyes corrupting Wikipedia. They had not the slightest notion they
were doing anything wrong. Everybody thinks they are on the side of the
angels.
To my mind, the solution is the same one that journalists have: that we
write for our readers alone. Anything else invites turning a trickle
into a flood.
More similar, I think, would be to compare historians
who write works on
commission. These are generally paid for by an interested party,[...]
I'd be intrigued to read more about this, but my guess is that it would
require several conditions for it to work:
1. The company would have to have a clear and special interest in
being seeing as completely forthright.
2. The historian would have to be somebody with an established
reputation and solid credentials.
3. The historian would do a relatively small amount of work for the
commissioning party. (E.g., they would not be a staff historian.)
4. The historian would not primarily do commissioned work.
The last three at least seem to be the case here---an established and
well-respected contributor is asking if writing the occasional article
for a paid commissioner would be okay. I think the first is actually
better to avoid having to decide, since the motives of companies are
rather difficult to discern---so long as the writer is not a staff
historian, and doesn't do this as their main living, then whether the
company is interested in forthrightness or not matters little.
No slight intended to Jaap or any of our contributors but I don't think
the comparison is even close. A professional historian with an
established reputation and solid credentials has put, what, two decades
into getting there? And getting caught distorting the truth means they
throw that and their professional future away. Even our very best
editors don't have anything like that on the line. For those who are
pseudonymous, there is even less penalty for ethical missteps.
And those historians work in a field where academic norms of
intellectual independence and honesty have been built up over centuries,
with detection and enforcement mechanisms to match. Not to mention years
of training in research and writing for every person involved. We aren't
even close to having that kind of infrastructure.
As to item 1, again it comes back to conflict of interest. If Intel pays
some professional technology journalist to expand our computer science
articles, more power to them, as I don't see them as having an interest
in distorting them. But as soon as they want changes to anything where
there is a conflict of interest, we should say no.
Motivations of companies are actually not difficult to discern: they are
there to make money for their shareholders.
William
--
William Pietri <william(a)scissor.com>
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:William_Pietri