William Pietri wrote:
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.
This is a pretty vague definition, but yes, it's the sort of thing I
wouldn't mind seeing expanded. Note that conflicts of interest can be
very subtle, though. If our article on [[autism]] was edited by someone
paid by a company selling autism drugs, that's a pretty clear conflict
of interest. But if it were edited by someone paid by a non-profit
group like [[Cure Autism Now]], there would also be potential conflicts
of interest; in particular, Cure Autism Now finds views that autism
isn't a disease offensive, so would be prone to having those treated in
an exclusively negative light if at all. The mythical independent
editor does not really exist; it's more a matter of degrees. I happen
to think that a conscientious editor accepting money from a source that
might have a conflict of interest is actually low on the list of
problems. A PhD in CS editing CS-related articles in which he has
published extensively is much more in a conflict of interest (since it
is the very rare professor who has no bias in the field, or any interest
in career advancement), but we actually encourage that.
However I also think it would be nice if people disclosed the money they
accepted---along with disclosing other potential conflicts of
interest---so articles could be scrutinized appropriately. We can never
actually force that to happen in all cases, but at the moment our
policies actively discourage it, which hardly helps.
-Mark