[WikiEN-l] Almeda University paying for positive Wikipedia edits

[Jeff Raymond]

charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com wrote:

> Disagree. That isn't a strategy. What would be a strategy? Certainly (a)
> encourage corporations and others to post GFDL material about themselves,
> and (b) err... we need a more explicit mechanism for harvesting GFDL text
> and adding it to WP, but we never get to this, because people seem to
> think that we have to discuss 'paid editors', not the mission. But anyway
> we can perfectly well set up pages for listing available online GFDL text
> about corporations, and perfectly well allow PR people to list things on
> such pages.

Paid edits do not run contrary to our mission at all.  A transaction
outside of our structure that results in contributions to our project that
meet our needs and requirements are fine.

The issue is this - we can either continue to stick our hands in our ears
and sing loudly, or we can accept that it is happening, will continue to
happen even if we try to ban it, and decide to encourage such users to be
clear as to their motives and allow their edits to be monitored
mercilessly to meet our standards.  I'd much rather know who a percentage
of them are than not know who any of them are.

-Jeff