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

[Ray Saintonge]

charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com wrote:

>"Jake Nelson" wrote
>  
>
>>No matter what, people will be paid to edit. The questions is whetehr
>>they'll bother to tell us.... let's make a registration requirement,
>>and ban the hell out of anyone who violates it, and see where that
>>takes us.
>>    
>>
>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.
>
We need to get corporations on our side, not to be in a perpetual state 
of war with them.  There is great value to what you propose.  Many 
corporate documents are protected by copyrights.  Where a person is paid 
to edit on behalf of a company he presumably has the right to act on 
behalf of the company when he releases these documents on a page that is 
covered by the GFDL.  This frees up material whose use under copyright 
law might be uncertain.

Paying attention to the GFDL issue is more far-sighted than wallowing in 
allegations of conflict of interest.

Ec