[Wikimedia-l] Paid editing language wide

[Tomasz Ganicz]

2012/9/20 Samuel Klein <meta.sj at gmail.com>:
> On Wed, Sep 19, 2012 at 3:20 PM, Risker <risker.wp at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> On 19 September 2012 13:17, Steven Walling <steven.walling at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>> >
>> > https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Conflict_of_interest_editing for a
>> > placeholder.
>>
>> Just for the record, there's a difference between paid editing and conflict
>> of interest editing.  One can easily have a conflict of interest without
>> receiving any financial remuneration.
>>
>
> And you could be paid to edit without having a conflict of interest.  Some
> wiki-friendly donor could set up an anonymous fund to pay stipends to
> people to edit wikipedia for a year.  funded grad students in wiki studies
> are close.
>

Well.. English Wikipedia defines the conflict of interest on this page:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paid_editing_on_Wikipedia

"n the context of Wikipedia, conflict of interest editing is the
editing of Wikipedia articles by people whose background means that
their motives are likely to conflict with the encyclopedia's
neutrality policy. Conflict of interest editing includes paid editing
or paid advocacy, when employees, contractors, or those with financial
connection to individuals, products, corporations, organizations,
political campaigns or governments edit articles related to those
subjects. Although these edits may often involve minor factual
corrections and changes, significant media attention has revolved
around the editing of articles which removes or downplays negative
information and adds or highlights positive information by editors
with a conflict of interest."

"Wikipedia's conflict of interest guideline states (as of 2012) that a
conflict of interest (COI) is an "incompatibility between the aim of
Wikipedia, which is to produce a neutral, reliably sourced
encyclopaedia, and the aims of an individual editor," and that "COI
editing involves contributing to Wikipedia in order to promote your
own interests or those of other individuals, companies, or groups.
Where advancing outside interests is more important to an editor than
advancing the aims of Wikipedia, that editor stands in a conflict of
interest."


So, using Wikipedia for paid promoting of a city or a state by pushing
placement of the links to the relevant articles on the main page of
Wikipedia is or is not a conflict of interest? IMHO - at least
potentially there is a conflict of interest. Bear in mind that there
is quite long queue for "Did you know" section of main page. So, if
you push your (paid) articles using your possition and authority in
Wikipedia community, then other, less influential editors must wait
longer or the articles nominated/written by them will never appear on
the main page. I think the question can be fairly answered by checking
how the process of selection happened in case of Gibraltar related
articles - if there are proves that there was a kind of unfair
advocacy - for example organizing a group of editors to bias the
selection process we can say about conflict of interest and unfair
behavior.

I can't see the conflict of interest with providing paid QR-code based
service with use of Wikipedia content - this is an external feature -
and indeed anyone can organize it itself - but paid editing of
Wikipedia which results in systematic bias on behalf of the contractor
is quite obviously a conflict of interest. Is it possible to do paid
editing without putting to Wikipedia systematic bias? Maybe in some
cases yes - but IMHO there is very often such a danger even if the
resulting articles as read separately are OK.


-- 
Tomek "Polimerek" Ganicz
http://pl.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Polimerek
http://www.ganicz.pl/poli/
http://www.cbmm.lodz.pl/work.php?id=29&title=tomasz-ganicz