[Wikimedia-l] Paid editing v. paid advocacy (editing)

[Brad Jorsch (Anomie)]

(Note these are my own personal views and in no way reflect any views of
the WMF or anyone else)

On Fri, Jan 10, 2014 at 7:34 AM, Christophe Henner <
christophe.henner at gmail.com> wrote:

> Now, the question about "paid advocacy". Again, one of our core
> principle is NPOV. We don't want people to push their POV. Whether
> they're paid or not, is not relevant.
>
> So, to me, the "paid foobar" question is not the one in debate here.
> The one we're actually debating about is "do we want for profit
> organization to edit Wikipedia".
>

I'd take this one step further: *paid* advocacy isn't necessarily the thing
we should be that much concerned about, as unpaid advocacy is just as bad
for the integrity of our content. There's no difference between someone who
inserts POV content because they're being paid to do so and someone who
inserts POV content because of their religious beliefs or personal
relationships or the like.

On the other hand, a paid advocate may perhaps be more concerning from a
community standpoint because it's likely that the paid advocate is going to
have more time and resources to devote to inserting POV content (and to
doing so in ways less likely to be "caught") than most unpaid advocates.

Even more generally, even paid editing without advocacy may give a stigma
to the project even if the content really is fully NPOV. And, as mentioned
elsewhere, even paid editing without advocacy might discourage non-paid
contributions for various reasons. These reasons might be behind some of
the opposition to all paid editing.