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Should Wikipedians Edit Stories For Pay?
Hugh Pickens writes "The Register reports that a longtime Wikipedia admin has been caught offering to edit the online encyclopedia in exchange for cash. Someone noticed a post to an online job marketplace where he was advertising his services: 'Besides technical writing, I also am an accomplished senior Wikipedia administrator with several featured articles to my name,' read the post, which has since been changed. 'If you need a good profile on Wikipedia, I can help you out there too through my rich experience.' Wikipedia promptly opened a discussion page to try to reach consensus on the community view of 'paid editing.' So far opinion seems to be divided between those who say it's ok as long as full disclosure is made and 'edits are compliant with WP:NPOV, WP:RS, WP:BLP, WP:N,' and others who believe that paid editing automatically creates a conflict of interest. Back in 2006, Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales shot down a company known as MyWikiBiz, which promised that you could 'author your legacy on the Internet.' The company subsequently had to reinvent itself with no reference to Wikipedia. 'It is not ok with me that anyone ever set up a service selling their services as a Wikipedia editor, administrator, bureaucrat, etc., I will personally block any cases that I am shown,' wrote Wales."
Just like Wikipedia discourages people to make edits of a person's own article for themselves, this should also be discouraged. Once you receive money for edits you've made, you're no longer an uninterested third party and have a biased voice. There's no way to enforce this so Wikipedia will have to just continue accepting/rejecting edits based inherently on the edit and what bias it itself may hold.
My work here is dung.
Wikipedia has grown to be the biggest encyclopedia in the world without paying anybody. I don't see why they should start now. We all contribute to Wikipedia and expect nothing in return. That's how we pay for the articles - with our kindness.
wikipedia is already biased and untrustworthy. another idiot adding to the existing idiots in the pot wont make a difference.
Copyright. Yeah. That would work. You could keep other people from diluting your work by using the protection afforded by copyright laws. That would be great. Thank goodness that we have copyright! That way, people who want to protect the integrity of their work have the legal authority to do so!
Youtubes demise? Deleting full episodes, editing comments, deleting controversial videos and muting personal videos.
Wikipedia? Going from a user generated non bias global collaborative encyclopedia to just an encyclopedia.
Once these companies get big enough, the always revert back to standard business models. This however is always completely against what made them so good to begin with, youtube became famous for the very content they now destroy, and pay people to seek out.
Next in line? Google......
They all sell out.
It's that sort of reasoning that gets us ridiculous laws regarding child porn (like kids sexting eachother being charged as sex offenders). If you imagine the worst possible scum when making laws, you get stupidly over-broad laws.
If a person is skilled at writing, it seems reasonable for that person to make a living at writing. It seems that there is a huge bias against people making a living, although we do celebrate the super-rich.
Of course, if the guy who owns the site makes paid copy against the rules, that's his prerogative because its his site. But this isn't a moral issue -- it's an ownership issue.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
There's an excellent analysis by user Ha! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_comment/Paid_Editing#Statement_by_Ha.21 who shows that versions made for pay are generally PR puff pieces at best. He's expanded that to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Ha!/paid_editing_adverts which drives the point home even further. Allowing paid editing would be the death of anything resembling neutrality. There are serious problems with neutrality already, but this would kill it completely.
Brittanica pays its editors and authors after all. I think if you pay someone to edit articles, it ought to be fine, as long as they are about subjects in which you have no vested interest. Ethically, there wouldn't be a problem there, although there might be some technical issues in actually making sure that that is the case.
I mean, if someone's a good writer/researcher, and someone else wants to sponsor them (pay their bills so they can concentrate on writing/researching), what would be wrong with that?
How many people would support paying history gradschool students to work on WikiProject: Russian History?
It's perfectly possible to be unbiased and paid for your work. I don't see why they need a new policy to deal with this - their regular NPOV policies are fine.
The Yasashii Syndicate ||
Everyone thinks that people who disagree with them are garbage.
Do you really believe that a company would hire a Wikipedia admin to wedge an article about said company onto Wikipedia because said company was looking for a NEUTRAL point of view?
Is that because there just aren't enough decent writers out there? Or that those other decent writers want way too much money?
Or is it because those companies believe that an admin would have the best chance of getting a biased story posted?
Copyright is not an "anti-distribution tool". It's an anti-unauthorized-unpaid-distribution tool. Don't bring your propaganda here.
The problem is, you can't argue for market forces when the market is against it. Its like trying to market ham at a kosher deli, they aren't going to want it, and no matter how many times you want to "let the free market decide" they simply don't want it. Same with Wikipedia, the market (Wikipedia) is opposed to paid editing of articles.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Can we pay the Wikipedia editors to stop editing articles? Having some moron keep changing verifiable factual information back to something that's flat out wrong over and over gets really tiresome after several years. IMO half those people shouldn't be allowed near the thing.
Need Mercedes parts ?
Anytime someone is paid for something there is a slanted "opinion". Pay me enough I'll tell you anything you want to hear, I'll slam any person, or business if the price is right. This is entirely contradictory to the spirit of a wiki.
Which works great right up to the point where someone is actually convicted for something that should never have been a crime to begin with.
How many stupid things did you do as a teenager? I mean little meaningless things -- imagine your life if you got busted for one of the frequent lapses in intelligence that plague teenagers, but instead of some slap on the wrist commensurate with the misdeed, you had to walk around the rest of your life with the equivalent of a scarlet letter, shunned, unable to get good work, and reviled by everyone who assume because of that scarlet letter, that you did something really really nasty. That's an utterly random result that makes people disrespect the law and start thinking revolutionary or counter-cultural ideas. It is in no way an actual deterrent and serves instead to undermine government. If we had a law that said the police can shoot dead every 10th speeder they catch, it might be a deterrent. Enough laws like that though, and you can expect violent resistance.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
This already happens and inevitably will become more common as Wikipedia's profile rises. WP might as well get out in front of it with policies that make it easier to police and verify.
Currently, PR firms who are hired by companies to raise their profile already add biased, poorly sourced puff pieces to Wikipedia. They are promptly shredded by the community and deleted in nine cases out of ten. They do, however, create a lot of work for Wikipedian volunteers, usually because the PR people in question know websites generally, but nothing about the rules and culture that govern Wikipedia. They also do not generally disclose up front that they have a business relationship with the company they're writing the article about.
There's an argument to be made that there's an advantage to replacing these PR firms with people who are already clued in to Wikipedia's culture and guidelines. They could communicate up front to a client what will and won't fly on WP, and the best way to add verifiable information about the company without running afoul of neutrality and verifiability guidelines. If all these paid editors do on behalf of their employer is add content and provide sources, as long as their work is in accord with policy I don't see a reason to care that they are getting paid.
There are freelance wackos and fanboys that attempt to sabotage or whitewash pages about companies and other institutions as it is. How are paid editors different? At least you could require them to declare their influences. Make stringent requirements about disclosure, and allow paid editors to edit and provide info in talk pages, but not to take any administrative actions on the pages they're paid to edit. Any violation results in a topic ban for that account.
How about the fact that the age of consent is below 18 in most states, meaning that while it's legal for teenagers to engage in all sorts of sexual activity, a girl taking a picture in her underwear can land her in prison for 10 years with a permanent registration as a danger to children?
If you don't see anything wrong with that, you need your vision checked.
I'm a lawyer, but not yours. I wouldn't represent someone who thinks taking legal advice from Slashdot is a good idea.
...I suppose on what is really being paid for. Are you paying for someone to spin an article in your favor, or are you simply paying to make sure that the article is well done, well formatted, and grammatically correct. I see no objections to the latter, honestly.
you would still have donated.. right? sure. sure.
NPOV doesnt mean a lack of critical content, it means viewpoints can be mentioned but not one to the exclusivity of others.
but in general 'fans' of something dont want any critical viewpoints even mentioned. they dont understand NPOV.
so, whatever.
...Those with the most time on their hands.
They always have been.
Just try and outlast, say, a bored housewife with an axe to grind and nothing better to do than grind it.
Or maybe the unemployed aspiring journalist who likes to insert references to himself and his work into half the existing Wikipedia entries.
And then there are the relentlessly self-promoting ego-monsters who believe Wikipedia was created solely for to allow them to finally reveal their greatness and grandeur to the world.
Or the high school kid hellbent on mindless vandalism to impress his little friends, as well as for the sheer pleasure of it.
Those are just a few obvious ones, but there are many others.
Wikipedia is a wonderful concept, but unfortunately it's an utter bitch in reality.
Some actors in the market are against it. Some are for it, as the summary shows. The end result is a black market, the same as always when an authority attempts to prevent supply and demand from meeting.
Interestingly, Wikitruth is now frozen, claiming to have won.
Somehow, I think it's true; more and more people understand that you can use Wikipedia at the same time as questioning it. Many people have learned how to question all media (the problems of Wikipedia are the same as those of traditional media, just more obvious). At the same time there's a whole load of anti-wikipedia people who just wanted to destroy. That doesn't seem to have happened.
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
We all have to deal with the things we did when we are young all our lives, unless we move outside of the area that knows about it (possibly including leaving the country if we committed a felony and were tried as an adult, which is JUST WRONG... err, sorry for the diversion. Don't worry, I don't have any felonies on my record at any age.) Once upon a time you'd grow up and die in the same village, at least now you can move out of town. You know the joke, right? "You see that bridge over there? I built that bridge with my own hands, stone by stone. But do they call me the bridge builder?"
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"