Slashdot Mirror
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."
TELL THE WIKITRUTH
"You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."
How many people would support The Church of Scientology paying people to edit and publish stories on Wikipedia?
Still not clear enough?
How many people would support The Church of Scientology paying a Wikipedia ADMIN to edit and publish stories on Wikipedia?
True but the issue under discussion is precisely having outsider sources pay to write articles. In the vast majority of cases it is companies (the examples given by Ha!) it is companies paying to have articles about themselves or individuals paying to have articles about themselves. Paying in a completely uninterested fashion would not create the same problems. However, it would create other problems completely unrelated. As Lessig discusses in his book Remix, people are often willing to volunteer when no one is getting paid for it. But if some people are getting paid or if everyone is getting paid a small amount they switch from thinking of it is as a volunteer work but instead of as employment and you get many fewer people willing to join in. So that simply raises separate problems.
When I am under contract with a person or corporation to write an article about said person or corporation, I have very, very, very little interest in presenting an "advocacy" position on behalf of that entity. Rather, success is measured in durability within Wikipedia, so my highest priority is...
How do I write (and publish) this article in such a way that it passes WP:NPOV, WP:V, WP:RS, and all the other WP:things, while simultaneously NOT DRAWING THE ATTENTION of someone from the WikiHive intent on deleting paid promotional puff pieces?
Guess what? The articles that result are relatively bland, not puff pieces, quite encyclopedic, and (ever since I learned this technique) 100% durable within Wikipedia -- with surprisingly little follow-up maintenance, and likewise lasting appreciation of my clients.
That's not quite how corporations pay for their articles.
Oh sure, that's who I'm talking about. People paid to manipulate wikipedia in the interest of a corporation. /sarcasm
I'm talking about the average wikinerd, who spends his or her spare time compiling huge lists, writing articles on even the most obscure relics from pop culture, and editing every little misspelling and fuck-you they see. The ones with user pages littered with barnstars and embarrassing userboxes detailing their interest in siberian huskies and stamp collecting. Your meat and potatoes wikipedian. They don't do it for money. They do it for the love of wikipedia. They are fucking hardcore!
There is an interesting topic on how one "leading Wikipedia" David Shankbone Miller got paid by the Israeli government and given all sorts of professional advantages, such as introductions famous authors and Shimon Peres, in an attempt to curry favor with the Wikipedia camp.
http://wikipediareview.com/index.php?showtopic=24358
The big joke is what they got back were pictures of pissing goats and dimly lit gay clubs. Probably not the kid of PR Israel thought they were buying.
By all accounts, this guy had had more than one trip out to Israel paid for and yet there is no discussion of this kind of sponsorship. No one is accounting for it. He did stick this one photo up though ...
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Palestinian_boy_with_toy_guy_in_Nazareth_by_David_Shankbone.jpg
and tried adding the title, "A recent study by Herzogâ(TM)s trauma centre found that 33 per cent of Israeli youth have been affected personally by terrorism, either by being at the scene of an attack or by knowing someone injured or killed by terrorists. Seventy per cent of those surveyed reported increased subjective fear or hopelessness." ... a nice bit of bought "NPOV" and a good reason why it should not be allowed.
It would appear that this particular gun has backfired on his paymasters.
Is that because there just aren't enough decent writers out there? Or that those other decent writers want way too much money?
I think that is more on target. Writing anything from a neutral point of view is difficult/impossible. If you are taking the time to edit an article, you are most likely not an impartial 3rd party. Hopefully what this could encourage is more well written articles. As with all articles, the obviously false information can get edited out by other users. If the information then gets continually changed the article gets frozen (a la Scientology).
I can see this going awry, but I'd be interested to see where it heads.
Same with Wikipedia, the market (Wikipedia) is opposed to paid editing of articles.
That doesn't appear to be true. There has been a majority in favor of allowing paid editing since a fairly early stage in the process (and no it doesn't seem to consist of paid shills but I suppose it's hard to tell for certain). It's running at about 60% suporting the idea that whether someone's paid is irrelevant as long as content is neutral, verificable etc. and 40% against.
To summarise the summary of the summary: people are a problem. ~ h2g2
I honestly don't believe that any contributor posts with a neutral point of view actually.
A NPOV is the author trying to present information in the best interests of the typical reader. The author is human, has incomplete information and so cannot be completely unbiased but nonetheless they make a best effort.
That a person gets paid, just makes their biases more obvious.
A non-NPOV is the author trying to present information in the best interests of the writer. They are trying to manipulate the reader into making irrational judgments based on incomplete and biased information in favour of the writer, not the reader. The author is not making a best effort for the reader at all.
I know which I'd prefer.
---
An unobtrusive ad is a non-functional ad. It is a non-sustainable business model.
My worries about Wikipedia were confirmed when I had a doctor use a Wikipedia entry to determine what type of medicine to prescribe for my condition. When I expressed my shock over this he politely informed me that "most doctors" use it to make decisions about medication. I can only imagine what kind of other professionals are using Wikipedia to make potentially life altering decisions.
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?
Some companies are reasonably ethical and well regarded. They might be quite happy to have a neutral POV article on wikipedia rather than no article at all, given that no-one has much that is bad to say about them.
Yes.
But then again, some points of view are more neutral than others.