Jimmy Wales: evaluation

Transcript context

…Now, you don’t allow paid-for editing, but I’ve known people who are paid editors — on Wikipedia, they write things. They’re not, for the most part, slanting content. They’re trying to fill in gaps or add detail on, maybe, the person they work for. To what extent do you think Wikipedia is actually somewhat parasitic on nontransparent, paid-for editing, and you get rid of the worst manifestations of it, but it’s still a big part of the underlying foundation? It’s a really good question. It’s something that we struggle with. We know that it does go on, and we know that we don’t approve of it. Around the margins, there are a lot of different angles on what that looks like. I think one of the first things to note is that we try to make a distinction between paid editing and paid advocacy editing. The difference is — let’s say you’re a university professor, and your university says, “Actually, as a part of your evaluation, we are interested in our professors being involved in public dialogue, in public debate. And actually, if you can contribute knowledge to Wikipedia and show us that, we consider that a positive thing, and you’ll get a good review based on that.” Then, in some sense, they’re being paid to edit Wikipedia, but they are not being paid in the same way that the PR department of the university would be paid to make the university look good. In fact, they probably wouldn’t have much interest in making sure that page about the university itself is good. That’s paid editing, but not paid advocacy editing. Paid advocacy editing is really the problem. In that case, people are of different minds. I’m quite a hardliner on this. I just think it’s not something people should be doing at all. In fact, I think what we need to do to cope with it is have better mechanisms that are less combative for people who have a conflict of interest to actually contribute constructively by not editing pages, but by making suggestions in some organized fashion that will actually be paid attention to. But that gives rise to a lot of other problems. One of the problems is, there’s the old saying, which I should know who said it, but it’s very hard to get someone to understand something when their paycheck depends on them not understanding it. If you’re being paid to spruce up the page about your boss, and your idea of what’s neutral filling in the gaps and our idea might be substantially different simply because you come to it with an advocacy bias, and that’s problematic. I think what works for people is if they come in in good faith and talk to the community. That’s by far the most effective way to get things done. But we also know there are people who are doing paid editing, and it’s something that we basically disapprove of because we also see the abuses of it, where people go around trying to charge people a lot of money, pretending things that aren’t true about what they can get done, and so on and so forth. I’m the rare person who actually has no sock puppets. Why not allow sock puppets? What exactly is wrong with them? So what if a person has more than one identity out there, as long as you can monitor the identity that is operating on Wikipedia?…

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