Will you be expecting every supporter of a political party, every member of
a religious group, every national of a country, every supporter of a
football team and so on ad nauseam... to declare COI when editing a related
article? These groups are often more biased then grunt employees. Wikipedia
content is largely contributed by enthusiasts with either a strong bias or
partial information (leading to unintentional bias). It is the strength and
the wakness of crowdsourcing. Live with it or lose many of your
contributors. This whole pogrom against paid editors is a waste of effort as
it is virtually unenforceable without an invasion of privacy that the NSA
would reject as over the top. Judge the contributor by the quality of their
work, not by who their connections may be, or require every contributor to
register their true and validated identity and all affiliations, financial
or otherwise.. I oppose double standards favouring unpaid fanatics against
well intentioned professionals
Cheers,
Peter
----- Original Message -----
From: "Fæ" <fae...@gmail.com>
To: "Wikimedia Mailing List" <wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org>
Sent: Friday, April 04, 2014 3:39 PM
Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Proposal: Transparency for Wikimedia
"paidvolunteers"
On 4 April 2014 14:05, Richard Symonds <richard.symo...@wikimedia.org.uk>
wrote:
...
It seems to me that the term 'paid volunteer' is an oxymoron.
...
Yes, it is oxymoronic, many common terms are, though I am open to an
alternative form of words. I understand that volunteers who are also
employees do not want to be required to always declare they are an
employee, it can be the equivalent of wearing a "kick me" sign, but
this is a community issue to solve, not an excuse for being opaque.
Sue's report into the Belfer case is leading us in this direction if
we want to avoid the same embarrassments occurring not just in the WMF
but in partnerships or chapter/thorg funded projects.
We need to cover the following real and current situations where there
is a lack of transparency (here "employee" includes contractors and
Wikimedia organizations includes the WMF, chapters, thorgs,
proto-chapter programmes, etc.):
(A) There are increasing numbers of Wikimedia self-identified
volunteers receiving expenses, scholarships, grants or supplied
equipment as part of projects funded or part-funded by Wikimedia
organizations. The most notable are Wikimedian in Residence projects,
however a variety of other projects exist with money or other
benefits, such as me being supplied a computer to support some
worthwhile Commons mass upload projects. There is currently no
consistent global requirement or procedure for volunteers to do any
more than declare their interest, which may remain on a special
sub-page of one of the Wikimedia projects, chapter wikis, or even
privately declared. There are plenty examples of 'paid volunteers' or
'supported volunteers' in this situation, who are advocating for
community support for their projects without it being clear or
transparent at the time of that advocacy that they are being supported
with funding, equipment or contracted payments. There is *absolutely*
nothing wrong with content creation advocacy, it is fulfilling the aim
of our projects, however if an interest is not transparent and not
easy to understand, it is not best practice.
(B) Significant numbers of Wikimedia/chapter employees are taking part
in community project discussions and !votes using pseudonymous
accounts. The resulting summary of community consensus does not take
account of the numbers of volunteers who are also employees
contributing, even when a !vote has direct implications for the
priority or future funding of projects that some of the same employees
may benefit from or their employer will benefit from.
(C) Full time Wikimedia organization employees are paid Wikimedia
volunteer scholarships to go to Wikimedia conferences where they may
attend without making it clear they are an employee as they are
attending as a volunteer. During the conference they are advocating
future projects and community policy changes that will benefit their
employer and may create future funded programmes for their employer
and potentially themselves as an employee.
Fae
--
fae...@gmail.com https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Fae
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