Sarah Stierch leaves Wikimedia Foundation over paid editing

Those are good points for most rules. Perhaps not when it comes to rules that you will let employees go for breaking, though.

It seems to me that this lady was merely following the rule that you cited. In some countries, if she now files for unfair dismissal, I think Wikimedia might lose.

People defend other people on the Internet for all sorts of dumb reasons. Only women get a special term for when guys stick up for them.

The problem with it is it ends up being just as denigrating to the woman involved, who you are after all accusing of being a 'damsel in distress'.

I'm not sure there needs to be a term to describe quite that frame of reference. If the guys involved are creepily harassing the woman (even through 'kindness'), than the term for that is harassment.

Otherwise, I don't think a special term is needed to describe when you (especially male 'you's) believe a woman is only being defended because of sex appeal, so what. Why does there 'definitely' need to be a term to describe that?

It's not a term that needs replacing. Shorthand personality bins are not a void that needs to be filled. Classifying the speaker (whether with 'emo' or 'hipster' or 'feminazi' or 'homophobe' or 'fag' or 'geek' or 'jock' or ...) does nothing to elucidate the argument.

You do not need to classify the speaker. Your arguments are stronger if you do not classify the speaker. Classifying the speaker leads one to interpret an argument through one's preconception of that class of speaker, weakening one's listening and interpretation skills.

And, classifying a speaker aloud often leads your audience to classify you in an opposing class. Use "white knight" and many will classify you as a "bro". Use "homophobe" and get classified as gay or a militant feminist. Use "gay" and get classified as a homophobe. That leads to your audience interpreting your argument through their preconceptions of your classification.

In other words, classifying the speaker endangers your critical thinking, endangers your chances of being understood, and has no upsides.

Maybe you have a nice subtle meaning for it, but 98% of the time it's used to describe any man who defends any woman for any reason, generally with the implication "I can't imagine any reason a dude would be nice to a lady except to get sex." It says more about the speaker than the subject.

Yes, in general I think some paid editing is better than much of the free editing. People who edit for free are not all altruistic people who want to help advance human knowledge. Many of them choose an article to edit because they're interested in advancing some specific agenda, such as their political, social, national, or other views, or engaging in general boosterism of their local city, community, university, software project, church, favorite band, etc. Many are not motivated to do proper research in libraries to support the additions they make to articles, or spend time educating themselves about multiple aspects of a topic before writing about it. People who are paid in "Wikipedian in residence" programs at a museum, to take an example of the "gold standard" paid editing programs that have worked well, typically make much better edits.

One can surely be a paid shill, but that's just a good reason to look at whether the edits are any good. If someone is willing to fund non-shill editing that is actually good, then I'd say please do so, just like I encourage Red Hat funding paid open-source contributions. There are many situations where it is a win-win, when the interests of Wikipedia and the funder align (much like the interests of Red Hat and Linux often aligning).

For example, to take even a commercial example, I recently noticed that the Greek wine industry is currently very poorly covered on the English Wikipedia (even many of the basic grape varieties don't have good articles about them, let alone any decent history of the industry itself). This is bad for the English Wikipedia (which has a geographical gap) and conceivably it's even bad for the Greek wine industry (which has less information on its produce available to the internet-reading public). If some winemakers' organization was willing to fund a Wikipedian to go sit in a library for a few weeks and improve the articles on Greek grapes, wine legislation, producers, etc., I think that would be excellent for Wikipedia. It's work that needs to get done eventually anyway, whether someone funds it or not, so a funder appearing would just provide resources to make it happen sooner rather than later.

Of course, if instead of funding a researcher who sits in a library and writes articles, they wanted to hire a promotional agent who writes fluffy PR copy, then that kind of paid editing should be frowned on and removed. But then it should be frowned on and removed even if it weren't paid: if it were just a patriotic Greek puffing up his local wine for no pay because he loves it, that's bad editing too. So to me it's the nature of the editing that matters: is it encyclopedic, scholarly, referenced, or is it fluffy promotional stuff? Whether it's paid or not doesn't matter to me, because both paid and non-paid work can fall in either category.

Interestingly, this is much less controversial on some non-English Wikipedias. On the Swedish Wikipedia, paid editors are welcomed and encouraged, as long as they disclose their sources of funding and are careful about conflicts of interest. The focus is mostly just on "onboarding" them, to ensure they understand what is appropriate for a Wikipedia article and what isn't. One heuristic is that paid editors generally shouldn't remove information from an article, and shouldn't engage in attempts to "own" a page (such as watching it over months and trying to control its direction). But just showing up and writing new material that was previously missing seems generally appreciated, as long as it's suitably referenced and not PR copy.

Hmm, I traced this story to http://www.securitybsides.com/w/page/35868077/BSidesSanFranc... and you're right - this account makes them look very bad.

Hmm. Damn.

Covert and thus unchecked by other viewpoints is a problem.

But is muzzling the entity and its spokespeople the truth-and-utility-maximizing response? It's suppressing information from the discussion, of which free speech advocates can be rightly suspicious.

Lots of paid work, even by people with an interest in the outcome, is useful. Until Wikipedia, all encyclopedias had mostly-paid authors. Almost all of the reliable sources Wikipedia uses have paid authors, often with a stronger-than-"NPOV" perspective.