User talk:Bri/What's wrong with undisclosed paid editing

What's wrong with paid editing?
Or more aptly: What's right with it? The simple answer is 'nothing is right with it.'

I've read what you are preparing here, Brian. I like it. The only thing I personally disagree with is the word undisclosed; anyone following my comments over the past year or so will have understood that I insist  that  all paid editing  is inadmissible and to  allow even disclosed editing  is to  provide a crack in  our armour. All this comes from Wikipedia's culture that is a legacy of the 1960s revolution which is now ingrained in the philosophies of most volunteer organisations worldwide. Yeah, yeah, man, I'm a product of the Greenwich Village, Haight Ashbury, King's Road, Carnaby St., and Kreuzberg cults with my then waist-length hair and earrings of my 20s, but I grew up. For those still too young to remember (and that is probably most of the readers and writers of Wikipedia), the characteristics of kaftans and cowbells are tolerance, forgiveness, banning the bomb, and banning capital punishment, legalising extra-marital sex, marijuhana, and LGBT. And of course preaching AGF - tons of it. That revolution had indeed many positives.

That revolution has had negatives - our AGF mantra has been stretched to accept and condone the sort of cyber criminality that attacks the very fabric of what Jimbo Wales started and most of us strive to maintain. We could be Boy Scouts, Girl Guides, or their leaders, Peace Corps volunteers, Greanpeacers, or any of the thousands of undergrads doing a gap year to teach English for free in the jungle, and it's bad enough the permanent employees on their 6-figure salaries (not wholly unlike the CEO of Wikimedia) of those who organise them and live in luxury with their servants and swimming pools in the posh suburbs of Pnom Pen, one of the poorest places on the planet

At 66 I have a very firm idea of how I would like the Wikipedia to be that I have spent thousands of hours and thousands of dollars on. Instead of pussy-footing around with the anti-admin brigade, the peanut gallery, rogue admins, spammers, and other trolls, we need to be more aggressive otherwise 'Wikipedia's goal to create the world's finest free encyclopedia is being undermined by the separate but equal forces of volunteer apathy and PR agencies', will happen and the third element we have to contend with is the very real fear that the WMF will one day allow it to happen. And when it does, their salaries will get even bigger, not ours. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 09:31, 16 September 2015 (UTC)

Move into Wikipedia: space
I saw this when you mentioned it in the WP:TOUSL discussion. This is a fine essay and has been sitting here 5 years in user space.

Share it. This is great to publish in Wikipedia: space and index with other guides and commentary.  Blue Rasberry  (talk)  16:41, 4 February 2020 (UTC)