Wikipediawriters.com

[HRIP7]

Orange Mike points out on Jimbo's talk page that Somebody is selling themselves to write Wikipedia articles for pay, and using our trademarks on their pages to do it (permalink).

There is also a discussion on the same topic at ANI (permalink) that Greg will no doubt appreciate:

Gregory Kohs is unpopular here for many reasons I won't go into. (If you're interested in the backstory, search Wikipedia for his name, MyWikiBiz and Centiare to find many megabytes worth of discussions, noticeboard threads, etc.; go to wikipediareview.com and wikipediocracy.com for still more megabytes of his side of the story).

At one point, he proposed to put paid articles in MediaWiki format on his own wiki with GFDL (what we used before CC-BY-SA) licensing for reuse by Wikipedia. This gave Wikipedia editors a ready source of pre-written articles they could then move over to Wikipedia if they met our criteria. After a several subsequent years dealing with spam and paid editing, I've come to realize in retrospect this was a pretty good idea for all parties; certainly better than all the covert stuff we have now. There's so much animus nowadays between Kohs and Wikipedia, however, that I don't see this ever happening, at least with his firm.

I bring this up not to rehash (or rebash) Gregory Kohs' activities but because I think the underlying concept is worth further thought.
Paid editing on Wikipedia is sort of like the US' illegal immigration problem. Exposure on Wikipedia is worth so much money that material will find its way here one way or the other ("show me a 15' border fence and I'll show you a 17' ladder"). Is there a way we can at least partially triage or channel it in an intelligent way? --A. B. (talk • contribs • global count) 01:37, 18 October 2012 (UTC)

[thekohser]

I do appreciate that discussion -- thanks for pointing it out.

I enjoyed this smug comment, too:

Oddly enough, George I of Great Britain and Acrocanthosaurus and Cogan House Covered Bridge all became well written without a single cent changing hands. Could someone explain that to me? --Jayron32 03:01, 18 October 2012 (UTC)

How do they know that no money was involved in the production of those articles?

I'm seeing more and more "faithful" editors on Wikipedia getting themselves worked up about paid editing; but they fail to realize that their platform is entirely susceptible to the phenomenon... there is nothing they earnestly can do to prevent all, or even most, paid editing. And that situation is further exacerbated by their years-long antagonism of paid editors who tried to follow the "full disclosure" process.