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This is a proposal to create a Chinese wall between paid and volunteer editing on the English Wikipedia.
- Solution and proposal up front
Paid editors should have their own, non-indexed, sandbox-like environment that volunteers can then choose to dip into. From our own definition such a construct is "an information barrier within an organization that was erected to prevent exchanges or communication that could lead to conflicts of interest". It's a solved problem in some respects, and the rest is implementation and enforcement details. But we have to start with this as the basis for allowing paid editors to contribute. We currently do this weakly and non-mandatory fashion with the WP:COIEDIT guideline, which is a fail because it is only a guideline.
- Strategic rollout
The simplest path from A to B may be to strengthen and upgrade this portion of WP:COIEDIT to a policy:
you are strongly discouraged prohibited from editing affected articles directly. If and when it appears to be failing in practice, then upgrade to the technical solution identified below.