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 | This page in a nutshell: Paid editors create a systemic bias with their edits. Their editing creates disproportionate coverage of paid topics. Volunteers helping them in any way, such as by cleaning up after their articles, which often need a lot of cleanup, increases this systemic bias because it is taking editor time away from editing non-paid topics. |
No one in the community wants Wikipedia to be, sort of, abandoned to the shills. So we've got a lot of work to do.
When a paid editor creates an article, should a volunteer fix it? If they do, the customer is rewarded with a buy one, get one free (BOGOF) editor offer. That is a service equivalent of the product sales promotion buy one, get one free (BOGOF). In the product sales promotion, the customer is rewarded with one identical free product. On Wikipedia, several good-faith editors are likely to help editing, normally at a higher standard than the paid editor. It's likely to be buy one (bad editor), get one (good team) free. Volunteers are subsidising the market. This increased supply drives down demand for quality paid editors, increasing demand for unscrupulous, low quality and poorly paid editors, at the cost of diverting the finite supply of quality volunteer editors, all based on market demand.
Paid and more generally COI editors are a systemic bias. Cleaning up after them externalises the cost, allows the articles to remain and does nothing to address the systemic bias. In fact, due to the finite volunteer resource, it not only increases coverage on topics that have been edited for pay but also decreases coverage of other topics, multiplying the systemic bias. Time spent salvaging a paid promotion is time not spent writing something else voluntarily.
Opinions for dealing with promotional articles created by undisclosed paid editors can polarise into two views being expressed in deletion discussions. They may be seen in terms of competing freedoms:
| View | Action | Editor | Cost | Reader | Systemic bias | Cycle | Consequence |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Subsidise bias | Rescue | Freedom to improve any article | Externality | Freedom to read article | Multiplied | Vicious circle | Tragedy of the commons |
| Internalise bias | WP:TNT, WP:Drafts, WP:Userify, WP:AFC |
Freedom from having to | Internality | Freedom from systemic bias | Decreased | Virtuous circle | Internalizing the externality |
Hardin stated in his analysis of the tragedy of the commons that:
Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all.
— Garrett Hardin, "The Tragedy of the Commons", Hardin (1968)[2]
Internalizing the externality is one possible solution.