Wikipedia will mark writers by request

Paid edits and their authors on Wikipedia may become more visible: a new amendment to the Terms of Use is discussed in the Meta-Wiki. If they accept it, participants writing for companies or specific people (“having a potential conflict of interest”) will have to honestly inform other users that they are working for money and who they work for.

A participant can be legalized in one of three ways: tell about his employer on his personal page, discussion page or in the field of a brief description of changes.
Now the proposed amendment is still under discussion by the wiki community. Leave your comment on the discussion page until March 21. After this, the amendment will be submitted to the Board of Trustees of Wikimedia.

Wikipedia.org ranks among the ten most visited websites in the world (6th place according to Alexa ranking). The number of active users involved in the creation of Wikipedia, in January 2014 amounted to 76 thousand people . Due to the large audience reach and the ability to freely make edits, Wikipedia has long been tried to be used as a marketing tool. There are quite a few firms that specialize in writing encyclopedic articles for money (try simply googling “hire wikipedia editor”), and in large companies they often identify special people who describe the company and its products in an encyclopedia. The requirements for these articles remain the same as for all the others - if the revision or article satisfies the wikipedic criteria of neutrality and significance, they are left. If the content is frankly advertising, active members of the community will cancel the editing, and the article will be offered for deletion.

What is the motivation for the new amendment to the rules? Perhaps, if you separate the paid authors from the rest of the community, the activities of the former will be easier to regulate. Supporters of the amendment hope that this will make the affiliated author’s changes in the articles more visible to the reader (however, not yet there are tools for this), and he will be able to form a correct opinion about the subject. Opponents of the initiative are pushing for the fact that such a “personal transition” will lead to the persecution of paid contributors, and all their revisions will be viewed with suspicion.
')
Published at the request of habrauzera YellowDuck .