Wikipedia talk:Paid editor's bill of rights

public timesheets

An interesting essay. In regards to work schedule, method by which performance is assessed, and Wikipedia accounts currently being paid by this employer, may I suggest some form of public timesheet could be used. I recently started User:Eclipsed/Timesheet for myself, and I've duely noted this discussion on todays timesheet ;) -- Eclipsed (talk) (COI Declaration) 23:19, 28 April 2012 (UTC)

Union advocacy is important

I see that User:Jimbo Wales removed a section on union advocacy [1].

However, I think it is important to encourage union advocacy, because ultimately, Wikipedia is a union, or could be. Unlike the usual sort of union that is created after a corporation builds up a workplace, here we have a functioning workplace, which doesn't really need a corporation at all. If they want to come here, if they want to do business with us, then we should have the right to united activity, whether it is by setting standards for Wikipedia as a whole, or by organizing workers in one particular country or industry.

Related to this is the need to ensure that paid editors make the U.S. federal minimum wage. This should be motivated in part by the precedent of the AOL Community Leader Program, where failure to pay minimum wage ultimately fell afoul of U.S. law - at least, if Wikipedia is in the U.S., the editor is in the U.S., and the payer is in the U.S., I'm guessing it would apply (IANAL). But also we have the problem of what will happen if we don't keep up that standard. Picture for a moment that we are besieged by very low paid editors who used to do "gold farming" in lower income countries. Suppose we suddenly had a hundred Pakistanis casting AfD votes about American corporations in broken English, starting vanity articles and so forth. How do you suppose we are going to treat the hundred and first Pakistani, who is not a paid editor, but simply wants to start some articles about things important to him? I think the outcome of allowing paid editing, and allowing the wage for paid editing to collapse past the U.S. standard, could be that editors from such countries will end up being treated with such bad faith and hostility that it will taint all of Wikipedia with prejudice and recrimination. Wnt (talk) 19:33, 7 May 2012 (UTC)

• I realize that this is a pretty stale conversation, and maybe there is little point in attempting to join it now. However, I wanted to point out a few things: most paid editors, while they are editing for pay, do so as independent contractors: there is no monitoring of hours worked or discussion with an employer about reasonable lag time between paychecks. An editor needs to develop his or her own set of work rules, share them with the person paying him/ her, and then perform the expected work within a reasonable amount of time for the payment(s) received. Hourly employees are already getting paid an hourly wage by their employer, so none of this matters for them anyway. I don't think it is reasonable to ask or even suggest that paid editors set themselves up in the same way that wage laborers operate. Editing, like academic writing, is not a by-the-hour process, and I don't see any role for Wikipedia in trying to set it up otherwise. If we did that, we would also need to cover things like employee health care, paid vacation, business deductions, etc. But none of that is any of Wikipedia's business.

When I saw this essay, I thought that it dealt with paid editors rights with respect to Wikipedia in general and other editors specifically. Things like the right to make minor corrections to grammar and spelling to their COI articles without having such edits being questioned; the right (however dubious) to publish articles without submitting them to the Articles for Creation process; the right to have their COI recorded in either their own user page, on the article talk page, or in an edit summary, and to be able to choose which and how many of those three to do without having that decision deemed inadequate; the right to have a deleted COI article brought to deletion review without that editor's paid relationship to the article having any bearing on the subject's notability (which should exist independently); the right to be able to submit an edit request during the course of a deletion discussion and have that request processed in a timely manner and in accordance with the rules surrounding any edit to an article that is being considered for deletion (i.e., edits to improve an article to make it more acceptable are always welcome, even if they are large and even during a deletion discussion, even when requested by an editor with a paid COI); the right not to disclose the amount or nature of compensation the editor received for his/ her work; the right to have one's acts as a paid editor treated separately from those done as a volunteer, provided they are performed under the same user account login; etc.

I am unsure how many others would agree that those are "rights", but they are totally different from the rights discussed in this essay. KDS4444 ^(talk) 22:14, 16 September 2017 (UTC)