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Comment by jrochkind1 | Hacker News Reader

It is quite clear that nobody that's paid staff for Wikimedia Foundation should be doing paid editing.

But I'm not liking the sound of:

> She did that even though it is widely known that paid editing is frowned upon by many in the editing communit

Yeah, it's "frowned upon" for _anyone_ to do paid editing, clearly. But "frowned upon" is not usually a good reason to fire someone.

If it's not already clearly against clearly stated policies for WMF employees to do paid editing, WMF is hopefully making it so pretty quickly. Next time (which is definitely a 'when' rather than an 'if', I'm afriad), it should say "They did that even though paid editing is a clear violation of WMF conflict of interest policies," not "it is frowned upon." Time to get real.

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> Yeah, it's "frowned upon" for _anyone_ to do paid editing, clearly. But "frowned upon" is not usually a good reason to fire someone.

At least in at will or semi at will employment situations, it is not necessary for the employee handbook to be as exhaustive as a penal code.

There's nothing written anywhere that says that I am forbidden from telling one of our customers to die in a fire, but doing so is certainly frowned upon and would get me fired. I don't see any need for all such implicit rules to be codified.

I saw two policies cited on her talk page:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:PAY

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:ADMINACCT

California is an at will employment state so they really didn't need a reason. next when your side work directly deals with your day job that is a warning flag.

What I don't understand is why they have to be quasi-transparent about it. They should have just released her sans-reason and made an announcement sans-details or went fully transparent and named all the parties above. This middling disclosure in the email is confusingly non-specific.

They had to release Sarah and be public about it. What happened here goes straight against journalistic standards and the mission of Wikipedia, and the story would have broken sooner or later anyway. It would have been bad for donations.

There's two things I just don't understand. First, how can anyone be so stupid and as a high-ranking member of Wikipedia accept money to pass of advertisement as copy? Second, what's with the culture of the Wikimedia Foundation? How come that they can hire someone with questionable ethical standards? They have continuous problems with the staff they hire, but then, from the outside, the place doesn't look like something that someone with a choice would like to be employed at.

I think the wording he used in the announcement was bad. I think it's fairly universally agreed upon that neutrality and avoidance of conflict of interest are key tenants of Wikipedia, and are certainly things that an administrator of Wikipedia and employee of Wikimedia would be expected to uphold.

Fairly universally agreed upon of course, but the question is whether they have a specific written policy that takes it from being "pretty much agreed upon" to "a clear violation of his/her employment agreement" or something equally robust.

I think that sort of legalism is unhelpful, especially at Wikipedia. In my view, the most important policy at Wikipedia is the one which says, "If a rule prevents you from improving or maintaining Wikipedia, ignore it." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:IAR

The point of it is that people should always be thinking about Wikipedia's mission and vision. Rule-systems are always leaky, and on Wikipedia people should never use the excuse, "Well, what I did wasn't against the rules."

Those are good points for most rules. Perhaps not when it comes to rules that you will let employees go for breaking, though.

It seems to me that this lady was merely following the rule that you cited. In some countries, if she now files for unfair dismissal, I think Wikimedia might lose.

In California, where the Wikimedia Foundation is based, I don't believe that to be the case: http://www.ca-employment-lawyers.com/Wrongful-Termination.ht...

> Next time (which is definitely a 'when' rather than an 'if', I'm afriad) [sic]

Do you really mean to imply vast swathes of the WMF's tiny staff (most of which don't edit, let alone write good articles) are engaged in a paid-editing cabal? Or have I misunderstood?

Nope, I do not mean to imply that. Just that with wikipedia as influential as it is, it will surely happen again at some point, eventually.

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