Just recently there was an outburst of controversy on Wikipedia when it was reported that Microsoft asked an editor to make some edits and receive compensation. Microsoft was unsettled by some of the inaccuracies and over criticisms of their file types in their respective Wikipedia articles. Since anyone can edit Wikipedia, Microsoft could have easily edited these articles themselves, they instead attempted to hire a neutral 3rd party that would re-write the articles with a more balanced view.

This upset many a Wikipedian, including Jimbo Wales, the founder of Wikipedia. Jimbo calls this pratice "'antithetical' to Wikipedia's mission". I find this a bit bizzare. Wikipedia already has a defense mechanism to react to bad edits. If an edit is made, anyone else can do anything from as small as remove a sentence or two, or reverting the entire edit to its previous state. This defense should be enough to prevent the majority of such paid editors from making such bad edits, and keep their good edits in check.

Wikipedia already allows compensation via a special message board in which people request certain edits be made or criteria met in a particular article. Compensation for such edits can either be a monetary amount or they may be requested to be done for free.

Offers for barter or even cash are common on the forum, and the person making the offer can remain anonymous. Indeed, on Wednesday, someone was ponying up $55 for whoever could get an article about Lithuania to reach featured status.

I've found that while browsing Wikipedia some seemingly important topics are left with very short articles, or stubs, which leave you searching for information elsewhere on the internet. Paid editors point out the following:

"It is strange that a minor Pokemon character will get a 1,200-word article, but a Fortune 500 company will get ... maybe 100 words," he said.

I think Wikipedia is already set up to easily handle and bad edits made and these pratices should not be prevented or frowned upon.