There is no way fancruft can survive today in Wikipedia if identified we still haven t got the whole identifying part down but hey that s something PR professionals using the talk pages and tags could help with Open your eyes fancruft is all around you The most prolific areas of content on Wikipedia are as big as they are precisely because of the volume and intensity of their fans Cerejota what you re doing boggles my mind at this point You are here contributing to the idea that no one being paid as an editor can be trusted to write anything but advocacy for their clients e g to write with bias in ways that contravenes NPOV etc You are hardly alone in your belief there in fact I d say you re easily in the majority when it comes to this suspicion It s a fair stance to take I don t share it but it is fair What isn t fair is to then claim that such suspicion doesn t exist that it s bullshit for PR professionals to think that if they announce their COI editors will refuse to help them It s not bullshit at all and your very arguments are undoubtedly proving their points The irony here is that I believe that Jimbo s stance on this is itself a public relations matter He s not really interested in understanding how much or little our project might be damaged or aided in terms of quality contribution What he s concerned with in my opinion is our image If we are not firmly against paid editing in principle people will trust our content less I think this is a reasonable conclusion but I m not sold on the fact that it is true personally I d like to see more evidence