There's been a recent trend of museums having some of their paid staff contribute to Wikipedia articles relating to the museum's area of interest. Things like writing articles about paintings in the museum's collection, biographies of sculptors who the museum has a large collection of works from, etc. This promotes the museum indirectly (by getting their collection more exposure), but in a way that also aligns with Wikipedia's goals.

There's a fairly organized system to do outreach to such organizations and help them contribute in a positive way: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:GLAM

There are countless employees/owners of various firms editing their own wikipedia articles on company time. As long as they're providing verifiable, true information and actually making the page better no one really cares.

The issue isn't that this company offered to outsource that so much as that they were consistently promising to create fabrications and biased content.

If you're paid to improve articles for a company, you "are very strongly discouraged from direct article editing, and should instead propose changes on the talk page of the article in question." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Conflict_of_interest) They weren't following that guideline.

Making an article better isn't as big of a deal if have some conflict of interest but aren't directly paid to edit, such as voluntarily editing an article about a product you helped build - you may "make certain kinds of non-controversial edits", like reverting vandalism, correcting typos, and adding references: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Conflict_of_interest...

There are people who write about stuff neutrally as part of their job as an expert in that area. Hence, we usually take care to distinguish "paid editing" from "paid advocacy".

In the real world, these days authors of scientific papers declare "competing interests". If your income depends on it, you had better declare it.

The tobacco industry taught medical science a lesson, but Wikiworld is wacky, and continues to disregard it.

Actually, that's false. There are clear guidelines about disclosing conflicts of interest on Wikipedia (I assume you are referring to Wikipedia when you say "Wikiworld").

There used to be the bounty board: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Bounty_board

See Gibraltarpedia on Wikipedia. Whatever one thinks about the idea, the consultant did have balls and sufficient clout on Wikipedia to push the project through.