Journal of Current Cultural Research
Introduction
Wikipedia is an encyclopaedia in transition. Its core values are being called into
question as an increasing number of users are paid to contribute to the encyclopaedia. How then is the open editorial community of this free encyclopaedia responding to the increasing presence of commercial interests and paid editors?
Through an analysis of three failed proposals by the community to impose bans or
limits on paid editing, this study reveals how the values of the English language
Wikipedia editorial community are in transition and how these shifts reflect wider
changes in assumptions about commerciality in digital media.
Throughout its history Wikipedia’s status as a non-commercial, non-profit, top
web property among commercial counterparts has often seen it being praised for
holding all the promises of an open and democratic web. In this discourse, debates
about freedom, openness and non-commercialism often get conflated or neglected
in favour of celebratory accounts of collaboration. However, it is important to
recognise that there are different logics at work in each of these narratives and this
paper aims to untangle the threads of freedom, neutrality and commercialism to
investigate how ideals around the collaborative production of knowledge online
are changing and how within Wikipedia there has been a shuffling of the community’s values.
Once the threat of commercial activity in Wikipedia and the ability to derive a
profit from the unpaid labour of others prompted a volunteer walk-out, known in
Wikipedia folklore as the Spanish Fork. In response to suggestions in 2002 that
Wikipedia may take advertising, Spanish language volunteers forked their content
to other servers and started a new encyclopaedia (Lih 2009; Tkacz 2011). Now the
presence of paid advocates – those editors who gain financial benefits from editing Wikipedia articles on another party’s behalf – has drawn a public response
from the Wikimedia Foundation, its then Executive Director Sue Gardner and
founder Jimmy Wales (who has always been a vocal opponent of PR involvement
in the encyclopaedia) (Wikipedia 2012; Roth 2013; Wikimedia Foundation
2013b). However, the community response has been divided. It is interesting to
analyse these divisions, along with the involvement of different actors and groups
in Wikipedia to see how paid advocacy has been constructed and how it reflects a
separation of the values of openness and freedom and a shift away from the ideals
of earlier contributors to the encyclopaedia. Indeed, as Wikipedia is reconfiguring
its norms and values, this analysis reveals important truths about how the boundaries between the commercial and the non-profit in the context of peer production
are sometimes fuzzy, overlapping and far from clearly defined.
