Journal of Current Cultural Research
must first look back at the ideals in question – freedom, neutrality, and commercialism – and how they have been conflated in imaginings of Wikipedia in utopian
discourses of peer production.
The popular discourses (Benkler 2006; Leadbeater 2006; Tapscott & Williams
2006; Bruns 2008; Shirky 2008) around peer production, collaboration, prosumption and produsage normally invoke Wikipedia as a separate entity from market
forces and portray its users as contributing due to a commitment to free and open
knowledge. Attributing these motivations and ideals ‘fits neatly with the longstanding rhetoric about the democratizing potential of the internet, and with the
more recent enthusiasm for user-generated content (UGC) [and] amateur expertise’ (Gillespie 2010: 352). Indeed Wikipedia is often situated as part of a gift, or
sharing economy that operates differently to traditional market forces (Benkler
2006; Lessig 2008).
These narratives also suggest that one of the key aspects of peer production and
co-creation is collaboration, where amateurs and/or volunteers work with traditionally commercial content producers in a mutually beneficial relationship. Indeed as Nathaniel Tkacz notes about these discourses, ‘Collaboration is literally
everywhere and can be attached to almost anything, immediately giving it a positive value’ that is ‘beyond that of simply co-labouring’ (Tkacz 2010: 41-42).
Tkacz (2010) also notes that there is a gap between popular and romanticised accounts of collaboration with how projects such as Wikipedia actually operate in an
attempt to enact ideals (Kittur et al. 2007; Matei & Dobrescu 2010; Halfaker,
Kittur & Riedl 2011; Laniado & Tasso 2011). This process of enacting ideals is
ongoing and the encyclopaedia is in transition as both a knowledge producer and
web platform. Tarleton Gillespie notes of web platforms:
Like the television networks and trade publishers before them, they are increasingly facing questions about their responsibilities: to their users, to key constituencies who depend on the public discourse they host, and to broader notions of the public interest. (Gillespie 2010: 348)
Like other online platforms Wikipedia is a socio-technical construction that has
evolved through a negotiation and formation of rules by the community. From its
founding ideals Wikipedia has developed in a political context where ideals and
principles scaffold the construction process (van Dijck 2013). This ‘nonprofit,
nonmarket business model that Wikipedia has chosen is inimically interwoven
with the volunteer-based peer-production system the platform so successfully implemented’ (van Dijck 2013: 148), and commercialism in this environment is consequently a controversial subject.
So while scholars like Benkler have given us a romantic view of Wikipedia as
being based on peer production, on a system somehow apart from the commercial
market, this is not in reality the case (Tkacz 2010). Websites are highly interconnected and this connected nature means that Wikipedia inevitably includes com-
