Page:The Free Encyclopaedia that Anyone can Edit： The Shifting Values of Wikipedia Editors.pdf/11

Culture Unbound Journal of Current Cultural Research be taken to mean anything from a museum employee updating information about an artefact in their collection, or a funded graduate student contributing in their area of expertise to paid professionals who are editing for a third party to advocate a particular point of view.

"Also, no one anywhere on this project has ever clearly defined the differences between ‘paid editing’ and ‘paid advocacy’, and until definitions exist then discussions probably cannot proceed. The working definition is that ‘paid advocacy’ is ‘paid editing’ which does not comply with Wikipedia community guidelines. All discussions on this topic make no sense to anyone outside this movement because advocacy in the Wiktionary sense of the term has nothing to do with its use in this small community on Wikipedia. (Wikipedia 2013b)"

What constitutes a conflict of interest, and indeed what threat editors with conflicts of interest pose to the encyclopaedia is still very much up for discussion in the community. It demonstrates a shuffling of values among different editors as to the place of commercial players in the Wikipedia ecology. Interestingly where commercial involvement was once viewed by the community as being in direct opposition to Wikipedia’s core values (and this rhetoric is repeated at an institutional level) and should be prevented, some community members now accept the presence of paid professionals and are resigned to their presence in the encyclopaedia.

"Dishonest paid editors will do it anyway, so why punish the honest ones? Or drive them to dishonesty? We can strongly discourage paid editing but not ban it. We should try to work with the COI editors to develop a lasting relationship, not declare all out war. (Wikipedia 2013b)"

There are therefore values more important to the community than whether or not an editor is being paid, and these relate to the encyclopaedia’s existing standards of notability, verifiability and most importantly neutrality. Participants expressed the need to differentiate between the different types of paid editing and that as long as the editorial pillars of Wikipedia are held up, the issue of whether or not someone has a commercial interest in editing Wikipedia is secondary to them holding up these ideals.

Conclusion

‘Wikipedia is the flagship of peer production and the most celebrated open content project’ (Tkacz 2010). It is the free encyclopaedia that anyone can edit and this ideal is valued by Wikipedia contributors over and above remaining free from commercial activity. The reality that Wikipedia is no longer (if indeed it ever was) free from commercial involvement, is one that many editors are resigned to. Rather than take an ideological stance against paid editing like the Spanish Fork, Culture Unbound, Volume 6, 2014