Page:The Free Encyclopaedia that Anyone can Edit： The Shifting Values of Wikipedia Editors.pdf/12

Culture Unbound Journal of Current Cultural Research editors are willing to find ways to mange it based on existing ideals of neutrality and openness.

While debates continue to play out in the English language Wikipedia about paid editing, in other language versions, working arrangements have been reached with those editors who are paid to write for the encyclopaedia. In the German language encyclopaedia (which is the third largest version behind English and Dutch) companies can edit through a verified account (Wikipedia 2014a). Similarly advocates for paid editing from Wikimedia France welcome the input of corporate editors as they see it as improving articles that would otherwise languish and to keep information relevant and up-to-date (Wikimania 2013).

In line with this more open approach from other Wikipedias, the English language Wikipedia community is responding to the increasing presence of commercial interests and paid editors by favouring the ideals of openness and neutrality over freedom from commercial involvement. It is looking at ways of defining and regulating this involvement, but not in any way that would impede the ability of anyone to edit.

For the popular discourses about peer production that hold Wikipedia up as an ideal of free, open, volunteer-led, non-commercial activity, no longer hold in an environment where companies will want a presence on one of the world’s most popular websites. And while the Wikimedia Foundation and founder Jimmy Wales are drawing bright lines around paid advocacy editing, the Wikipedia editorial community is taking steps to manage commercial involvement by looking at the variations of paid editing as they ‘seek to strike a balance between stability and open-ended flexibility’ (Coleman 2013: 208).

English language Wikipedia editors are still negotiating and constructing paid editing. Indeed as the nature of the web is changing and commercial activity is more overtly evident across other platforms, some editors seemed resigned to commercial activity in the encyclopaedia (Song & Wildman 2013). The question is then not how to prevent commercial involvement from paid editors (such as through the policy proposals discussed), but how to manage it. In reconfiguring their values from earlier editorial communities, editors are reflecting the changing nature of the web and separating out the values of openness, freedom and noncommercialism into a workable model that upholds the central ideals of neutral and objective information in an encyclopaedia that anyone can edit. [604]