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 An Experiment in Knowledge

Wikipedia started life as an online experiment, a side project, to build a free encyclopaedia, and one of the strongest ideological threads between Wikipedia and earlier encyclopaedic efforts based on Enlightenment ideals is the desire to make available the totality of knowledge. In Wikipedia, this ideal is expressed as providing access to the ‘sum of all knowledge,’ and this similarity between Wikipedia and earlier efforts has contributed to the experiment becoming an extremely successful global encyclopaedia (Wikipedia 2013d). Indeed as Benjamin Mako Hill found in his study of failed encyclopaedias, one of Wikipedia’s strengths is that despite being online, it still largely resembles a traditional encyclopaedia (Garber 2011).

However these encyclopaedias of the past have been of a momentary nature, taking ‘snapshots’ of information (Yeo 2001) at different points in time. On the other hand, Wikipedia, which is popularly criticised (Sanger 2006) for its information being unstable and transient, is perhaps the only encyclopaedia to aggregate these ‘snapshots’ to construct a history of a particular subject over time. As each edit is logged and timestamped, Haider and Sundin (2010) note that in Wikipedia, ‘permanence has reached a new height…Everything is constantly changing at the same time as it is always being saved and stable, archived.’

Indeed, encyclopaedias are important in exemplifying the ideals of a period in history, of capturing intellectual consensus and establishing the knowledge of the time. These ‘snapshots’ provide an insight into the current ideals around free and open access to knowledge, and in Wikipedia’s case the potential of the web to be a forum for this knowledge. Ideals concerned with the greater social good are a historical feature of encyclopaedias as debates about property and copyright have played out since the early 18th century, just as they play out about commercialisation in Wikipedia today (Yeo 2001; Loveland & Reagle 2013). Analysing how Wikipedia has responded to paid editing can therefore reflect wider popular feeling about commercial activities on the web.

Untangling the Threads: Peer Production and Collaborative Knowledge Ideals in Reality

Events in the platform’s history, such as the Spanish Fork, suggest that Wikipedia has long been opposed to commercial involvement and values its place as a neutral non-profit. As Wikimedia Foundation spokesperson Jay Walsh notes in relation to paid editing in the community, ‘there’s a historical resistance towards it from early days within the project’ (Mullin 2014). Now however, the encyclopaedia is negotiating how to maintain its ideals in a web environment where commercial players inevitably want to be involved in producing content for a top six website (Alexa 2013). In order to examine what and how things are changing, we Culture Unbound, Volume 6, 2014