Page:The Free Encyclopaedia that Anyone can Edit： The Shifting Values of Wikipedia Editors.pdf/5

Culture Unbound Journal of Current Cultural Research actors. Indeed, sustainability in this environment is linked to a platform’s ability to integrate content across multiple places and spaces on the web (for example Wikipedia’s Facebook entries (Park 2010) and translation project with Google (Galvez 2010; van Dijck 2013).

Additionally, being conflated with other online platforms, being something other than an encyclopaedia, may reveal why Wikipedia is seen as open slather for so many marketing professionals. In using the term ‘platform’, which Gillespie (2010) points out is a politically charged term, we can see how it can be appropriated as a marketing ‘platform,’ or conflated with other ‘platforms’ that offer up marketing opportunities (such as YouTube, Facebook, Twitter), or indeed how Wikipedia may be packaged as part of a larger online media campaign. The difference is Wikipedia to many of its contributors and readers outside the PR sphere, is a platform for advocating the value of, and providing, free and open knowledge.

This is the fine line that Wikipedia straddles between an encyclopaedia and a platform, between an institution and a community. Where an encyclopaedia has an established tradition, a platform is still being negotiated. Whereas an institution is compromised of rules, a community is a more ad hoc assemblage where members can come and go freely, and it is in this context that Wikipedia is trying to negotiate the values associated with peer production and the creation of a volunteer-led online encyclopaedia, and what commercial involvement means for its future sustainability.

Wikipedia’s Core Policies as an Expression of Ideals

Wikipedia’s ideals are linked to its non-profit business model (van Dijck 2013), and as an organisation free from commercial pressures it is perceived as ‘free’ to create neutral and objective knowledge. Setting the conditions for what Wikipedia is and its core policies – its five pillars – reflect these ideals of freedom and openness.

Of Wikipedia’s five pillars, neutrality is arguably the most venerated (Greenstein & Zhu 2012; van Dijck 2013). It is the ideal to which editors aspire, a truly fair and representative article. While the possibility of this may be challenged by those editors who consider knowledge a social construction (Matei & Dobrescu 2010), it is still upheld as a core policy by most Wikipedia editors. And this ideal of the community to produce truly neutral information is tested by the presence of paid advocates within the editorial community.

Advocacy by paid editors, in Wikipedia, is the antithesis of neutrality. The promotion of one position over another is seen as against the ideals of free and representative information. It would follow therefore that the community (which has been so good at constructing rules and norms in the past to regulate behaviour (Halfaker et al. 2012)) would want to create a policy to prevent such Culture Unbound, Volume 6, 2014