Whether you trust it or ignore it, Wikipedia is one of the most popular websites in the world and accessed by millions of people every day. So would you trust it any more (or even less) if you knew people were being paid to contribute content to the encyclopedia?

The Wikimedia Foundation, the charitable organisation that supports Wikipedia, has changed its Terms of Use. Paid contributors can now make changes to Wikipedia articles so long as they clearly disclose their affiliations and potential conflicts of interest.

The website has previously not had an official policy on paid editing, despite a history of community opposition to editors who contribute for pay.

So the change in policy comes amid concerns from the Foundation about the potential damage to Wikipedia’s reputation as a free and objective source of knowledge from editors acting on behalf of a paying client or employer.

The concerns arose after the user community broke the story of its year-long investigation into large-scale editing by the consulting business Wiki-PR.

Working out of Austin, Texas, Wiki-PR employees used 250 fake accounts to create and contribute to pages about its clients. This resulted in several hundred promotional articles on Wikipedia, which the volunteer community subsequently had to remove for not meeting the encyclopedia’s quality standards.

What is paid editing?

Paid editing refers broadly to anyone who receives or expects to receive compensation for their contributions to the encyclopedia.

 

These editors are not paid by Wikipedia or the Wikimedia Foundation. They are understood to be contributing on behalf of a third party such as an employer or client.

At its heart, paid editing seems at odds with the open user-led model of volunteer collaboration that Wikipedia employs and is famous for. Therefore, the acknowledgement by the Wikimedia Foundation of such activity in the encyclopedia is a big deal.

Critics in the community say contributions from paid editors will never be compatible with the site’s core editing policy of neutrality, or that requiring disclosure is an invasion of privacy and the freedom to edit anonymously. Supporters of the change acknowledge the presence of these paid editors is important for fulfilling the site’s mission of being the encyclopedia that anyone can edit.

A short history of paid editing in Wikipedia

Paid editing has a tumultuous history in Wikipedia. In the last few years, there have been some high-profile instances of professionals whitewashing Wikipedia, known as wikiwashing. This is using a particular Wikipedia entry to further their clients’ interests, which is in violation of the site’s neutrality policy (among others).

Last year BP employee Arturo Silva was accused of providing nearly half the text for the British Petroleum article, including sections discussing the corporation’s environmental record.

The Gibraltarpedia controversy in 2012 resulted in a high-profile editor stepping down from trustee duties with Wikimedia UK after it was revealed his consultancy received fees from the Gibraltar Tourist Board.

In late 2011, UK newspaper The Independent filmed senior members of PR firm Bell Pottinger boasting of using “dark arts” to “sort” Wikipedia on behalf of governments with less-than-perfect human rights records.

It is also interesting that in all but the Bell Pottinger case, the Wikipedia community uncovered the activity.

What does the change mean for Wikipedia?

The change in the Terms of Use to acknowledge paid editing highlights Wikipedia’s importance in the management of corporate reputations.

But it also highlights the importance of managing Wikipedia’s own brand as a neutral and non-profit site of encyclopedic information.

The presence of paid editors on the site raises questions about the ability of the platform to meet this goal of neutrality. Can an article written about a company by an employee of that company ever be truly objective?

The fear is that opening up the platform to any form of commercial involvement changes its nature and threatens its sustainability as a site of free and neutral knowledge.

Is any editor a good editor?

On the other hand, can the site ever claim to really represent the sum of all knowledge without input from professionals? Paid editors have the time and inclination to spend on articles that otherwise may go unimproved, or may not exist at all.

Another argument for including paid editors in the community relates to the sustainability of the platform itself. The number of active volunteer editors is declining from a peak in 2007, although the number of new articles created each day continues to grow.

It is still important to make sure that Wikipedia remains the “encyclopedia that anyone can edit” so long as paid editors play by Wikipedia’s rules.

What does the change mean for users?

For readers, the change will remain largely unseen. It serves as an extra level of control for volunteer editors, and is flexible enough that site policies can be amended to reflect local legal requirements about fraud and conflicts of interest.

It means readers should continue to approach Wikipedia for what it is – a user-led encyclopedia. If the veracity of the information you seek is important, then you may need to click past the article and head to the talk page or the edit history to get an idea of how the article was constructed. You can then judge for yourself how you view any contribution from paid editors.

For contributors, the changed terms are meant to allow easier identification of edits that may present a conflict of interest and require extra scrutiny from uninvolved parties. It is hoped this will ultimately improve the quality of the encyclopedia.

Whether amending the Terms of Use invites a new wave of commercialism is yet to be seen. Either way the amendment signals that the platform is still open – to change at the very least.

This article was originally published on The Conversation.
Read the original article.

For an in depth look at one community response to paid editing see The Free Encyclopaedia that Anyone can Edit: The Shifting Values of Wikipedia Editors.

In accordance with Wikipedia policy when there is a conflict of interest (WP:COI), Arturo never actually directly edited the article on BP. He made his connection with BP known, both in his username and explicitly on his user page: “I have established this account to help improve BP-related articles in line with Wikipedia standards and guidelines. In the interest of full transparency, I chose “Arturo at BP” as my username so that my affiliation with BP is abundantly clear to all parties I may interact with on Wikipedia.”

The issue among other editors in Wikipedia, is that contributing editors to the article often accepted Arturo’s proposed text and contributions to the article unchanged. As the user Slim Virgin states: “I’ve noticed editors simply slotting in what Arturo writes, including large sections, which means that BP is writing the article about itself, without this being signalled to the reader in any way.” Editors who have been inserting Arturo’s text defended their actions, by referring to the Wikipedia policy of neutrality. Editor SilverserenC states, “I don’t care whatsoever about who is writing the information. I only care that the information is neutral and shows all relevant sides.” The conversation continued (and continues in other places on Wikipedia) to play out about the importance of neutrality and reliability over transparency. In the press, it has played out as the ability of Wikipedia to be an open, legitimate and reliable source of information, when corporate contributions cannot be easily identified.

Arturo’s actions however are not an isolated case.  Wikipedia is being packaged as a platform along with the likes of Facebook and Twitter as part of larger social media communications strategies. Public relations firm Bell Pottinger Private promised its clients favourable coverage in Wikipedia articles, in some instances removing information regarding human rights violations and links to terrorist organisations (Newman & Wright, 2011). In other cases, Wikipedia is the sole focus of a promotional strategy, where consultants sell their expertise in navigating Wikipedia’s policies and increasing a client’s presence in the encyclopaedia. Former Wikimedia UK chair Roger Bamkin resigned over his involvement with Gibraltarpedia, where he received payment for developing QR codes for the project, which were then placed on monuments around the island and linked to Wikipedia entries that as a Wikipedia admin, Bamkin often promoted or featured.

Similarly, former Wikipedian in Residence Max Klein offered services through his consultancy called untrikiwiki where clients could purchase “Wikipedia editing as a PR service” (Blue 2012). As marketing consultant and Wikipedian Mike Wood (2013) notes, “People and companies see it as a social media website where they want to have their profile posted.”

While these cases stirred a lot of feeling and controversy, not all of the responses to “paid editing” from the community are negative. Many editors see this practice as actually improving the encyclopaedia. If professionals follow Wikipedia’s guidelines for contribution and clearly state their COI, then their contributions are valid and can increase article quality. These editors view following policy as the most important guideline for editing the encyclopaedia.

Others are more sceptical of the involvement of marketing professionals. For while Wikipedia is indeed open, it is also neutral and they argue contributions from such editors can never be so. These editors argue the open, non-profit structure of Wikipedia cannot be accommodating to commercial contributions. Information should be sourced from a variety of neutral and verifiable sites, and the organisation itself can never be a valid source of encyclopaedic knowledge.

However the tension between the social and commercial interests is not only evident in a non-profit platform like Wikipedia. Across social media sites, attempting to achieve the balance between user and corporate demands has contributed the evolution of these platforms. In its early days, Twitter struggled to negotiate its meaning and accommodate the needs of its different stakeholders. Did it enable person to person communication, or was it more suited to one-way mass communication from marketing channels (van Dijck 2011)? Similarly YouTube’s role was negotiated in a struggle between corporate interests and audience use (Burgess and Green 2009). The difference being in these cases, commercial activity is clearly identifiable through the use of dedicated accounts and channels. In Wikipedia, the presence of commercial interests is much harder to see. Unless a reader navigates to the article history, follows user accounts or deciphers IP addresses, the origin of edits is not immediately apparent.

How the issue of paid editing plays out in the future of Wikipedia will be interesting to examine. For it is hard to imagine that corporations, with millions invested in their brand and image, will rely on the contributions of anonymous volunteers to write and maintain the Wikipedia articles they have an interest in. It is similarly hard to imagine volunteers committed to an open ethos, will simply offer up their project to commercial editing by paid professionals.

Watch this (non-profit, free and open) space.

References & More Info

Baytiyeh, H. & Pfaffman, J. 2010. Volunteers in Wikipedia: Why the community matters. Educational Technology & Society, 13 (2): 128–140.

Blue, V. 2012. Corruption in Wikiland? Paid PR scandal erupts at Wikipedia. CNET,  September 18, 2012.

Blue, V. 2013. BP accused of rewriting environmental record on Wikipedia. CNET, March 20, 2013.

Burgess, J. & Green, J. 2009. YouTube. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.

Stuart, H. 2013. Much Of BP’s Wikipedia Page Allegedly Written By Company Employee Arturo Silva. Huffington Post Tech, 21 March 2013.

Wikipedia. 2013. Talk:BP/Archive 9. Last modified 4 April 2013 at 00:55.

Wood, M. 2013. I Get Paid To Edit Wikipedia For Leading Companies. Business Insider Australia, 10 January 2013.

Van Dijck, J. 2011. Tracing Twitter: The rise of a microblogging platform. International Journal of Media & Cultural Politics, 7(3), 333–348.