Journal of Current Cultural Research
response to the revelations of the extent of the sockpuppeting activity. At an institutional level, the WMF expressed concern that its brand and reputation as a nonprofit site of independent knowledge had been damaged by Wiki-PR’s activities:
The Wikimedia community of volunteer writers, editors, photographers, and other contributors has built Wikipedia into the world’s most popular encyclopaedia, with a reputation for transparency, objectivity, and lack of bias. When outside publicity firms and their agents conceal or misrepresent their identity by creating or allowing false, unauthorized or misleading user accounts, Wikipedia’s reputation is harmed. (Wikimedia Foundation 2013c)
This event therefore demonstrates the gap in English language Wikipedia between
norms around commercial involvement and actual practices. For at a community
level, the response has been less decisive, reflecting the shifting values of the Wikipedia community members as they engage in discussion to define and construct
paid advocacy editing and its position in Wikipedia’s landscape of volunteers,
paid editors and public relations professionals.
Methodology
In order to map the debates, I conducted a grounded analysis of the three main
votes on paid editing conducted in the community in November 2013. These discussions formed one response to the Wiki-PR revelations and are a discrete object
through which to analyse immediate user feeling in relation to a well-publicised
event that challenges the encyclopaedia’s ideals. It is theoretical sample, chosen to
illuminate a specific response to a specific controversy rather than be a representative sample of the entire Wikipedia editorial community.
Using a Constructivist Grounded Theory (CGT) approach to the problem of
mapping how the editorial community of Wikipedia is responding to the increasing presence of commercial interests and paid editors allows for new themes to
emerge through the coding process that may not be reflected in dominant responses from other places. Grounded Theory works well when applied to online discussions such as these as it allows for quickly ‘gaining a clear focus on what is happening in your data without sacrificing the detail of enacted scenes’ (Charmaz
2006: 14). Kathy Charmaz notes that, ‘like a camera with many lenses, first you
view a broad sweep of the landscape. Subsequently, you change your lens several
times to bring scenes closer and closer into view’ (Charmaz 2006: 14). Such a
close reading of all three votes revealed divisions in the community about supporting measures to limit or ban paid editing as proposed. However it also revealed the justifications offered by editors in the conversations often aligned as
editors seek to negotiate what paid editing actually is.
As mentioned above, the institutional response from Jimmy Wales, Sue Gardner and the WMF was definite in its opposition to paid advocacy editing, reflecting the assumption, based on past actions that the community is against such in-
