Journal of Current Cultural Research
contributed across these different discussion spaces, 16% who participated in two
of the conversations about the proposals and only 6% contributed across all three
discussions. Additionally in the collaborative tradition of the few doing the most,
a small number of users contributed heavily to the discussions. In NPA the ten
most frequent commenters contributed 16.9% of the posts, while in PEPP and
COIL, the top ten contributed 49.2% and 51.4% of all posts respectively (although
this was often just short replies to votes, rather than involved discussions among
users).
‘We are at the Barricades’
The first, and most obvious result is that all three proposals failed. Despite much
debate and discussion across a variety of spaces both on-wiki and off, and the
swift formation of the policy proposals, all three failed to garner enough support
via the votes to effectively ban paid advocacy editors by way of a formal written
policy. It became apparent in analysing the discussions that ‘free’ does not necessarily correlate with ‘free from commercial interests’ and that remaining open to
contributions from all editors, paid, volunteer or somewhere in between, is more
important than creating more regulatory mechanisms to assist in the production of
quality, neutral content. Therefore one of the major themes to emerge from the
analysis was that editors felt existing policies in Wikipedia already cover the issues raised by paid advocacy editing, the two most cited being neutrality and notability. Neutrality is expressed as an impartial point of view where articles are
written from a fair and representative position (Wikipedia 2014b). Notability
guidelines outline the criteria under which a topic is considered significant enough
to have an article in the encyclopaedia (Wikipedia 2013e). The most common
response from users to the proposals reasoned that the application of these existing policies would weed out the edits made by someone with a conflict of interest,
and an additional policy is not necessary.
Further, advocacy of any sort as a motive doesn't really address edit quality. Only application of existing Wikipedia guidelines does that.
One of the issues here is our incredibly low notability standards….Sorry, but I think we need to clean up our own act before we create policies that will be used primarily to gain advantage against opponents in ideologically-based editing. (Wikipedia 2013b)
The alternative view from supporters of the proposed policies, is that an explicit, new rule is needed. One that specifically bans paid advocacy editing so that a message is sent to editors that this type of commercial activity is not welcome in the encyclopaedia. Supporters maintain that traditional non-profit organisations
are required to have policies on conflicts of interest and Wikipedia should be no different.
