Ray Saintonge wrote:
By and large I find that supporters of open access to intellectual property in its various forms have not grasped the larger economic environment that would make this work. The people who contribute still [need] to make a living, and the number of those contributors that believe in a Marxist paradise where everyone gets what he needs are few and far between. Plese someone, tell me what economic model is going to keep this all alive over an extended time.
As somebody who made his first open-source contribution in 1992 and has done occasional bits ever since, I've given this some thought.
I think the main economic model for the next few years is going to be exactly the one that drove it to the current state: increasing wealth and education allows people to devote substantial time, money, and intellectual power to hobbies.
I don't think it will take the turn that large open-source projects have, where major contributions come from people who are paid with commercial money. The companies that pay for open-source developer time have a direct financial interest in improving the tools at hand. I think that's unlikely here, although I could see it happening with non-encyclopedia free content, like training materials and documentation for popular tools.
Down the line, I think we'll run of gas some with we hobbyists. Not that we won't get and use a ton of that, just that the quality level and topic focus will leave gaps that will become more and more obvious. I think the step over that will either be through advertising on Wikipedia or through large donations from tech billionaires creating an endowment. Either one will result in the Foundation hiring people full time to work on the content. This will expand the caste system in a way that will involve much wailing and gnashing of teeth in the community, but people will eventually get over it because it will actually make the encyclopedia better.
And then my guess is that as long as the funding is stable, things will pretty much stick that way, although as more of the content management responsibility shifts to the Foundation, they'll need to spend more and more in an arms race with spammers, COI types, and POV pushers of all sorts. This will probably involve the development of hardcore editing and monitoring tools along the lines of the current RC patrol and anti-vandal tools, but much more extensive and integrated in to Wikipedia's core.
Under those circumstances if I were in that position I wouldn't declare my conflict, and just go quietly about my work. If another editor complains that my edits are too favorable to the company I would have no problem apologizing quietly, knowing full well that my more subtle biases will go by unnoticed.
And wouldn't that apply just as well if we were ok with declared conflicts of interest? That still involves an increased level of scrutiny that is uncomfortable.
I really don't think that most corporate representatives who come here to edit for their company are here to create a bias.
I don't think they will think of it as a bias because the essence of PR is a pervasive and relentless bias. Expecting them to notice it consciously is like expecting us to think about the air all the time. This isn't a slam, by the way, I have friends in marketing and PR that I like just fine. I just don't want them writing articles on Wikipedia about their employers because they don't have the skills for it.
Just to be clear, I'm fine with some random IBM employee who turns up to correct a detail about some IBM research facility. But that's not what writing for pay will be.
With the relatively small part of the material that really is controversial we will have no shortage of editors who are willing to make the discrepancies obvious. What are we afraid of?
I am afraid of articles like [[PA Consulting Group]]. The number of person-hours we have from good editors is very, very small when compared with the number of people who work in the advertising, PR, and marketing industries, all of which have bias as part of their core.
William