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
--
William Pietri <william(a)scissor.com>
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:William_Pietri