User:Fifelfoo/signpost

Many editors edit wikipedia as a relief from working to survive, working for a boss, and making the rich richer. Wikipedia doesn't charge for access, it doesn't advertise, and it doesn't channel user browsing data to commercial databases. For many users, they feel this instinctively as volunteerism. For some users, this is indicative of the social and economic promises of working class communism; and, wikipedia is often noted as an example of what free labour can do. Within this analysis of wikipedia, we compete with a few other projects such as the network of free-to-use free-to-reuse software projects for the largest economic unit that is produced without paid labour or bossed workers. However, this volunteer spirit is under threat.

(Sue's example of Occupy politics in terms of civility is indicative, Sue needs to learn how we talk about our own experience working on Wikipedia).

On one side, editors like User:TCO who perceive a problem in wikipedia instantly jump to metaphors of organisation that attack consensus and volunteerism and impose management practices most common in the business world or neo-liberalism. Key Performance Indicators, Five Year Plans, Targets, Goals, Editors who can be bossed from one job to another, Vitality not as a measure of encyclopaedic performance but in terms of the number of consumers or page views or potential advertising eyeballs. While wikipedia is a consensus, and editors who think there is an inherent efficiency in boss and bossed have the same participation in consensus as every other editor, we are not a paid workplace. The solution to loss of editors is not to offer cash money, while stripping from editors control over their own participation.

On the other hand, editors like User:Sue Gardner view the process of wikipedia as reducible to the relationship between manager and bossed worker (UK 2011-11-19 part 3 44m00s). Riding roughshod over consensus, and lobbying off wikipedia forums in order to influence policy online. This is the behaviour of the cadre organisation, the experts who know for editors, and remove their control over their own work. It works against the consensus and volunteer functions, and suggests that there is a right to dictate the course of the encyclopaedia other than participation as an editor.

This is an attempt to valorise: to reduce wikipedia to money, skill, or "education" circulating in society; and to commodify: to reduce wikipedia to units of production, consumption, distribution and exchange instead of accepting that it is free education done freely in an encyclopaedic manner by free and equal editors. Much like free-as-in-a-talking-beer software has been analysed from outside as a successful experiment in free production, without sales, bosses, owners or paid workers; so too has wikipedia been appreciated as such. You don't need to agree with this economic analysis to observe that wikipedia doesn't work like a company, a government, a manufacturing plant, or a sales outlet. Even if you don't find the volunteer economy personally motivating, the change to our behaviour that being bossed by a taxonomy of vital articles, or the wikimedia foundation would influence your day to day editing. And it would influence it most firmly by restricting your capacity to seek consensus to overturn it.

Wikipedia produces something useful to most people on the planet; and it produces it in a way that very few other projects do, so much so that our nearest economic equivalent is the diverse free software movement. Users who attempt to claim authority, and implement unfree organisational principles, or make people work instead of edit, or try to turn our collective output into something like network television counting eyeballs; are attempting to circumvent community consensus and steal from us one thing that motivates many of us—editing wikipedia is something we do when we're not working. I do not want to be forced into a second job to meet criteria from a small group of users who have circumvented consensus by organising off-line.