Editors-for-hire on Wikipedia

On the eve of its stock market flotation, an (unnamed) American company approached Mark Bray, who lives in Sheffield, the steel town in the north of England. The company required the 28-year-old's help on a matter the directors felt could affect the share price: its Wikipedia page. Short, uninteresting and uninspiring, the page was in dire need of some pizzazz.

So Mr Bray advised the company how to polish, update and expand its entry in the crowdsourced online encyclopedia. He did this for pay. While the rewards can be good - his competitors in the USA, he says, boast their turnover is millions of dollars - the work risks incurring the wrath of the Wikipedia community, a loyal army of volunteer editors who propose, research, write and update entries. Some volunteers accuse paid editors of being charlatans, charging money for shady practices.

The free versus paid dispute goes to the heart of the debate about whether content on the internet should be open to all, without charge. Jimmy Wales, the online encyclopedia's co-founder, has said it is his mission to "distribute a free encyclopedia to every single person on the planet in their own language". Influenced by the open-source software movement in the 1990s, his utopian vision was to create a largely self-policing community of Wikipedians, in which a 15-year-old's contribution to an entry on Call of Duty is just as important as an English teacher's description of Hamlet. There are 77,500 "active editors", classed as those who make five or more edits a month, according to the latest survey by the Wikimedia foundation, the non-profit organisation overseeing the encyclopedia.

Paid editors are disliked because they are deemed not to have a NPOV - or neutral point of view - to use the Wikipedia parlance. That is one of the encyclopedia's three content tenets, the other two being "verifiability" and "no original research" (NOR), meaning that information must be sourced to published reports. When novelist Philip Roth amended what he described as a "misstatement" in Wikipedia about his novel, The Human Stain, his expertise was inadmissible as it was deemed original research. In an open letter in The New Yorker, he wrote of being told by a Wikipedia administrator: "I understand your point that the author is the greatest authority on their own work . . . but we require secondary sources."

Puff pieces are banned. Public relations companies have come in for severe criticism for manipulating their clients' entries without disclosing it. In 2013, an investigation by the Wikimedia foundation, discovered hundreds of users were involved in so-called "black hat" practices, in other words, promoting clients. Last year, 11 PR agencies publicly committed to Wikipedia's rules in an attempt to lay to rest hostility between PR firms and volunteer editors.

Wikipedia's beauty is that it is free, according to Katherine Maher, chief communications officer at Wikimedia. "Paid editing disrupts the values. Wikipedia is a volunteer collaborative community. If it was paid it would be a different site." Last year, a Wikimedia employee stepped down after it was discovered that she had been editing on behalf of paying clients.

After consulting the community, Wikipedia's terms of use were updated last year, requiring editors to disclose if they are paid (either on their user page, talk page or edit summary).

Yet, the small industry of professional editors claim their work is invaluable and they do it on behalf of musicians, writers and companies. They say that Wikipedia's complicated rules, enforced by volunteers that occasionally get accused of bullying, have carved out a niche for paid professionals. Mr Bray describes himself as a consultant, not an editor, advising clients how to operate within the guidelines.

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He also claims that high-handed self-appointed guardians of Wikipedia are the reason that so many women and ethnic minorities are deterred from editing. A report by the Wikimedia foundation in 2011 found only 9 per cent of editors are women. The foundation is making efforts to encourage more women editors as well as those from ethnic minorities, through edit-a-thons (events in which people work together in person to build content).

His paid work has led to him being blocked by Wikipedia. Yet, he still edits on behalf of clients, using a proprietary method that he will not disclose.

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Abid Karmali, a 25-year-old Canadian describes his typical client as "a Wikipedia-ignorant person" who wants to be mentioned on the site or feels their entry is insufficient. Contrary to Mr Roth's experience, Mr Karmali believes that liaising with the subject of an article offers "an excellent head start". The aspiring writer, who works for WikipediaWriters.com, says much of his time is spent explaining to clients why he can't replicate a press release.

Mr Wood does not disclose on Wikipedia that he has been paid as he fears the work will be vandalised. He says his company, Legalmorning, has received requests from people posing as would-be clients asking to see examples of his work, only for those pages to then be deleted. "Editors want to destroy paid editing."

Not so, says, Dariusz Jemielniak, author of Common Knowledge?: An Ethnography of Wikipedia . He has been an active volunteer editor and believes paid professionals have their place. "Wikipedia can be a nightmare for a newcomer." The key is to write and edit in "good faith". In any case, "if paid editing is really smart it won't be detected."

emma.jacobs@ft.com Twitter: @emmavj

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