Monetary materialities of peer-produced knowledge: The case of wikipedia and its tensions with paid labour

Abstract

This article contributes to the debate on the possibilities and limits of expanding the sphere of peer production within and beyond capitalism. As a case in point, it discusses the explicit and tacit monetary dependencies of Wikipedia, which are not only ascribable to the need to sustain the technological structures that render the collaboration possible, but also about the money-mediated sustenance of the peer producers themselves. In Wikipedia, the “bright line” principle for avoiding conflicts of interest has been that no one should be paid for directly editing an article. By examining the aftermath of the Wiki-PR scandal, where a consulting firm was allegedly involved in helping more than 12,000 clients to edit Wikipedia articles until 2014, the goal of the analysis is to shed light on the paradoxical situation where the institution for supporting the peer production (Wikimedia Foundation) found itself taking a more strict perspective vis-à-vis commercial alliances than the unpaid community editors.