PortlandWiki:Paid editing

The following is an essay. It contains the views of one or more editors and should not be taken as a community-developed policy or standard.

Paid editing is the practice of editing a wiki as a professional service. Usually this is done at the request of a business seeking to create, expand, or modify an article about their own business. Paid editing caused some discussion at large wikis like the English Wikipedia.

On Wikipedia, successfully editing business articles on Wikipedia has come to require a certain level of policy knowledge, social etiquette, and technical ability. This makes hiring an experienced editor appealing to a small handful of businesses.

While we at PortlandWiki would probably be more accepting of paid editing than Wikipedians, it has probably never happened here, and may be unlikely to ever happen. As of this writing (February 2010), there are no formalized editing policies, article formatting is not yet standardized, and there have been no etiquette problems. It is very easy to edit business articles, as nearly anything is acceptable at this point. In addition, PortlandWiki has not yet achieved high enough popularity for most businesses to even care (or know) about their PortlandWiki article. These reasons combined make paid editing very unlikely at this stage.

In the future, as policies and standardization naturally increase, hopefully they will be formed in such a way that editing any article will remain easy for anyone. While this would be solely in the interest of making editing accessible to all, an unintentional side effect may be that businesses will continue to see no need to pay for editing. However, the possibility remains that businesses might find it worthwhile to hire an editor regardless of PortlandWiki's editing accessibility. Some businesses may be short-staffed and could not spare any time to edit PortlandWiki, or may find the wiki editing interface confusing. If these businesses exist, there might be a small market for paid editors if the value of having an informative, well-written business article on PortlandWiki could be conveyed.