Turning Pro: An Argument for Wikipedia's Future

Small announcement here: in the February issue of PR Week, you can read a column by none other than this Wikipedian here, making the case that Wikipedia's long-term growth requires a reassessment of its volunteer culture.

I don't mean to argue that Wikipedia should do away with volunteerism, but that recent developments to professionalize certain types of editing and Wikipedia-building activity should be expanded beyond the "cultural sector" to include professional organizations and even for-profit entities. (So now you can see why PR Week was interested.) And the model which Wikipedia should consider? Another open-source community with deep ties to the business world: Linux. An excerpt:

Like Wikipedia, Linux was released free on the Web without fanfare, caught on quickly, and within a decade was known around the world. While anyone can join the Linux community, you will not be much help if you cannot write code. ...

Linux's evolution from a small open-source experiment to a key part of today's Internet was driven in part by upstart companies such as Red Hat and behemoths including IBM. ...

Wikipedia's volunteers and its nonprofit parent group, the Wikimedia Foundation, should seriously consider this example.

It's no big deal that the Smithsonian has a "Wikipedian in Residence". Why shouldn't General Motors, or General Electric? Granted, there is much more trust with the Smithsonian because it is a like-minded institution, and the generalists of American business are certainly different. However, for Wikipedia to grow and improve, it needs to find new ways to encourage contributions that its volunteer model, by itself, has not.

P.S. The article is behind a paywall, so you may try plugging the title into Google News and seeing if that helps. Not that you heard it from me...