Why is it dangerous to work with freelance Wikipedians?

Ukrainian Wikipedia has more than 3,500 active contributing editors. However, only 13% of the most experienced ones have the status of patrol (it means 468 people as of November 2020). Moreover, only 1% of the most ambitious editors with many years of experience become administrators. Now there are 46 of them.

These are very different people: NGO representatives, scientists, teachers, students, IT specialists, diasporas, retired soldiers, retirees, etc. They have several hundred articles created and thousands edited. They literally live on Wikipedia. This is a big and powerful part of their identity.

They are proud of their contributions, try to preserve their reputation and authority in the community. They participate for hours in discussions, inner Wikipedia meetings, etc. As a result, the more professional the administrator, the more professionally deformed he is and the stronger his bubble is. Thus, it creates the root of the difficulties and all the risks of commercial cooperation for brands and companies:

• work without a contract
• no deadlines
• no guarantees that the article will not be removed
• no confidentiality guarantee 
• no money refund in cases of the page removal
• slow work
• no conveyor expertise and experience of complex cases
• misunderstanding the needs and language of business (brands, digital, marketing)
• work alone and no allies editors
• weak examination in arbitration and discussions about articles removal
• fear of account risks, and therefore discard 90% of the native advertising

These are the main problems that customers of paying Wikipedia editing face with. Almost every fifth customer who comes to Wikibusines has already had a negative experience of working with a wikipedist. Frequently, they don’t take into account a number of edits, the final version of the text is not used, or in general, you may not get the refund for a deleted article.

Often, the desire to save costs means huge loss of time, money and nerves. Therefore, it is very important to predict possible risks and try to avoid them. The Wikibusines team calls for thorough market research and reviews before ordering editing or creating an article on Wikipedia from the wikipedists who work on freelance.