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8 J. on Telecomm. & High Tech. L. 157 (2010)
Wikipedia's Labor Squeeze and Its Consequences

handle is hein.journals/jtelhtel8 and id is 159 raw text is: WIKIPEDIA'S LABOR SQUEEZE AND ITS CONSEQUENCES ERIC GOLDMAN* INT RO D U CTIO N ................................................................................... 158 I. MEASURING WIKIPEDIA'S SUCCESS ....................................... 159 II. THREATS TO WIKIPEDIA ......................................................... 161 III. WIKIPEDIA'S RESPONSE TO THE VANDAL AND SPAMMER T H REA T S ................................................................................... 164 A. Increased Technological Barriers to Participation .................... 164 B. Increased Social Barriers to Participation ............................... 167 IV. WIKIPEDIA'S LOOMING LABOR SUPPLY PROBLEMS ............. 170 A . E ditor Turnover ................................................................... 170 B. Wikipedia's Limited Toolkit to Attract New Editors ............... 172 C. Wikipedia Compared with the Free and Open Source Software Community ............................................................ 175 D. Can Wikipedia Thrive on Intrinsic Motivations? .................. 176 E. Doesn't Wikipedia's Success to Date Disprove My A rgum ent? ............................................................................ 177 V. POSSIBLE CHANGES ................................................................. 178 A. Raise Technological Barriers/Eliminate Free Editability ........ 178 B. Recruit Replacement Labor ................................................... 179 C O N C LU SIO N ....................................................................................... 182 * Associate Professor and Director, High Tech Law Institute, Santa Clara University School of Law. egoldman@gmail.com; http://www.ericgoldman.org. Before becoming a full- time professor, I was General Counsel at Epinions.com. This Essay originated from three blog posts on my Technology & Marketing Law Blog: Wikipedia Will Fail Within 5 Years, http://blog.ericgoldman.org/archives/2005/12/wikipedia.will.htm (Dec. 5, 2005); Wikipedia Will Fail in 4 Years, http://blog.ericgoldman.org/archives/2006/12/wikipedia-will_1.htm (Dec. 5, 2006); Wikipedia Revisited: the Wikipedia Community's Xenophobia, http://blog.ericgoldman.org/archives/2008/01/wikipedia-revis.htm (Jan. 22, 2008). I am grateful for helpful comments from David Ball, Colleen Chien, Dan Cosley, Yihong Ding, Shubha Ghosh, James Grimmelmann, Deep Gulasekaram, Andy Hilal, Greg Lastowka, Timothy B. Lee, David Levine, Salil Mehra, Jason Lee Miller, Joseph Reagle, Aaron Swartz, Rebecca Tushnet, Laurence Wilson, and the participants at the Virtual Worlds, Social Networks & User-Generated Content Roundtable at Vanderbilt Law School, The Digital Broadband Migration: Imagining The Internet's Future conference at University of Colorado Boulder and the Santa Clara University School of Law Faculty Workshop.

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