FirstMonday: The Case of Wikipedia

[Gerry Mckiernan]

Colleagues/

With regard to the Pro and/or Con statements about Wikipedia (and wikis in general) that have been 
posted over the past several days, I highly recommend that We All Read:

_Phantom Authority, Self*Selective Recruitment and Retention of Members in Virtual Communities:
The Case of Wikipedia_ by Andrea Ciffolilli [First Monday, volume 8, number 12 (December 2003)] 

[ http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue8_12/ciffolilli/ l ]

A Few Key Excerpts

"Wikipedia is based on the Wiki technology that characterizes many Web sites. A Wiki community is open in the sense that it allows anyone to participate, freely viewing information contained in a site, permitting editing of that information as well [9]. Editing Web pages can be done without submitting changes to a publisher and negotiating for them.

Why does this approach work? One might assume that graffiti attacks would eventually frustrate an approach on this sort of large scale. However, Wikipedia has been successful with a great deal of notable content as well as content in a state of constant improvement. For the most part, content disasters * in terms of quality * have not occurred."

"Another secret of the success of Wikipedia is related to the incentives that contribute to a "creative construction" of information, rather than a "creative destruction" of it. As noted earlier, I expected Wikipedia to be engaged in an endless war among reliable contributions and graffiti attacks that would have blocked the development of the Web site. In reality, that has not happened, basically because all changes made to any article are stored; it is possible to undo any unapproved modification with a single click. This makes the activity of littering a page extremely more expensive for an individual (in terms of time and reputation), than it is for anyone else. Therefore, also in this circumstance, it is a matter of costs.

Through this mechanism of editing and undoing meaningless changes or graffiti, an evolutionary process is fostered and only the best contributions survive the selection (Neus, 2001). Moreover, other factors contribute to Wikipedia's success such as sources of authority and coordination."

>From the Conclusion

"Despite their positive aspects, virtual communities such as Wikipedia are not absolutely free of troubles. While the processes of recruitment and retention have been working quite well so far, but will they continue to operate in the future? Are the mechanisms that allow accumulation of reputation and hence, authority distribution, strong enough to guarantee medium*term sustainability, and to maintain the sense of trust and identity among members? Some instruments for entry selection, such as a compulsory registration, may further improve the quality of recruitment and therefore the outcome of the cooperative effort, without being detrimental to the community's momentum. At the same time, more intense use of personal profile pages and a direct recognition of the contribution made by each user could foster a sense of trust and help retain  participants. Finally, let me mention another problem related to the exercise of authority. If the number of administrators, retaining a certain degree of institutional authority, continues to grow over time, will a new complexity make it necessary to increase the number of hierarchical layers in the structure and discourage participation? This issue will need to be resolved at some point in the future.

There certainly is great charm exerted by successful projects of massive collaboration producing a public good or a club. Part of this charm may be attributable to the open source approach. In fact, an open source mode of dividing innovative labour may be useful to encourage knowledge sharing, breaking information bottlenecks."


BTW: Thanks, Bernie Sloan for recommending this Most Excellent article!

Enjoy!

/Gerry

Gerry McKiernan
Collaborative Librarian 
Iowa State University 
Ames IA 50011

gerrymck at iastate.edu 


"In times of universal deceit, telling the truth will be a revolutionary act."

--- George Orwell [Eric Arthur Blair] (1903-1950) British author