Laura Robinson

Since its inception, the internet has been the birthplace of digital sites based on peer-to-peer sharing rather than hierarchical dissemination. Among the most well-known collaborative projects, eBay and Napster ushered in an innovative wave of user-based digital communities espousing utopian goals. Although some of the idealist aims of these projects fell prey to the powers of commercialization (1), the changes they wrought are still alive and well in the online world. The hype generated by Napster’s file sharing and eBay’s user-generated reputation system is now centered on user-based information communities, the most visible of which is Wikipedia.

The collaborative effort known as Wikipedia is populated by its community of Wikipedians. Wikipedians create and edit the quickly growing online, multi-lingual encyclopedias housed by the Wikimedia Foundation of which Wikipedia is one part. The English version of the site states:

"Wikipedia is a project to build free encyclopedias in all languages of the world. Virtually anyone is free to contribute. The project started in January 2001 in one language, English, and currently has over 3,300,000 articles in over 150 languages. The largest Wikipedia is in the English language, with over 1,000,000 articles; then come the German and French editions, with over 300,000 articles each. 100 other languages have at least 1,000 articles. New language editions are proposed and launched every month" (2).

Like previous utopian projects that began on the internet, Wikipedia offers radical change from its offline equivalent. On its home page, viewers are urged to, “Imagine a world in which every single person is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That's what we're doing” (3). Wikipedians’ who believe in the power of collaborative knowledge generation are not alone. According to Marshall Poe, “Wikipedia has the potential to be the greatest effort in collaborative knowledge gathering the world has ever known, and it may well be the greatest effort in voluntary collaboration of any kind” (4).

Napster and other file-sharing programs generated enormous peer-to-peer networks. EBay did the same with its member-generated reputation system. Wikipedia follows this tradition with its online encyclopedias that are user generated, user edited, and user maintained. The site states:

"Wikipedia is an encyclopedia collaboratively written by many of its readers. It uses a special type of website, called a wiki, that makes collaboration easy. Lots of people are constantly improving Wikipedia, making thousands of changes an hour, all of which are recorded on article histories and recent changes. Inappropriate changes are usually removed quickly, and repeat offenders can be blocked from editing" (5).

Reminiscent of eBay’s Community Values (6), Wikipedia is based on its Five Pillars that guide any individual who wishes to take part in this large-scale collaborative effort (7). Thus, any individual with access to the internet can create new entries, edit existing entries, discuss existing entries, and nominate entries for “good article” status (8).

Previous research on Wikipedia targets quantitative trends concerning user-generated posts and edits of those posts, trends across different language sites, and references in the press (9). The present research concerns itself, however, with how users understand and valorize information on Wikipedia. More specifically, some educators believe that Wikipedia can be a powerful tool for information dissemination, as well as a learning tool for information literacy among high school students (10). The first phase of research will explore this assertion more closely and will be used to inform future components of the study.

Given the wealth of information being produced every second by Wikipedians around the globe, the project ultimately seeks to uncover knowledge about the different facets of both Wikipedia and the process of creating and editing collaborative knowledge. It should be noted that the present research is a pilot project that is generative in nature. As such, it will be used to inform future phases of study because the revolutionary nature of the Wikimedia project that goes far beyond the online encyclopedia with such projects as Wikinews, Wiktionary, and Wikibooks.

Endnotes:

1. For eBay see: Robinson, Laura. 2006. “Black Friday and Feedback Bombing: An Examination of Trust and Online Community in eBay’s Early History.” The eBay Reader, Ken Hillis, Michael Petit and Nathan Epley (Eds.), Routledge. For Napster see: Robinson, Laura and David Halle. 2002. “Digitization, the Internet, and the Arts: eBay, SAG, e-Books, and Napster.” Qualitative Sociology. Volume 25, Number 3, 359-383.

2. All Wikipedia quotes come from the English version of the Wikimedia Foundation site. All were retrieved on October 8, 2006. http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Our_projects

3. http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Home.

4. Poe, Marshall. 2006: September. “The Hive.” The Atlantic Monthly.

5. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Welcome,_newcomers

6. The five “fundamental values” read:

“We believe people are basically good.
We believe everyone has something to contribute.
We believe that an honest, open environment can bring out the best in people.
We recognize and respect everyone as a unique individual.
We encourage you to treat others the way you want to be treated.”
http://pages.ebay.com/community/people/values.html Retrieved October 8, 2006.

7. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Five_pillars

8. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Good_articles

9. Holloway, Todd et al. “Analyzing and Visualizing the Semantic Coverage of Wikipedia and Its Authors.” Paper submitted to Complexity, Special Issue on Understanding Complex Systems.
http://arxiv.org/ftp/cs/papers/0512/0512085.pdf#search=%22analyzing%20and%20visualizing%20the%20semantic%20
coverage%20of%20wikipedia%20and%20its%20authors%22. Retrieved October 9, 2006.

Voβ, Jakob. “Measuring Wikipedia.” Forthcoming in Proceedings of the ISSI 2005 Conference. http://eprints.rclis.org/archive/00003610/01/MeasuringWikipedia2005.pdf#search=%22jakob%20voss%20measuring%20wikipedia%22. Retrieved October 9, 2006.

Lih, Andrew. 2004. “Wikipedia as Participatory Journalism: Reliable Sources? Metrics for evaluating collaborative media as a news source.” Paper Presented at the 5th International Symposium on Online Journalism. April 16-17, Austin, Texas. http://jmsc.hku.hk/faculty/alih/publications/utaustin-2004-wikipedia-rc2.pdf#search=%22andrew%20lih%20wikipedia%22. Retrieved October 9, 2006.

10. Long, Cindy. 2006: September. “Getting Wiki With It.” NEA Today.