Wikipedia: A New Community of Practice?

Citation

Mason, D. (2010), "Wikipedia: A New Community of Practice?", The Electronic Library, Vol. 28 No. 4, pp. 624-625. https://doi.org/10.1108/02640471011065445

Wikipedia is an internet phenomenon, the biggest online reference source in the world. It has over three million articles and the English version contains over a billion words. There has never been anything like it – or has there? That is what this book sets out to examine.

The book describes Wikipedia, its origins, the people who contribute to it, and the philosophy that underlies it. In many ways Wikipedia is the antithesis of our current expectations about authoritative information. It is a reference source created by ordinary people, not experts. It is non‐proprietary, it is free, and it is run by an anonymous group – with no responsibility for its accuracy, completeness or anything else. And yet it is the world's most popular reference source.

O'Sullivan takes this as the starting point for a critical sociological analysis. Most works of reference were the outcome of one mind but collaborative efforts did exist before the internet made mass connections possible. Wikipedia is not the first attempt to collect all knowledge into one place. The book describes and analyses five earlier collaborative information endeavours: the Great Library of Alexandria, the Royal Society, the Republic of Letters, the OED, and the Left Book Club. Each of these was unique in its time, a collaborative venture that changed the society around it. Each is analysed in terms of its aims, type of contributor, transaction costs, relations with the public, and its legacy.

The rest of the book treats Wikipedia to the same sociological scrutiny. Subsequent chapters each dissect Wikipedia's aims, contributors, transaction costs and public interactions in detail. The comparison and parallels with earlier joint endeavours are fascinating. Wikipedia is not the only attempt at an Internet Encyclopedia. The author shows that underneath all the technology the timeless principles of a successful research work can be seen, but so can the things that lead to failure.

Chief amongst these are problems associated with public access and anonymity. The public cannot only read it, they can change it. This leads to issues ranging from adolescent vandalism, political revisionism, how to accommodate dissenting views, and the whole issue of the nature of knowledge. There is discussion on whether public access will inevitably improve the articles due to an emergent quasi‐Darwinian process as more and more contributors vet and improve the content, or whether they will descend into some average level of mediocrity. These and many other questions are treated with admirable scholarship as Wikipedia and its works are subjected to economic, sociological and cultural analyses.

Overall, this is an excellent book that puts Wikipedia into its cultural context and gives us a way of understanding an important part of our modern world.