WIKINDX Resources
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Proceedings Article:
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BibTeX citation key: senabrehidalgo.658
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Senabre Hidalgo Enric (2007). « Stigmergy, meritocracy and vandalism in peer-production : How can wikis grow ». In Towards a Social Science of Web 2.0 Conference, 5-7 septembre 2007.
Added by: Laure Endrizzi 2007-11-18 20:29:32
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Abstract
When considering the appropriation of a wiki tool for the development of research, the example of Wikipedia could be a good start for understanding in advance what model of collaborative knowledge creation is needed, or could arise. Wikipedia, whose dynamics of interaction among participants replicates the meritocratic and stigmergic system of relations among hackers in the developing of free software, is one of the most detailed and popular experiences of commons-based peer production in Web2.0. While the hacker's influence is not only detectable in power structures and identities of wikipedians (but also in the highly efficient peer-production system it entails), another reason for the exponential growth of Wikipedia is how the community has reacted against vandalism in the edition of articles.
Although not all the wikis evolve the same way, there are common denominators in how people coordinate their efforts and guide the growth of content within these tools. On one hand, the specialization of tasks and the way users intercommunicate by modifying the informational environment of a wiki could be understand, and dynamically planned, as a self-organizing emergent system. On the other hand, the possibility of vandalism inherent to every wiki editing philosophy could work as a spur for generating policies based on the recognition of participants for their merits (as well as for creating more and better content, accordingly). How could this apply to research methodologies and publication processes should be a key element when considering new academic practices in this field.
Furthermore, the design principles of the wiki tool itself determine and allow patterns of constructive learning and different dynamics of communication between its participants, where Wikipedia represents the type of evolution and internal processes a wiki could adopt collaboratively when experiencing massive participation. In this sense, comparisons between wikis (content-oriented) and blogs (user-oriented) can also help to understand different dynamics of collaboration and to conceptualize some innovations Web2.0 represents, in terms of socialization and methodological innovation.
The above mentioned considerations could be established on the basis of qualitative examples and quantitative data extracted from Wikipedia, as well as from theoretical literature about collaboration in wikis and about commons-based peer production. The aim is to give input toward the development of new paradigms for innovative research in this second wave of Internet, and specifically to help raising questions about the collaborative creation of knowledge in wikis as distributed systems.
Added by: Laure Endrizzi
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