The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom
The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom
Information quality work organization in wikipedia
Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology
Detecting Wikipedia vandalism via spatio-temporal analysis of revision metadata?
Proceedings of the Third European Workshop on System Security
Ethics and Information Technology
Navigating between chaos and bureaucracy: backgrounding trust in open-content communities
SocInfo'12 Proceedings of the 4th international conference on Social Informatics
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In communities of user-generated content, systems for the management of content and/or their contributors are usually accepted without much protest. Not so, however, in the case of Wikipedia, in which the proposal to introduce a system of review for new edits (in order to counter vandalism) led to heated discussions. This debate is analysed, and arguments of both supporters and opponents (of English, German and French tongue) are extracted from Wikipedian archives. In order to better understand this division of the minds, an analogy is drawn with theories of bureaucracy as developed for real-life organizations. From these it transpires that bureaucratic rules may be perceived as springing from either a control logic or an enabling logic. In Wikipedia, then, both perceptions were at work, depending on the underlying views of participants. Wikipedians either rejected the proposed scheme (because it is antithetical to their conception of Wikipedia as a community) or endorsed it (because it is consonant with their conception of Wikipedia as an organization with clearly defined boundaries). Are other open-content communities susceptible to the same kind of `essential contestation'?