[Air-L] Philosophy/theory of the Wikipedia

Andrea Forte aforte at drexel.edu
Fri Jan 21 07:36:23 PST 2011


The "Wikipedia can't work in theory only in practice" quote is an old 
joke in the Wikipedia community. A lot of Wikipedia researchers use it 
in talks, etc, but the first reference to it I have found in MSM is this 
New York Times article: 
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/23/world/americas/23iht-wiki.1.5405005.html

Joe attributes it to Raul's laws, I think. But even there it was 
attributed to anonymous. If anyone has a clearer idea of the joke's 
origin, I'd love to update my slides. :)

Also, re: theories for thinking about WP. Benkler, yes. I also like 
Ostrom's principles that guide self-governing communities. She was 
working with data about communities that manage common-pool resources 
and there are a lot of nice insights to be had, I think. There are at 
least a couple papers that examine this relationship - Viegas et al's 
"Hidden Order of Wikipedia" and my own "Decentralization in Wikipedia 
Governance."

Best,
Andrea


  :: Andrea Forte
  :: Assistant Professor,
  :: College of Information Science and Technology, Drexel University
  :: http://www.andreaforte.net


On 1/20/11 5:01 PM, Kevin Guidry wrote:
> 2011/1/20 Yu-Hao Lee(李育豪)<minke33 at gmail.com>:
>>   I would suggest Yochai Benkler's "The Wealth of Networks: How social
>> production transforms markets and freedom".
> That's always a good recommendation.
>
> I also recommend Reagle's "Good Faith Collaboration: The Culture of
> Wikipedia."  It's not deeply philosophical or theoretical but it does
> capture the feeling of "screw the experts and the theories, we're just
> going to do this" attitude that seems important to understand as part
> of Wikipedia's culture.  (I can't find the exact quote but somewhere
> in the book it mentions how Wikipedia is the kind of thing that could
> never work in theory, only in practice.)
>
>
> Kevin
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