Aaron Swartz is looking into what constitutes "the community" on Wikipedia through content analysis (challenging the fact that only 500 people edit the majority of Wikipedia). Andrea Forte (Georgia Tech) is doing a qualitative study of Wikipedia culture. Fernanda Viegas & Martin Wattenberg (IBM) have been building visualizations of Wikipedia's editing patterns. These are the key people that i know looking into Wikipedia from different angles. Andrea's probably your best bet for looking at motivation. That said, some very interesting bits are coming out of Aaron's work... namely that the kinds of edits made by anonymous folks are very different (and often content more detailed content) than those made from people with accounts who are frequent editors. (Jimmy - do you know of other studies going on?) danah On Oct 7, 2006, at 2:23 PM, Barry Wellman wrote:
Having had several experiences with Wikipedia entries and edits this week, I am curious if anyone is doing research on:
the social structure and reward structure of Wikipedists -- item enterers, editing others, administrators, etc. (I don't know the structure well enough to know the nomenclature).
Barry Wellman _____________________________________________________________________
Barry Wellman S.D. Clark Professor of Sociology NetLab Director Centre for Urban & Community Studies University of Toronto 455 Spadina Avenue Toronto Canada M5S 2G8 fax:+1-416-978-7162 wellman at chass.utoronto.ca http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~wellman for fun: http://chass.utoronto.ca/oldnew/cybertimes.php _____________________________________________________________________
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