Recently we have started with a research project to investigate how and why people collaborate in wikipedia. Why people are engaged in the encyclopedia could not be explained by individual motivation. We hope to find some explanations in the commitment of the core group of the activists and in the picture of the different positions of all participants . We will conduct network analysis of different levels of Wikipeda, like the articles, the discussions around articles, different mailing lists etc. The project will last two years, but I am sure we can present some of our first results at the Sunbelt Conference in Corfu next year. Christian danah boyd schrieb:
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 _____________________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________ The air-l@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http:// listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
Join the Association of Internet Researchers: http://www.aoir.org/
- - - - - - - - - - d a n a h ( d o t ) o r g - - - - - - - - - - "taken out of context i must seem so strange"
musings :: http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts
_______________________________________________ The air-l@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
Join the Association of Internet Researchers: http://www.aoir.org/
-- ************************************************* PD Dr. Christian Stegbauer Goethe-Universität Frankfurt Fachbereich Gesellschaftswissenschaften Institut für Gesellschafts- und Politikanalyse 60054 Frankfurt Tel.Uni: 069 798-23543 Tel.priv: 069 55 43 92 e-mail: stegbauer@soz.uni-frankfurt.de Magazin: kommunikation@gesellschaft Journal für alte und neue Medien aus soziologischer, kulturanthropologischer und kommunikationswissenschaftlicher Perspektive www.kommunikation-gesellschaft.de demnächst: Stegbauer, Christian / Rausch, Alexander Strukturalistische Internetforschung. 2006. Ca. 240 S. Wiesbaden, VS-Verlag,* ISBN: 3-531-15110-X und Stegbauer, Christian Geschmackssache? Eine kleine Soziologie für Genießer. 2006. Ca. 200 Seiten.ISBN 3-939519-16-2. Hamburg: Merus *************************************************