Wikipedia @ 20
Stories of an Incomplete Revolution
Published on 13. October 2020
376 pages
978-0-262-36060-9 (ISBN)
Description
Wikipedia's first twenty years: how what began as an experiment in collaboration became the world's most popular reference work.
We have been looking things up in Wikipedia for twenty years. What began almost by accident--a wiki attached to an nascent online encyclopedia--has become the world's most popular reference work. Regarded at first as the scholarly equivalent of a Big Mac, Wikipedia is now known for its reliable sourcing and as a bastion of (mostly) reasoned interaction. How has Wikipedia, built on a model of radical collaboration, remained true to its original mission of "free access to the sum of all human knowledge" when other tech phenomena have devolved into advertising platforms? In this book, scholars, activists, and volunteers reflect on Wikipedia's first twenty years, revealing connections across disciplines and borders, languages and data, the professional and personal.
We have been looking things up in Wikipedia for twenty years. What began almost by accident--a wiki attached to an nascent online encyclopedia--has become the world's most popular reference work. Regarded at first as the scholarly equivalent of a Big Mac, Wikipedia is now known for its reliable sourcing and as a bastion of (mostly) reasoned interaction. How has Wikipedia, built on a model of radical collaboration, remained true to its original mission of "free access to the sum of all human knowledge" when other tech phenomena have devolved into advertising platforms? In this book, scholars, activists, and volunteers reflect on Wikipedia's first twenty years, revealing connections across disciplines and borders, languages and data, the professional and personal.
More details
Other editions
Additional editions
Book
10/2020
MIT Press
€36.70
Article exhausted; check different version
Persons
Joseph M. Reagle, Jr., is Associate Professor of Communication Studies at Northeastern University. He is the author of Good Faith Collaboration, Reading the Comments, and Hacking Life, all published by the MIT Press. Jackie L. Koerner is a qualitative research analyst for online communities. She is Community Health Consultant for the Wikimedia community and from 2016 to 2018 was Visiting Scholar at Wiki Education Foundation at San Francisco State University.
