Good Faith Collaboration ─ The Culture of Wikipedia

Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, is built by a community--a community ofWikipedians who are expected to "assume good faith" when interacting with one another. InGood Faith Collaboration, Joseph Reagle examines this unique collaborativeculture. Wikipedia, says Reagle, is not the first effort to create a freely shared, universalencyclopedia; its early twentieth-century ancestors include Paul Otlet's UniversalRepository and H. G. Wells's proposal for a World Brain. Both theseprojects, like Wikipedia, were fuelled by new technology--which at the time included index cards andmicrofilm. What distinguishes Wikipedia from these and other more recent ventures is Wikipedia'sgood-faith collaborative culture, as seen not only in the writing and editing of articles but alsoin their discussion pages and edit histories. Keeping an open perspective on both knowledge claimsand other contributors, Reagle argues, creates an extraordinary collaborative potential. Wikipedia'sstyle of collaborative production has been imitated, analyzed, and satirized. Despite the socialunease over its implications for individual autonomy, institutional authority, and the character(and quality) of cultural products, Wikipedia's good-faith collaborative culture has brought uscloser than ever to a realization of the century-old pursuit of a universal encyclopedia.

Joseph Michael Reagle Jr. is an Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at Northeastern University and a faculty associate at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University.