Page 60 - Cyberculture and New Media

Knowledge Building and Motivations in Wikipedia:
Participation as “Ba”

Sheizaf Rafaeli, Tsahi Hayat, Yaron Ariel

Abstract
The online encyclopedia Wikipedia has been one of the prominent
phenomena in the emergent of online user-generated content. This study
explores Wikipedians’ (Wikipedia users) perceptions of Wikipedia
knowledge, their sense of community and motivations for participating in
Wikipedia. We suggest utilizing the constructivist approach to knowledge, as
a theoretical framework for understanding the co-building of knowledge in
Wikipedia. Adapting the organizational knowledge creation model, as
proposed by Nonaka and Takeuchi, for examining Wikipedia we emphasize
the importance of the context, using a concept named Ba. We suggest that
key factors of knowledge building are the users’ sense of community and
processes of interactivity that are enabled by Wikipedia. A central tenet of
wiki community is users’ motivation to contribute. In a study exploring the
success of online community, Sangwan suggested that the “Uses and
Gratifications” framework be applied, and identifies three key motivators for
virtual community use: Functional, Emotive and Contextual. Following these
observations, we study Wikipedians’ motivations, thus highlighting the users’
cognitive and integrative gratifications. To survey Wikipedians on these
aspects, we posted a link to an online web questionnaire in the “Community
Portal” of the English and Hebrew language Wikipedias. We provide some
preliminary cross-cultural survey data.

Key Words: Wikipedia, Wikipedians, knowledge building community, ba,
motivations, sense of community, uses and gratifications

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1. Introduction
New media go beyond traditional media modes by adapting and
innovating conventions. Traditional media such as newspapers and books
shift to online environments through duplication of the old genre, or by
generating new genres. One interesting new medium transformation case is
the on-line encyclopedia - Wikipedia. The project of Wikipedia was initiated
in 2001 and currently has millions of articles in many dozens of language
versions.
Thus, Wikipedia as a medium is a novel form of creating and
projecting content that experiments with social structure and form.
Wikipedia’s success, in terms of growth, quality and popularity, hinges on