Page 63 - Cyberculture and New Media

54 Knowledge Building and Motivations in Wikipedia
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rationale for grasping Wikipedia’s content as “collective knowledge”, let us
move now to explore the process building that knowledge.
Along with the Wiki literature, we claim that Wikipedia is a
“knowledge building community”. Note that any process of knowledge
building starts with an individual who knows. The “knowledge creation
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metaphor of learning” might be helpful for articulating individual
knowledge. This metaphor regards the learning process as analogous to the
process of inquiry, especially when knowledge is substantially enriched or
significantly transformed. The Wikipedia environment offers its participants
much stimulation for these processes. The context of Wikipedia as
community is most relevant to this matter, since it enables individuals’
processes means to build up collaboratively.
To examine Wikipedia as a knowledge building community let us
turn to highlight the collective level. This aspect will be examined according
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to the “Theory of Organizational Knowledge Creation”, and its extension
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through the “ba” concept. The process of knowledge creation, according to
this theory, involves social interaction and the transition between tacit and
explicit knowledge. Four modes of knowledge conversion proposed:
(1) Socialization: individuals share tacit knowledge through joint activities.
(2) Externalization: individuals link tacit knowledge to explicit knowledge.
(3) Combination: individuals combine different explicit ideas into more
complex sets of explicit knowledge.
(4) Internalization: individuals extract knowledge from newly created tacit
and explicit knowledge. A central notion of this theory is the continuation
and dynamic interaction of these modes.
“Ba” is a concept proposed by the Japanese philosopher Kitaro
Nishiba. “Ba” can be conceived of as a:

Shared space for emerging relationships: physical, virtual,
mental or any combination of them…According to the
theory of existentialism, “ba” is a context, which harbors
meaning. Thus, we consider “ba” to be shared space that
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serves as foundation knowledge creation.

Nonaka et al. suggest four types of “ba”:
(1) Originating “ba” is defined by individual and face-to-face interactions,
which offer the context of socialization
(2) Dialoguing “ba” is defined by individual and face-to-face interactions,
which offers the context of externalization
(3) Systemizing “ba” is defined by collective and virtual interactions, which
offers the context of combination
(4) Exercising “ba” is defined by individual and virtual interactions, which
offers the context of internalization.