Page 64 - Cyberculture and New Media

Sheizaf Rafaeli, Tsahi Hayat & Yaron Ariel 55
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The last three “ba”: Dialoguing, Systemizing and Exercising refer to
interactive processes that serve, each in its own context, as facilitators to a
knowledge building community process.
In this study, Wikipedia will be discussed as a social and technical
platform, which facilitates the creation of “ba”. In order to understand in
what ways this facilitation is expressed in Wikipedia we turn now to explore
Wikipedia’s communal facet.

4. Wikipedians’ sense of community
The Wikipedia project describes itself as a community. Wikipedians
are invited to participate in the “Community portal” “Wikipedia wants you!
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Together we are building an encyclopedia and a Wiki community”, and
community issues (from technical issues to debates) are discussed at the so-
called “Village pump”. Wikipedia clearly meets the basic definitions of
virtual community, sharing common interests and ideas.
Paradoxically, and even though its subject matter is broad and
universal, and it almost by definition does not have a unique focal point or
“practice” in the sense of discipline, the Wikipedia community can be
described as a community of practice. The community of practice model is
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based on the concept that knowledge cannot be separated from practice. The
model assumes that activity and mutual engagement brings members together
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into social entity with a shared repertoire of communal resources.
Wikipedia is also a part of the growing body of open source
software. Open source is the generic name to describe software whose source
code can (with few restrictions) be freely modified and redistributed.
Creating open source software has many similarities to Wikipedia, since both
the software and the encyclopedia are created collaboratively and enable its
creators the mechanisms of reputation. An open source community is able to
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produce software that at least matches those of commercial companies.
One of the most striking features of Wikipedia are the individual
Wikipedians who take the time to voluntarily contribute to its content. Those
individuals are the people who establish Wikipedia’s sense of community.
After discussing the communal aspects of Wikipedia, an interesting question
to ask will be one that concerns the individual Wikipedians’ motivation for
contributing to Wikipedia content.

5. Wikipedians’ motivations
Wikipedians contribute time and intellectual efforts to add and
correct Wikipedia’s content. The more involved Wikipedians, who are the
subject of this study, also participate in many communal activities such as
voting, sharing opinions about Wikipedia developments and policies,
patrolling pages, communicating with new participants, and the like. Rafaeli
and Ariel propose scholars should study Wikipedians’ participation along