What We Know About Wikipedia: A Review of the Literature Analyzing the Project(s)

Abstract

This article proposes a review of the literature analyzing Wikipedia as a collective system for producing knowledge. 1 Introduction. Wikipedia project is one of the tremendous successful project of knowledge production ever, with more than 3.5 million articles for the English version and nearly one million visits per day 2 by researchers (Ortega, 2009). From an Information System research point of view, this example of open knowledge projects should provide useful information on how structuring online open knowledge project for it to succeed 4 , but also for internal organization's projects, as rms are institutions created to allow collaboration (Simon, 1957; March and Simon, 1958), and even dened by Grant (1996) as "institution for integrating knowledge [of its members]. And regarding this function, the wiki tool, allowing distant and sequential collaboration around a structured document seems to be very promising (Hasan and Pfa, 2006a,c,b). It also, for libraries, a new platform to stock information and knowledge resources, to to promote digital collection and thus to reach new users (Pressley and McCallum, 2008), and today a prominent source of online information, notably for health (Laurent and Vickers, 2009), where false information may have dramatic consequences. But to be used as a model, how the model works is needed to be better understood. This is need for internal purpose too: the Wikipedia project managers may want to monitor the activity: is the English Wikipedia more ecient than the French one, or are projects (portals) more or less ecient, more or less productive, is there a minimal, an optimal number of editors for an article 5 ? And, to quote Crowston et al. (2006, p. 124), to be able to learn from teams that are working well, we need to have a denition of`working well'. To do so, we rst rely on the literature of Information System, but also on the literature of knowledge common, to propose a framework of how the elements interact. Then, we propose are review of the existing literature on how Wikipedia works. 2 Theoretical contributions. 2.1 Research questions. There are numerous research articles dealing with Wikipedia (7029 articles in the science direct base on October 20 th), notably because this encyclopedia is used as a test base in information and 4 Even if the comparison between dierent industries must be done very carefully, as shown by Müller-Seitz and Reger (2009) on the comparison between open-source with Open Source car and Wikipedia projects. 5 For research questions pointed by the Wikimedia foundation, which support the Wikipedia project, see http: //meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Index. 2 Theoretical contributions. 3 language processing systems 6 and information retrieval tasks (Buriol et al., 2006). This socio-technical project (Bryant et al., 2005; Benker and Nissenbaum, 2006), where the tools used and the rules mediate and shape user activity around open collaborative writing, can be seen as a community of practice (Hara et al., 2010), or even as an aggregation of multiple co...

The People’s Encyclopedia Under the Gaze of the Sages: A Systematic Review of Scholarly Research on Wikipedia

“…Wikipedia as an Input-Process-Output System (2012) Jullien (2012) conducted a very broad review that is one of the most extensive thus far conducted, with detailed insightful descriptions of over 250 scholarly works on Wikipedia. However, considering the enormous amount of literature, he screened out certain broad categories of studies: "the impact of the project on the environment ... such as how it is used to [accomplish] professional tasks (by the students, the researchers, the people in the industry), ... the analysis of the propositions to improve the tools (using it on mobile, creating a 3D Wikipedia), ... the use of Wikipedia as a database for information retrieval.... (2012, p.6).…”

“…Jullien also discusses scholarly books on Wikipedia; our coverage of these is limited to brief summaries. Jullien (2012) structured his review on a general input-process-output model. He grouped input-oriented studies as those who considered the Wikipedia environment and policies in place, and studies that investigated why people participate in Wikipedia.…”

Research on Wikipedia Vandalism

“…The detection of vandalism is defined as the most widely sought objective: 40 papers were devoted to this (59.7%). This is followed by the less important quality control of Wikipedia content (8,11.94%), analysis of the textual content (4, 5.97%) and prevention (2, 2.99%). Objectives such as the analysis of reliability, the elimination or the automatic blocking of acts of vandalism, the study of editors and of revertings, or the forecasting of possible acts of vandalism appear with just one mention.…”

“…Martin [10] stressed the areas of quality (where he included vandalism), trust, semantic aspects, and governance and society. Jullien [11], from a perspective based on the study of the community, indicates motivation for participation, the interaction patterns and processes (with a minor mention of vandals) and quality assessment as areas of interest. Nielsen [4] classifies research into four major categories.…”

Instruction and assessment of information literacy among STEM majors

“…The use of Wikipedia as a teaching tool in this project has been explained in more detail elsewhere [27]. Wikipedia was chosen as a teaching tool because it had been shown to be motivational in prior work [28] and one that has been gaining attention [29]. The project tasks required students to identify articles in Wikipedia that needed revision and then improve them by editing definitions, adding content, and adding reliable and appropriate sources as references.…”