Wikipedia @ 20: Stories of an Incomplete Revolution

Joseph Reagle, Jackie Koerner

MIT Press, Oct 13, 2020 - Language Arts & Disciplines - 376 pages

Wikipedia's first twenty years: how what began as an experiment in collaboration became the world's most popular reference work.

We have been looking things up in Wikipedia for twenty years. What began almost by accident--a wiki attached to an nascent online encyclopedia--has become the world's most popular reference work. Regarded at first as the scholarly equivalent of a Big Mac, Wikipedia is now known for its reliable sourcing and as a bastion of (mostly) reasoned interaction. How has Wikipedia, built on a model of radical collaboration, remained true to its original mission of "free access to the sum of all human knowledge" when other tech phenomena have devolved into advertising platforms? In this book, scholars, activists, and volunteers reflect on Wikipedia's first twenty years, revealing connections across disciplines and borders, languages and data, the professional and personal.

Contents

• The Many Reported Deaths of Wikipedia: 9
• From Utopia to Practice and Back: 43
• COI Editing and Its Discontents: 71
• Wikipedia and Libraries: 89
• Be Bold Assume Good Faith and There Are: 107
• Rise of the Underdog: 189
• Why Do I Have Authority to Edit the Page? The Politics of User: 205
• What We Talk About When We Talk About Community: 221
• Toward a Wikipedia For and From Us All: 239
• The Myth of the Comprehensive Historical Archive: 259
• No Internet No Problem: 273
• Wikipedias Encyclopedic Promise: 285
• Five Journeys: 297
• Making History Building the Future Together: 325
• Contributors: 345

About the author

Joseph M. Reagle, Jr., is Associate Professor of Communication Studies at Northeastern University. He is the author of Good Faith Collaboration, Reading the Comments, and Hacking Life, all published by the MIT Press. Jackie L. Koerner is a qualitative research analyst for online communities. She is Community Health Consultant for the Wikimedia community and from 2016 to 2018 was Visiting Scholar at Wiki Education Foundation at San Francisco State University.

Bibliographic information

• Title: Wikipedia @ 20: Stories of an Incomplete Revolution
• Editors: Joseph Reagle, Jackie Koerner
• Publisher: MIT Press, 2020
• ISBN: 0262360608, 9780262360609
• Length: 376 pages
• Subjects: Computers / Internet / General; Computers / Internet / User-Generated Content; Language Arts & Disciplines / Library & Information Science / Digital & Online Resources