Image found at: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_triangle
Bruns does an excellent job explaining and summarizing how Wikipedia works in chapter 5 and 6. While doing my experiment as a Wikipedia editor, I have spent my whole weekend trying to figure it out. I kept browsing through different articles in Wikipedia, all explaining its rules and administrations. I’ve edited three articles, and my boyfriend has created
an article regarding to his PhD researches in math. It was interesting to see everything being deleted after one hour. However, I was still investigating to see if my boyfriend’s article would be restored back, since he had included creditable information with references. As a matter of fact, just after reading about the tools in which they use to control Wikipedia, I went back to check if his article was deleted for sure, and his article was back. Seeing his enthusiasm and drive to edit more articles and add more information to his article, I started pondering on Wikipedia’s success. Indeed, as Bruns points in chapter five, “common property” and “individual reward” are the most important and the funding principles of Wikipedia. By feeling as if he was rewarded, my boyfriend wanted to collaborate even more to Wikipedia.
image found at:http://encefalus.com/general/pimps-of-knowledge-free-resources-for-all/
Certainly, this is how people feel when they are able to publish an article that will stay, even if it will always be changing with additional information. When Bruns talks about all methods used to control Wikipedia, I understood that even though everybody can change Wikipedia’s articles, there are ways of proving that the articles are creditable. Because of Wikipedia criticism, three important policies were created: Neutral Point of View, verifiability, and no original research. Even though through these principles, Wikipedia can be seen as a creditable source, a lot of its critics are concerned with the credibility of the cited sources that are presented. Even though there are so many critics of Wikipedia, they are failing to see that it is collaborating not only to society evolvement , but as Bruns points “ Wikipedia can be seen as an important contributor to the democratization of knowledge creation and representation, undermining the role of traditional encyclopedic and similar publications in determining the canon of high culture and accepted knowledge” ( 123).
Image found at:http://www.dmst.aueb.gr/dds/sw/wikipedia/graph.png
There are a lot of outside websites that cannot keep up with Wikipedia exactly because they restrict collaboration to only those who are knowledgeable. However, the creators of these websites fail in understanding that as long as there is ethics, everyone can collaborate to knowledge development. Wikipedia has an administration, and people who have mastered the website are on top of this administration, making sure that all articles are creditable and under the basic policies required. Wikipedia is gradually evolving because everyone is collaborating not only adding knowledge, but working on policies, and helping each other giving feedbacks and deciding how to edit articles in the community talks. As Bruns points in chapter 6, “a key requirement of the Produsage framework under which the site operates is that participants do not refrain from critiquing their peers’ contributions in deference to the apparent or real credentials of others”( 149). Wikipedia is working because of its “heterarchical adhocracies of Produsage communities” (143). Because no contributor is considered better than the other, the whole community is able to succeed while producing and using the knowledge they see in the articles. Even though there is nobody ruling over the information, there is a system of “checks and balances” (151) in which articles are being improved, or deleted, if proven to have no quality and verifiability.
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