THIS ESSAY IS A CHAPTER IN THE FOLLOWING DISSERTATION: Hill, Benjamin Mako. “Essays on Volunteer Mobiliza- tion in Peer Production.” Ph.D. Dissertation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2013. PLEASE CHECK THIS PAGE FOR A NEWER VERSION OF THE ESSAY BEFORE CITING OR DISTRIBUTING IT. Almost Wikipedia: Eight Early Encyclopedia Projects and the Mechanisms of Collective Action Benjamin Mako Hill (
[email protected]) MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY Abstract: Before Wikipedia was created in January 2001, there were seven attempts to create English-language online collaborative encyclopedia projects. Several of these attempts built sus- tainable communities of volunteer contributors but none achieved anything near Wikipedia’s success. Why did Wikipedia, superficially similar and a relatively late entrant, attract a commu- nity of millions and build the largest and most comprehensive compendium of human knowl- edge in history? Using data from interviews of these Wikipedia-like projects’ initiators and extensive archival data, I suggest three propositions for why Wikipedia succeeded in mobilizing volunteers where these other projects failed. I also present disconfirming evidence for two im- portant alternative explanations. Synthesizing these results, I suggest that Wikipedia succeeded because its stated goal hewed closely to a widely shared concept of “encyclopedia” familiar to many potential contributors, while innovating around the process and the social organization of production. INTRODUCTION Over the last decade, several books (e.g., Reagle, 2008; Tapscott and Williams, 2008; Lih, 2009) and more than 6,200 peer-reviewed articles have been published about Wikipedia.1 With interest driven by the rapid growth of both its encyclopedic product and community of contributors that builds it (see Ortega, 2009), a range of scholars and journalists have held Wikipedia up as a model of collaboration and collective action on the Internet (e.g., Benkler, 2006; Shirky, 2010).