Good Faith Collaboration: The Culture of Wikipedia Good Faith Collaboration The Culture of Wikipedia Joseph Michael Reagle Jr. Foreword by Lawrence Lessig The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. Web edition, Copyright © 2011 by Joseph Michael Reagle Jr. CC-NC-SA 3.0 Purchase at Amazon.com | Barnes and Noble | IndieBound | MIT Press Wikipedia's style of collaborative production has been lauded, lambasted, and satirized. Despite unease over its implications for the character (and quality) of knowledge, Wikipedia has brought us closer than ever to a realization of the centuries-old Author Bio & Research Blog pursuit of a universal encyclopedia. Good Faith Collaboration: The Culture of Wikipedia is a rich ethnographic portrayal of Wikipedia's historical roots, collaborative culture, and much debated legacy. Foreword Preface to the Web Edition Praise for Good Faith Collaboration Preface Extended Table of Contents "Reagle offers a compelling case that Wikipedia's most fascinating and unprecedented aspect isn't the encyclopedia itself — rather, it's the collaborative culture that underpins it: brawling, self-reflexive, funny, serious, and full-tilt committed to the 1. Nazis and Norms project, even if it means setting aside personal differences. Reagle's position as a scholar and a member of the community 2. The Pursuit of the Universal makes him uniquely situated to describe this culture." —Cory Doctorow , Boing Boing Encyclopedia "Reagle provides ample data regarding the everyday practices and cultural norms of the community which collaborates to 3. Good Faith Collaboration produce Wikipedia. His rich research and nuanced appreciation of the complexities of cultural digital media research are 4. The Puzzle of Openness well presented. Stylistically, the book was a pleasure to read. Good Faith Collaboration is an important contribution to understanding the collaborative culture of media production and the open content community. The production processes 5. The Challenges of Consensus and practices of Wikipedia represent a fascinating tale in media ethnography." —Lee Humphreys, Journal of 6. The Benevolent Dictator Communication. 7. Encyclopedic Anxiety ... more reviews 8. Conclusion: "A Globe in Accord" "Joseph Reagle's account of what makes Wikipedia tick debunks the vision of a shining Alexandria gliding towards free and Endnotes perfect knowledge and replaces it with something far more awe-inspiring: a humane, and human, enterprise that with each fitful back-and-forth elicits the best from those it draws in. In an era of polemic and cheap shots that some attribute largely Bibliography to the Internet's influence, he shows how even those of wildly varying backgrounds who disagree intensely can see themselves Errata as embarked on a common, ennobling mission grounded in respect and reason." —Jonathan Zittrain, Professor of Law, Harvard Law School and Kennedy School, Professor of Computer Science, Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, and author of The Future of the Internet — And How to Stop It "Joseph Reagle is one of a very few people who are both deeply engaged participants in online community and first-rate scholars of it. In Good Faith Collaboration he provides the best explanation to date of how a communally created encyclopedia went from 'crazy idea' to the most important reference work in the English language in less than ten years, and what Wikipedia's massive global experiment in its collaborative culture means for the future of ours." —Clay Shirky, NYU, author of Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations ... more endorsements http://reagle.org/joseph/2010/gfc/[1/11/2012 1:14:20 PM] Foreword [next] [bottom] · [up] Foreword There is value in studying anything that was once thought impossible but then proves possible. There is significant value in studying it well. A decade ago, no one — including its founder, Jimmy Wales — would have imagined “Wikipedia” possible. Today it is one of the very top Web sites on the Internet. And not just the Internet: Wikipedia has come to define the very best in an ethic of a different kind of economy or community: at its core, it is a “collaborative community” that freely and voluntarily gives to the world a constant invitation to understand and correct. More than any democracy, it empowers broadly. More than any entity anywhere, it elicits the very best of an amateur ethic — people working hard for the love of the work, and not for the money. Most of the world has known of Wikipedia for no more than a few years. Even the “digerati” have not paid much attention to the project for more than seven years. Like the most important innovations throughout human history, this one too stole upon us when most of us were looking elsewhere. And now, none of us understands anything new without first pinging Wikipedia’s brain to see its cut on whatever piques our curiosity. Scholars will spend a generation understanding its birth and growth. There have already been important books understanding open source production specifically (Steven Weber, The Success of Open Source [Harvard 2004]), and the culture of commons-based production (Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks [Yale 2007]). But Joseph Reagle’s contribution here is something new and important. Reagle came to this subject as a native. He was a computer scientist at MIT. He helped me work through early thoughts about what he called “social protocols” — an explicit mixing of computer science ideals with insight about social organization and norms. When he decided to return to graduate school to get his PhD, I was skeptical that such enormous talent should be lost to the stacks for so many years. This book proves me wrong. Reagle comes to this ethnographical project understanding more about the technology and its history than the people he intended to study. But that knowledge doesn’t get in the way. He has opened himself to a community that is similar to some he has worked within — the World Wide Web Consortium, most prominently — but importantly distinct. And as his book convincingly demonstrates, it is a community with a family resemblance to lots in our world, but unlike almost anything else. Wikipedia is a community, but one formed through a practice, or a doing — collaboration. That collaboration happens within a culture, or a set of norms, guided by principles that the community accepts and fights about, and through that struggle defines. The collaboration produces a social good that an enormous number of http://reagle.org/joseph/2010/gfc/foreward.html[1/11/2012 1:14:21 PM] Foreword people from around the world rely upon. The project is a generation away from its objective of “a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge.” But it is the first time in ten generations that this aspiration of the Enlightenment seems even possible to anyone but the likes of Jefferson. We need many academic disciplines — economics, political science, history, even law — to help us understand this phenomenon. But the first rich understanding must come from ethnographies. Only a deep reading of the culture of this community — for it is a community rich with a distinctive culture — can begin to make the important lessons of Wikipedia accessible. No utopia is to be found in these pages. Wikipedia is not written by angels; nor does its founder pretend to perfection. What is most striking throughout this lucid and informed account is the human-ness of everything inside. Wales, the founder, self-consciously practicing the humility every great leader teaches. A community, struggling to get it right, some devoting thousands of hours to making knowledge free. There are relatively few organizations that inspire respect, flaws notwithstanding. Very few retain that respect after serious scrutiny. These pages introduce one such institution. No one doubts it produces an encyclopedia that has errors. But it is hard to imagine a more significant and sustained community, manned by volunteers, from teenagers to retirees, working to produce understanding. Every serious soul must try to understand this impossibility. For there is little doubt that its lessons have much to teach far beyond the millions of entries on Wikipedia pages. Nor that an important first step in that understanding is found in these pages. Lawrence Lessig Professor of Law, Harvard Law School Director, Edmond J. Safra Foundation Center for Ethics [next] [top] · [up] http://reagle.org/joseph/2010/gfc/foreward.html[1/11/2012 1:14:21 PM] Preface to the Web Edition [prev] [next] · [prev-bottom] [bottom] · [up] Preface to the Web Edition As I worked on this book about Wikipedia, a free online encyclopedia, I anticipated being asked if Good Faith Collaboration was also free and online. Most books are published under restrictive licenses with little more than a promotional presence online. Of the open content books available, many are just PDFs of the printed work. So one year from its initial publication, I’m happy to be able to answer in the affirmative: this is now a Web-based open content book. Just as much of Wikipedia’s utility derives from it being a wiki, this work, too, is more useful when readers can easily follow references to the many primary (and secondary) sources available online. Plus, as the Web and free culture movement have shown, there are benefits to simply putting one’s work out there and seeing what happens. Indeed, some Wikimedians have already begun translating this work into Japanese! Yet, producing a book intended as both a commercial/print and free/online publication is tricky, logistically and technically. So, I thank Marguerite Avery and The MIT Press for supporting the publication of the Web edition under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike 3.0 license. I also thank those readers who pointed out mistakes, which are now fixed in the present text.