Who Leads Collaborative Writing? An Ethnonarrative Approach of Governance on the French Wikipedia
(2012) ECREA 2012 — Location: Istanbul (24.October.2012)
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- Abstract
- For some years now, many scholars from computer science and engineering or communication fields have commented the Internet as a potential democratic public sphere. In this sense, the collaborative encyclopedia Wikipedia appears to be a paragon of a self-governed organization able to produce knowledge. Paradoxically, it seems that the specific Wikipedian governance as a whole has remained a never opened black box. Going into the details of the processes at stake allows us to show that so-called decentralization of powers is more complex: Wikipedia is ruled by strong power plays where actors might be single or collective and might belong to one or another group depending on individual ideologies and contextual strategies about the decisions to be taken. We also illustrate how an ethnonarrative approach, based on recent studies about theory of mind in narratology, can explain heterogeneous mechanisms of authority.
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Citations
Wathelet, E. (2012). Who Leads Collaborative Writing? An Ethnonarrative Approach of Governance on the French Wikipedia. ECREA 2012, Istanbul. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/193482