Читать книгу The Handbook of Peer Production - Группа авторов - Страница 24

Jutta Haider & Olof Sundin

Wikis are often considered to be the core platform of peer production. This chapter brings together a broad range of research on wikis and Wikipedia from different disciplines. It delineates the central design principles and affordances of wikis and also pays attention to their historical development and embeddedness in society. Wikis are described as content management systems that allow for flexible collaboration without a defined content owner or leader. Users can modify the content and structure of documents directly in their web browser. Edits are usually archived and open to revision. This chapter pays particular attention to the most successful wiki‐based system, the non‐profit, online encyclopedia Wikipedia. As the chapter explains, Wikipedia actually contains a broad range of more or less individual wiki projects and has inspired a plethora of other endeavors, both open source and proprietary. The particular peer production model employed in Wikipedia is elucidated, and in the course also complicated, as is the role of Wikipedia in the contemporary commercial Internet. The chapter concludes by highlighting several tensions emerging from a wiki‐based peer‐production model, between amateurs and experts, human editors and bots, lay knowledge and academic knowledge, and the shaping of trust through external actors.