Research Paper On Wikipedia

It has been more than 10 years since the term Web 2.0 was first used, and what was at first considered to be just another marketing ‘buzzword’ (Best 2006, O’Reily 2005) for the most part is now widely accepted as hailing a fundamental shift in user behaviour online. The ideals behind Web 2.0 still elicit controversy and cynicism amongst the online community but regardless of stance on the idea that the 21st century marked a ‘new’ phase of the WWW, it is near impossible to disagree with the fact that many platforms that are considered hallmarks of Web2.0 have revolutionised the way users interact online. A core philosophy of Web 2.0 is participation, whereby users are empowered through the ability to produce and share content online (Allen 2003).

Wikipedia continues to draw controversy because its open source model of production is at odds with hundreds of years of traditional encylopedia creation (Hartelius, 2010). Historically encyclopaedias were created for the public in a top down process involving a small group of academics and professional writers (Konig 2011), and this information was available to the public at a cost. Proprietors of this production model are the printed and online encyclopaedias such as Encyclopaedia Britannica and Encarta. With the emergence of Web 2.0 and a philosophy embedded in the idea of collaboration, Wikipedia has “radicalised the way encyclopedias are created” (Wales 2007) by enabling any user to contribute and edit information regardless of educational background (Denis et al 2007, Darnton, 1987) resulting in mass collaboration. This mass collaboration is referred to as “collective intelligence” (“O’Reilly

By the early 2000’s in light of the dotcom crash many felt that the “egalitarian principles” (Berners-Lee 2010) that the WWW had been based had diminished, instead being co-opted by a capitalist business model (Allen 2003) where the user was relegated to the traditional role of “passive consumer” (Williams 2xxx). The rise of Wiki software and the launch of Wikipedia in 2001 saw “user participation started into a new dimension” (Best 2006) and the idea of collective intelligence through mass collaboration placed the user at the centre of content creation (cite here). The idea behind collective intelligence is that an exchange of information occurs within self-organising groups of individuals that exist beyond cultural and social boundaries (Jenkins 2002), or as Malone (2007) defines it “groups of individuals acting collectively in ways that seem intelligent”. While it is not a new concept, when associated with Web 2.0 platforms such as Wikipedia, it becomes revolutionary through the sheer scale at which it happens, intelligence can be tapped from enormous numbers of users who are only made available because of technology (Malone 2007, Bonabeau