Wikipedia: A New Community of Practice? (review)

The provocative subtitle of this book asks the question, "Is Wikipedia a project where individuals come together to pursue collaboration to learn from each other and communicate information?" Dan O'Sullivan's taut monograph helps us formulate an affirmative answer. Author of several history textbooks, O'Sullivan is a retired history department head of Prior Pursglove College (North Yorkshire, England). It is fitting that he begins his book, which is divided into three parts, with a consideration of five well-chosen communities of practice. These Wikipe-dia antecedents all anticipate elements of the online encyclopedia, long before the advent of the Internet. Readers interested in how groups acquire and maintain significant repositories of information will appreciate the chapters on the Library of Alexandria, England's Royal Society, Diderot's Republic of Letters, the Oxford English Dictionary, and most recently the United Kingdom's Left Book Club. O'Sullivan methodically analyzes each group in five categories: aims, membership, cost of doing business (transactional costs), the public's perception of the group, and the legacy of each group. A connection to Wikipedia is eventually established with each group.

The book's second section discusses Wikipedia and Wikipedians in the context of group theory. O'Sullivan analyzes Wikipedia using the same areas that he applied to the historical communities of practice, raising a wide range of issues as he does so. After recounting Wikipedia's primary aim—the free global dissemination of information—he explores the related questions of poverty, illiteracy, and the digital divide. While discussing how one browses Wikipedia, he introduces the idea that every reader derives a different meaning from any given text and that no author can control these multiple readings. Noting that Wikipedia's articles contain an average of 25 hyperlinks, he writes that each reader blazes a unique trail through the information and that no two readers are likely to follow exactly the same path. Substantive practical information is also provided. For readers unfamiliar with Wikipedia's features and nuances, the book's second section offers details concerning talk pages, sysops, the advantages and disadvantages of anonymity, the extent and controls on vandalism, "edit wars," and collaboration among participants. These descriptions afford insight into the Wikipedia phenomenon while reducing the threshold of anxiety for potential contributors and possibly assuaging the criticisms of some pundits.

Although the author often seems to be a Wikipedia proponent, his book ultimately achieves a palpable measure of impartiality. His frequent insights into Wikipedia's features and advantages are balanced by statements that demonstrate a critical assessment of the encyclopedia. For example, while observing that Wikipedia is prodigious because it is user created, non-hierarchical, and able to provide independent information without the oversight of a controlling authority, he immediately questions how long it can function uninfluenced by commercial pressures.

Academics and information professionals will find the third and final section particularly relevant. In chapter 15,"Assessing Wikipedia," the author creates a rubric for grading Wikipedia articles that examines them in 10 areas. Clear examples are included, illustrating the rubric's application to three widely contrasting versions of the same Wikipedia article. This is a cogent approach to evaluation and educators may wish to use the rubric, or adapt it, within information literacy instruction. Wikipedia: A New Community of Practice? concludes with several pages devoted to describing 10 activities that we could engage in to improve Wikipedia. Some recommendations are common sense like contributing to the Wikipedia Foundation; but several are original and useful, like improving Wikipedia by requesting bots to be created to automate important functions. (One minor criticism is that O'Sullivan does not mention that Wikipedia can and has been improved by information professionals and librarians, who have placed appropriate links to digital information in various collections from the external links sections of many Wikipedia articles.)

Historians, library administrators, and information professionals will find Wikipedia: A New Community of Practice? an engaging exploration of one of the early twenty-first century's most...