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Reviewed by:
  • Good Faith Collaboration: The Culture of Wikipedia
  • Paul Youngquist
Joseph Michael Reagle, Jr. Good Faith Collaboration: The Culture of Wikipedia. Cambridge, MA: The MIT P, 2010. 256 pp.

Preparing to write this review, I followed my first instinct. I googled “Encyclopedia.” Wikipedia was the third hit, right after Britannica.com and Encyclopedia.com: “Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.” I clicked the link and Firefox skipped to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encyclopedia. There I learned what I basically knew, if not in so many words: an encyclopedia “is a type of reference work , a compendium holding a summary of information either from all branches of knowledge or a particular branch of knowledge.” I could have clicked the links in this definition to learn more, but I had enough to get started. All it took was a laptop and Internet access.

Wikipedia is more than an online reference work. It’s a dream, an instinct, and, as Joseph Micheal Reagle, Jr. shows in Good Faith Collaboration: The Culture of Wikipedia, a community. Only a knowledge curmudgeon can resist the entry-level membership that comes with a search. I confess to searching Wikipedia frequently. I confess to editing it now and then. I confess to using it in the classroom as an occasion for collaboration among my undergraduates. I defy any curmudgeon to identify their entries and impugn their expertise. Wikipedia does not offer the last word on its 3 million plus entries. On the contrary, it offers the first. By its own description, Wikipedia “is not a primary source” (164). It’s a place to begin, not to end, the pursuit of general or specialized knowledge.

Reagle’s “historically informed ethnography” (9) of the culture of Wikipedia provides a wonderful account of the beliefs, practices, and controversies that sustain its dream of making all human knowledge accessible to all humans. It might come as a surprise that something like an encyclopedia can have a culture all its own. But Wikipedia is less an object of possession (those volumes on the shelf) than a process of creation (those proliferating entries). A human multitude produces it, working together in [End Page 390] an anonymous and dynamic process of continuous knowledge redaction. Wikipedia is this multitude (75,000 strong in 2009 [6]), a community of mostly mutually unknown believers working together to, well, change the world. One entry at a time.

A “collaborative culture” unites them (47). Reagle describes it, or tries to, in ethnographic detail, showing how Wikipedia and Wikipedias share a distinct history and set of values. This history runs back through the French Encyclopédie all the way to the library of Alexandria. Mercifully, Reagle confines his account to the more recent dream of universal information access and accord. It begins in earnest with Paul Otlet (1868-1944), who as early as 1903 envisioned technologies that might distill gathered bibliographical information into “the Biblion, the Source, the permanent Encylopedia, the Summa” (23) of human knowledge. H. G. Wells (1866-1946) was the booster of a “World Brain” (24) that could consolidate scattered knowledge into common understanding, conjuring harmony and abolishing war. These early visionaries invested information collection and access with utopian hope.

Lacking was a technology to realize that dream. Enter the Internet. Networked computing would provide the material foundation for these visions of infotopia. The first interactive, hypertextual multimedia system, Ted Nelson’s Project Xanadu from the early 1960s, anticipated new possibilities for information manipulation. They flowered when bibliophiles moved fully online. Michael Hart began Project Gutenberg in 1971 as an early attempt to create a free repository of knowledge from previously published books, most notoriously the great 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica. With the arrival of asynchronous proofreading and incremental data entry, Wikipedia was just around the corner.

Interpedia came first, a clunky FTP (file transfer protocol) project that never got off the ground, then the Distributed Encylopedia, a network of free articles hosted by their creators, and finally Nupedia, the true progenitor of Wikipedia, founded by the legendary fathers of both, Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger. Nupedia united financial backing with open source software with expert contributors and referees. More importantly, it was free. Nupedia aimed at becoming the...

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