Hi everyone,
I'm currently doing a Ph.d on digital commons. I'm tracing the history of the "digital common" movement (if there is one). And I wanted to know if there are some studies about Wikipedians and their relation with the conceptual framework of the commons (do they feel like commoners ? Do they know E. Ostrom, etc.) Thanks a lot for your help ! Best regards,
*Sébastien Shulz* *Doctorant en sociologie * *Laboratoire Interdisciplinaire Sciences Innovations Sociétés* *06.68.86.68.46 // Linkedin https://www.linkedin.com/in/sebastien-shulz*
On 07/12/2019 17:04, Sebastien Shulz wrote:
Hi everyone,
I'm currently doing a Ph.d on digital commons. I'm tracing the history of the "digital common" movement (if there is one). And I wanted to know if there are some studies about Wikipedians and their relation with the conceptual framework of the commons (do they feel like commoners ? Do they know E. Ostrom, etc.) Thanks a lot for your help ! Best regards,
Sébastien,
I'm guessing your aware of this paper by Cardon and Levrel :
Cardon, D., & Levrel, J. (2009). La vigilance participative. Une interprétation de la gouvernance de Wikipédia. Réseaux, 154(2), 51. https://doi.org/10.3917/res.154.0051
Though it specifically mentions Ostrom, the paper was more about attempting to translate Wikipedia pilars and rules into Ostrom's wording than an in-depth analysis of a (supposedly) community of commoners.
For more recent literature on a similar topic, I'd check Tkacz's book :
Tkacz, N. (2015). Wikipedia and the Politics of Openness. Retrieved from http://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/W/bo19085555.html
Maybe you'll find something about the community and their sense of values.
Hello,
I would also second Tkacz book as an analysis. Less well known but very interesting, since it has a lot of data detailed and structured, is E.A. Rijshouwer "Organizing Democracy : Power concentration and self-organization in the evolution of Wikipedia".
Jan
Am Sa., 7. Dez. 2019 um 17:19 Uhr schrieb Alexandre Hocquet < alexandre.hocquet@univ-lorraine.fr>:
On 07/12/2019 17:04, Sebastien Shulz wrote:
Hi everyone,
I'm currently doing a Ph.d on digital commons. I'm tracing the history of the "digital common" movement (if there is one). And I wanted to know if there are some studies about Wikipedians and their relation with the conceptual framework of the commons (do they feel like commoners ? Do
they
know E. Ostrom, etc.) Thanks a lot for your help ! Best regards,
Sébastien,
I'm guessing your aware of this paper by Cardon and Levrel :
Cardon, D., & Levrel, J. (2009). La vigilance participative. Une interprétation de la gouvernance de Wikipédia. Réseaux, 154(2), 51. https://doi.org/10.3917/res.154.0051
Though it specifically mentions Ostrom, the paper was more about attempting to translate Wikipedia pilars and rules into Ostrom's wording than an in-depth analysis of a (supposedly) community of commoners.
For more recent literature on a similar topic, I'd check Tkacz's book :
Tkacz, N. (2015). Wikipedia and the Politics of Openness. Retrieved from http://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/W/bo19085555.html
Maybe you'll find something about the community and their sense of values.
--
Alexandre Hocquet Archives Henri Poincaré & Science History Institute Alexandre.Hocquet@univ-lorraine.fr https://www.sciencehistory.org/profile/alexandre-hocquet https://poincare.univ-lorraine.fr/fr/membre-titulaire/alexandre-hocquet
Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
If you're looking for general history on the digital commons movement, check out Richard Stallman and the Free Software Foundation, and Eric S. Raymond's *The Cathedral and the Bazaar*. A lot of the initial Wikipedians were very much in favor of open source and open content, and were quite familiar with those. I don't, to be quite honest, know about "E. Ostrom", and have never heard them discussed on-wiki, but of course other editors might be.
But if you really want to see the influence of the "commons" idea on Wikipedia, the open source software movement is going to be very relevant to what you want to look at. Mediawiki, the software that Wikipedia and other Wikimedia sites run on, is open source, and the technology stack underlying it is as well.
On Sat, Dec 7, 2019 at 9:05 AM Sebastien Shulz sebastien.shulz@gmail.com wrote:
Hi everyone,
I'm currently doing a Ph.d on digital commons. I'm tracing the history of the "digital common" movement (if there is one). And I wanted to know if there are some studies about Wikipedians and their relation with the conceptual framework of the commons (do they feel like commoners ? Do they know E. Ostrom, etc.) Thanks a lot for your help ! Best regards,
*Sébastien Shulz* *Doctorant en sociologie * *Laboratoire Interdisciplinaire Sciences Innovations Sociétés* *06.68.86.68.46 // Linkedin https://www.linkedin.com/in/sebastien-shulz* _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
Commoners used to draw on Wikipedia as an outstanding example of commons goods, but Wikipedians usually do not refer to Ostrom's works or even 'The tragedy of the Commons', etc. We mostly draw on hacker's pamphlets such as Eric S. Raymond and John Perry Barlow. At least in the German-speaking community we aim at setting knowledge free by literally writing it down into Wikipedia. The licences allowing for commercial use of Wikipedia are a case in point. They are mostly seen as a strange phenomenon that was imposed upon us from the anglo-saxon world, but they do not fit the continental point of view as there should not be a commercial context for 'free' goods created for everyone. So, after all, Sébastien, I think you have found one of the community's touchy spots that are worth thinking about. Unfortunately, I do not remember a study about the topic. So there is room for one still.
Best regards, Jürgen.
Am 07.12.19 um 23:39 Uhr schrieb Todd Allen:
If you're looking for general history on the digital commons movement, check out Richard Stallman and the Free Software Foundation, and Eric S. Raymond's *The Cathedral and the Bazaar*. A lot of the initial Wikipedians were very much in favor of open source and open content, and were quite familiar with those. I don't, to be quite honest, know about "E. Ostrom", and have never heard them discussed on-wiki, but of course other editors might be.
But if you really want to see the influence of the "commons" idea on Wikipedia, the open source software movement is going to be very relevant to what you want to look at. Mediawiki, the software that Wikipedia and other Wikimedia sites run on, is open source, and the technology stack underlying it is as well.
On Sat, Dec 7, 2019 at 9:05 AM Sebastien Shulz sebastien.shulz@gmail.com wrote:
Hi everyone,
I'm currently doing a Ph.d on digital commons. I'm tracing the history of the "digital common" movement (if there is one). And I wanted to know if there are some studies about Wikipedians and their relation with the conceptual framework of the commons (do they feel like commoners ? Do they know E. Ostrom, etc.) Thanks a lot for your help ! Best regards,
*Sébastien Shulz* *Doctorant en sociologie * *Laboratoire Interdisciplinaire Sciences Innovations Sociétés* *06.68.86.68.46 // Linkedin https://www.linkedin.com/in/sebastien-shulz* _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
Juergen Fenn, 08/12/19 01:22:
Commoners used to draw on Wikipedia as an outstanding example of commons goods, but Wikipedians usually do not refer to Ostrom's works
Indeed, although this has changed a bit after she won a Nobel. It was 2007 when "Understanding knowledge as a commons" made the link clear between that theory and Wikipedia.
It's nothing unusual though: even "Free as in freedom" 1.0[1] will tell you that such books were published during a peak of interest, arguably *after* the ideas they were describing had succeeded (like GNU/Linux in the 1990s), yet the same ideas were present as underground current if not direct inspiration[2] for those same successes before.
The same with Wikipedia: most "classics" were probably published in the late 2000s after its success,[3] and even Lessig's "Free culture", in 2004, was already able to mention Wikipedia as a success (although most of the book is on music!). The early Wikimedia projects users did not come thanks to them and may have absorbed the ideas in other ways. As for the late users and the mass of infrequent contributors, it's hard to tell how influenced they were. Same for other classics on copyleft, the internet etc. like David L. Lange, James Boyle and others not mentioned yet.
It might be that such classics are actually written when they are in a way superfluous and we come back to them when we lost our way. (I personally read most of them during some crisis even though I knew their contents and may have referenced them in public presentations before that, ouch.) A survey to find out what "cultural references" the wikimedians have would be interesting: I agree we'd have some surprises (in Italy, R. David Lankes is mentioned a lot in some circles due to the influence of librarians).
It would be interesting to know which classics or other works are most effective at convincing the public about the underlying principles of the Wikimedia projects, or even at recruiting new active users. In Italy we've just started experimenting a bit on this, with a free distribution to schools of a few thousand copies of Carlo Piana (2018) https://it.wikisource.org/wiki/Open_source,_software_libero_e_altre_libert%C3%A0.
Federico
[1] https://www.oreilly.com/openbook/freedom/, updated version https://www.fsf.org/faif/. [2] Nupedia was directly inspired by GNU https://www.gnu.org/encyclopedia/free-encyclopedia.html, a fact which is standard to mention at least in classic Wikimedia Italia public outreach since the 2005. [3] Consider also Aigrain, Boldrin/Levine, De Martin/De Rosnay http://www.copyleft-italia.it/libri/libri-autori-stranieri.html and many others in languages other than English and Italian that I probably know nothing about.
It's worth noting that while Richard Stallman and Eric S. Raymond played important roles historically and published widely-read-at-the-time analyses, both have had significant falls from grace since then and basing current analyses of the commons and other systems on their work should be done _very_ carefully.
cheers stuart
-- ...let us be heard from red core to black sky
On Sun, 8 Dec 2019 at 11:39, Todd Allen toddmallen@gmail.com wrote:
If you're looking for general history on the digital commons movement, check out Richard Stallman and the Free Software Foundation, and Eric S. Raymond's *The Cathedral and the Bazaar*. A lot of the initial Wikipedians were very much in favor of open source and open content, and were quite familiar with those. I don't, to be quite honest, know about "E. Ostrom", and have never heard them discussed on-wiki, but of course other editors might be.
But if you really want to see the influence of the "commons" idea on Wikipedia, the open source software movement is going to be very relevant to what you want to look at. Mediawiki, the software that Wikipedia and other Wikimedia sites run on, is open source, and the technology stack underlying it is as well.
On Sat, Dec 7, 2019 at 9:05 AM Sebastien Shulz sebastien.shulz@gmail.com wrote:
Hi everyone,
I'm currently doing a Ph.d on digital commons. I'm tracing the history of the "digital common" movement (if there is one). And I wanted to know if there are some studies about Wikipedians and their relation with the conceptual framework of the commons (do they feel like commoners ? Do they know E. Ostrom, etc.) Thanks a lot for your help ! Best regards,
*Sébastien Shulz* *Doctorant en sociologie * *Laboratoire Interdisciplinaire Sciences Innovations Sociétés* *06.68.86.68.46 // Linkedin https://www.linkedin.com/in/sebastien-shulz* _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
Even aside from their fall from grace,
…widely-read-at-the-time analyses…
I guess, one would read "Cathedral and the Bazaar" as historically influential text today, I am not sure how "strong" it is as analysis of commons based systems in the first place.
Jan
Am So., 8. Dez. 2019 um 02:27 Uhr schrieb Stuart A. Yeates < syeates@gmail.com>:
It's worth noting that while Richard Stallman and Eric S. Raymond played important roles historically and published widely-read-at-the-time analyses, both have had significant falls from grace since then and basing current analyses of the commons and other systems on their work should be done _very_ carefully.
cheers stuart
-- ...let us be heard from red core to black sky
On Sun, 8 Dec 2019 at 11:39, Todd Allen toddmallen@gmail.com wrote:
If you're looking for general history on the digital commons movement, check out Richard Stallman and the Free Software Foundation, and Eric S. Raymond's *The Cathedral and the Bazaar*. A lot of the initial
Wikipedians
were very much in favor of open source and open content, and were quite familiar with those. I don't, to be quite honest, know about "E. Ostrom", and have never heard them discussed on-wiki, but of course other editors might be.
But if you really want to see the influence of the "commons" idea on Wikipedia, the open source software movement is going to be very relevant to what you want to look at. Mediawiki, the software that Wikipedia and other Wikimedia sites run on, is open source, and the technology stack underlying it is as well.
On Sat, Dec 7, 2019 at 9:05 AM Sebastien Shulz <
sebastien.shulz@gmail.com>
wrote:
Hi everyone,
I'm currently doing a Ph.d on digital commons. I'm tracing the history
of
the "digital common" movement (if there is one). And I wanted to know
if
there are some studies about Wikipedians and their relation with the conceptual framework of the commons (do they feel like commoners ? Do
they
know E. Ostrom, etc.) Thanks a lot for your help ! Best regards,
*Sébastien Shulz* *Doctorant en sociologie * *Laboratoire Interdisciplinaire Sciences Innovations Sociétés* *06.68.86.68.46 // Linkedin <
https://www.linkedin.com/in/sebastien-shulz%3E*
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I think Wikipedians are Wikipedians for a variety of reasons. Some of them are more altruistic (free knowledge), others are more personal (but not necessarily negative), others reasons are negative (pushing a point of view, advertising, vandalism, stroking their own ego, etc).
But if we look at the group that are more-or-less altruistic, I sincerely doubt that we can attribute their motivation to a particular author, open source software or whatever. I've been well-aware of Richard Stallman, open source software, open research data, etc, from before being a Wikipedian but those things didn't cause me to become a Wikipedian. I think most Wikipedians are simply people who can see that knowledge empowers people and enables them to live better lives, build a better society etc, and think that Wikipedia is therefore beneficial to the world and something they feel able to contribute to. I don't think most of them would think themselves as "commoners", indeed I think most of them would be thinking you were talking about contributors to Wikimedia Commons rather than the meaning you intend.
It simply makes good sense to contribute to Wikipedia.
Kerry
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