Joseph Reagle wrote:

Comments on these drafts are most welcome!

http://reagle.org/joseph/blog/career/phd/f05?showcomments=yes

* Wikipedia's Heritage: Vision, Pragmatics, and Happenstance -
   moving on from my earlier consideration of print publishers in
   Four Short Stories about the Reference Work, I consider recent
   digital encycopedic works:

 This essay explores development of globally available digital
 reference works from their first imaginings to contemporary cases.
 My hope in undertaking such a project is to identify technical and
 social aspects of digital reference work production that can
 contribute to an understanding of a prominent contemporary
 exemplar, the Wikipedia, a free online encyclopedia. Why did it
 take over 50 years for the vision of "[w]holly new forms of
 encyclopedias" (Bush 1945: 8 to be realized? The answer,
 presented in this essay, was that it required an alignment of a
 coherent goal, technical practicality, and serendipity: vision,
 pragmatics, and happenstance. ...

• Do as I do: leadership in the Wikipedia

  In this paper I consider how notions of leadership operate in collaborative on-line cultures. In particular, I consider the seemingly paradoxical, or perhaps merely playful, juxtaposition of informal tyrant-like titles (e.g., "Benevolent Dictator") in otherwise seemingly egalitarian voluntary content production communities such as the Wikipedia. To accomplish this, I first introduce the Wikipedia as an open content community and review existing literature on the role of leadership in such communities. I then relate ethnographic and archival data on how leadership is understood, performed, and discussed in the Wikipedia community. I conclude by integrating concepts from existing literature and my own findings into a theory of leadership and note other communities and leaders against which this theory could be tested. ...

Looks interesting... I just printed it... Looks like it will put me back in the past. I'll be glad to put one day new perspectives on the topic I think ;-)

ant