| Wikipedia, the self-proclaimed "free encyclopedia that anyone can edit," is often mystified in the public and academic imagination. Because Wikipedia allows anyone to edit any article at any time in any manner without review, common sense is astounded when it is claimed that the encyclopedia exhibits roughly the same level of quality as the Encyclopedia Britannica. This is largely because popular representations of Wikipedia hold that the project's software system, social structure, lack of management, and cultural values all seem to be built precisely to discourage such regulation. As such, the fact that Wikipedia works remains a mystery, seemingly contradicting everything that we as a society know about how humans organize in groups. In response, researchers from many disciplines have attempted to forge explanations of the encyclopedia project's order and regularity by adapting existing theories to Wikipedia. More sociologically-inclined researchers argue that Wikipedia is more like a traditional society, held together by shared norms, rules, traditions, roles, institutions, discourses, and other sociocultural macro-structures. Another tradition has compared Wikipedia to a market-based economy in which editors interact in unmediated and uncoordinated micro-level 'transactions.' In this thesis, I critique both of these depictions of Wikipedia, which take for granted the project's largely-invisible and unofficial infrastructures of knowing and knowledge production.;While the 'anyone can edit' functionality of Wikipedia's software architecture is essential, social and economic explanations of Wikipedia have generally failed to take into account technology in Wikipedia beyond this generic feature. As I show, there are a significant number of transformative technologies which have been deployed both officially and unofficially. Order in Wikipedia emerges not merely from social or economic forces, but alongside complex assemblages of technical and social actors who work to associate, aggregate, delegate, routinize, contextualize, and operationalize the seemingly-autonomous act of contributing to a Wikipedia article. I argue that research into Wikipedia must take into account the diverse and heterogeneous assemblage of humans and non-humans who are constantly working to make Wikipedia into the kind of place where either social or economic forces can come on the scene to explain how millions of individuals can work together to produce the largest encyclopedia in human history. |
