Negotiating with angry mastodons: the wikipedia policy environment as genre ecology
Abstract
Groups collaborating in online spaces on complex, extended projects develop behavioral conventions and agreed-upon practices to structure and regulate their interactions and work. Collaborators on Wikipedia have developed a multi-tiered policy environment to document a set of evolving principles, processes, and rules to facilitate productive group collaboration. Previous quantitative studies have noted this hierarchical structure, but have evaluated the policy environment as a singular entity rather than investigating potential differences between the three main regulatory genres that enable it. These studies also excluded essays, the least official regulatory genre, from their analyses. We perform a comparative content analysis of all three genres (policies, guidelines, and essays) and demonstrate that they focus on different areas of community regulation. Drawing on the theory of genre ecologies we discuss the possible role of unofficial genres such as essays in articulating and regulating work practices in online, organized collaborative work.
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Strand 1 also offers useful concepts for professional communication, which has studied peer and social production in open source software, Wikipedia, other peer production sites, and social media.
“Yet Strand 1 also offers productive concepts for professional communication, which has examined peer and social production in open source software and support, Wikipedia, and other peer production sites, and social media [24][30] [31].”
From Fourth-Generation Activity Theory: An Integrative Literature Review and Implications for Professional Communication (2019) · cites this paper as [31]
Cites
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Community, consensus, coercion, control
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From The Matrix to a Model of Coordinated Action (MoCA): A Conceptual Framework of and for CSCW
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Wikimedia movement governance: the limits of a-hierarchical organization.
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- Authors
- Morgan, J. T., & Zachry, M.
- Affiliations
- University of Washington (US)
- ORCID
- Zachry, Mark
- Venue
- Proceedings of the 16th ACM international conference on Supporting group work - GROUP '10
- Publisher
- ACM Press
- Published
- 2010
- Pages
- 165
- OpenAlex
- W2028384182
- Cited by
- 28
- References
- 13
- Citations by year
- 2025: 2 · 2023: 2 · 2021: 2 · 2020: 2 · 2019: 4 · 2018: 4 · 2017: 1 · 2016: 3 · 2015: 2 · 2014: 2 · 2013: 1 · 2012: 3
- Type
- conference abstract
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- International ACM SIGGROUP Conference on Supporting Group Work (GROUP) (publishedVersion)
- Funders
- National Science Foundation
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Communication › Wikis in Education and Collaboration
- Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › Literature and Literary Theory › Discourse Analysis in Language Studies
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Human-Computer Interaction › Digital Communication and Language
- Keywords
- Wikipedia, online collaboration, community regulation, collaborative work practices, organizational communication
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