Wikimania 2007

De Estigmergia

Meritocracy and vandalism

The aim of the presentation would be to discuss about Wikipedia as an example of technological appropriation whose dynamics of interaction among participants inherits the meritocratic system of relations among hackers in the developing of free software.

This influence would be not only be present in collaborative structures, identity and users' interaction, but it also concerns the way in which the community of wikipedians reacts and actuates in front of vandalism. I would like to discuss these hypotheses with other wikipedians, analyzing concrete examples extracted from Wikipedia and from theoretical literature on the project.

The intention is to raise questions about vandalism and the challenges and opportunities for community cohesion it represents. The idea is to start the workshop based in the conclusions of an online paper I presented recently at the third online Congress of the Observatory for CyberSociety, and on the discussions that took place then with other participants of the Spanish Wikipedia.

The target participants of the workshop are experienced members of the Wikipedia community, but specially sysops and people involved in fighting vandalism, whose comments and ideas could help very much to establish further knowledge about internal processes of responsability, accreditation and stigmergy.

Accepted! > http://www.york.ac.uk/res/siru/web2.0/hidalgo.htm