Wikipedia is one of the key tools and resources that has embraced produsage and motivated citizen journalism around the world. Wikepedia’s founders have called itself the ‘free encyclopedia’ and not only has it challenged the traditional resources used to access information but has defined an evolution in the way we recieve and interact with a broad range of information. Guranteed that if you googled a topic, Wikipedia would be one of the first links to providing information and definition because it has been visited and used by numerous online users. It provides the freedom for those who are passionate or interested about a certain subject to share their knowledge worldwide and embraces the online culture of creation and collaboration. Wikipedia was officialy launched on 15th January 2001 as a single English edition and quickly grew to having over 20 000 articles in 18 languages by the end of the year. By the end of 2002 it communicated in 26 different languages and by 2004 it provided editions in 161 languages. It is now the largest assembled encyclopeia that has ever been created and will continue to evolve. 

So how does it work?

Their belief of being a ‘neutral  point of view’ and ‘publicly editable document’ embraces the produsage principle of open participation and communal evaluation. These priniciples give Wikipedia the capacity to expand and provide knowledge faster than any other produced encyclopedia because it is being contributed to worldwide – unlike traditional encyclopedia’s where a specific team is dedicated to a certain topic. In addition the website offers users the tools to evaluate and contribute to what other peers have written and compare edits. This method of produsage embeds the theory of collective intelligence well into Wikipedia’s information structure. As Bonabeau (2009) states ‘collective intelligence is better for ideas generation and evaluation and in practice collective intelligence has performed better than theorists can explain’.  I belive that this is one of the main reasons why Wikipedia is such a rapidly growing success. It gives everyday people the opportunity to contribute to a certain subject that they feel passionate about and are also able to view how other people have responded and adapted to the information they publish. The freedom of colloborative knowledge has empowered many online participatory cultures and has given the opportunity to share with others around the world information that may have been otherwise not had the opportunity to be released.

 We must recognise that Wikipedia will never be given the same authority and academic credibility as other encyclopedia’s such as Britannica due to its open communication and participatory nature. Bruns (2008) states that many academics fear and criticise the quality of information that Wikipedia contains. However Rahman (2008) believes that Wikipedia is able to reach the core truth of information as users are able to highlight errors on certain subjects which is a feature that other encylopedia’s do not have. He suggests that if an article is further opinion than fact, people do not have the capacity to sort the bad information from the good where as in Wikipedia you  are able to highlights these errors therefore making it more informative.

References:

Bonabeau, E. 2009. Decisions 2.0: the Power of Collective Intelligence. MIT Sloan Management Review. Cambridge  50 (2): 45

Bruns, A. 2008. Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life and Beyond: from production to produsage. Peter Lang Publishing: New York. (p105-131)

Rahman, M. 2008. An Analysis of Wikipedia: Journal of Information Technology Theory and Application. Hong Kong Vol 9 (3): 81-96