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Author Bio & Research Blog
Good Faith Collaboration
The Culture of Wikipedia
Joseph Michael Reagle Jr.
Foreword by Lawrence Lessig
The MIT Press ,Cambridge, MA.
Available in print, as (this) Web edition, PDF or in Japanese .Wikipedia's style of collaborative production has been lauded, lambasted,and satirized. Despite unease over its implications for the character (andquality) of knowledge, Wikipedia has brought us closer than ever to arealization of the centuries-old pursuit of a universal encyclopedia. GoodFaith Collaboration: The Culture of Wikipedia is a rich ethnographicportrayal of Wikipedia's historical roots, collaborative culture, and muchdebated legacy.
Praise for Good Faith Collaboration
"Reagle offers a compelling case that Wikipedia's most fascinating andunprecedented aspect isn't the encyclopedia itself — rather, it's thecollaborative culture that underpins it: brawling, self-reflexive, funny,serious, and full-tilt committed to the project, even if it means setting asidepersonal differences. Reagle's position as a scholar and a member of thecommunity makes him uniquely situated to describe this culture." —CoryDoctorow , Boing Boing
"Reagle provides ample data regarding the everyday practices and culturalnorms of the community which collaborates to produce Wikipedia. His richresearch and nuanced appreciation of the complexities of cultural digital mediaresearch are well presented. Stylistically, the book was a pleasure to read. Good Faith Collaboration is an important contribution to understandingthe collaborative culture of media production and the open content community.The production processes and practices of Wikipedia represent a fascinatingtale in media ethnography." — Lee Humphreys, Journal ofCommunication .
"Joseph Reagle's account of what makes Wikipedia tick debunks the vision ofa shining Alexandria gliding towards free and perfect knowledge and replaces itwith something far more awe-inspiring: a humane, and human, enterprise thatwith each fitful back-and-forth elicits the best from those it draws in. In anera of polemic and cheap shots that some attribute largely to the Internet'sinfluence, he shows how even those of wildly varying backgrounds who disagreeintensely can see themselves as embarked on a common, ennobling missiongrounded in respect and reason." —Jonathan Zittrain, Professor of Law,Harvard Law School and Kennedy School, Professor of Computer Science, HarvardSchool of Engineering and Applied Sciences, and author of The Future of the Internet — And Howto Stop It
"Joseph Reagle is one of a very few people who are both deeply engagedparticipants in online community and first-rate scholars of it. In GoodFaith Collaboration he provides the best explanation to date of how acommunally created encyclopedia went from 'crazy idea' to the most importantreference work in the English language in less than ten years, and whatWikipedia's massive global experiment in its collaborative culture means forthe future of ours." —Clay Shirky, NYU, author of Here Comes Everybody: The Power ofOrganizing Without Organizations