Chapter 9
They call themselves ‘Wikipedians’. There is no precise definition of the term, other than as a way of self-identifying, perhaps. If you call yourself a ‘Wikipedian’ you probably are one, if you don’t, then you aren’t. It is hard to say what characterises them as a group. The first use of the name may have been as early as March 2001, when Larry changed his mailing list signature to read “Editor-in-Chief, Nupedia, Ordinary Wikipedian” , and it caught on. It neatly captured the difference between Nupedia, which had an editor-in-chief and by implication a hierarchy, and Wikipedia, where no such hierarchy was meant to exist.
Why does anyone work on Wikipedia? The core community of ‘administrators’ perform mostly mechanical, repetitive tasks. Typically, such work is associated with low status, low pay and low levels of education. Many Western economies have outsourced such work to developing economies. Yet the business model is alive and well on Wikipedia, with its editing base in developed economies. Why?
Following anthropologist John Wallis we argue that Wikipedia is an ‘imagined community’ that defines itself in language, used in a ritualistic way to enforce social cohesion and uniformity, to maintain its structure and hierarchy, and to instill and preserve a set of shared values and an ethos. It has a creation myth, built around its origins in Nupedia and the subsequent rejection of experts and specialists. It has an ideological landscape of figures, real and imagined, who serve as archetypes of what the members should aspire to be, as well as demons whose character embodies everything they must avoid.
Wikipedians do not conceive their contributions as motivated, “any more than participants in an imagined nationalism feel “motivated” to involve themselves in their nationhood. Being a Wikipedian implies familiarity with its culture, an assumption of habitus, an internalization of behavioural modes. Individuals in such a state do not need to be incentivised, unless we describe the basic dynamic of social life as one of incentivisation”.
