Wikipedia: Community or social movement?

Piotr Konieczny (1)

1 Hanyang University

In recent years a new realm for study of political and sociological phenomena has appeared, the Internet, contributing to major changes in our societies during its relatively brief existence. Within cyberspace, organizations whose existence is increasingly tied to this virtual world are of interest to social scientists. This study will analyze the community of one of the largest online organizations, Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia with millions of volunteer members. Wikipedia was never meant to be a community, yet it most certainly has become one. This study asks whether it is something even more –whether it is an expression of online activism, and whether it can be seen as a social movement organization, related to one or more of the Internet-centered social movements industries (in particular, the free and open-source software movement industry).

Mots clés: Wikipedia

Domaines: Sociologie

Piotr Konieczny. Wikipedia: Community or social movement?. Interface: a journal for and about social movements, 2009. ⟨hal-01580966⟩