Dariusz Jemielniak: Common Knowledge? An Ethnography of Wikipedia (2013/2014) [Polish, English]

“With an emphasis on peer–produced content and collaboration, Wikipedia exemplifies a departure from traditional management and organizational models. This iconic “project” has been variously characterized as a hive mind and an information revolution, attracting millions of new users even as it has been denigrated as anarchic and plagued by misinformation. Has Wikipedia’s structure and inner workings promoted its astonishing growth and enduring public relevance?

In Common Knowledge?, Dariusz Jemielniak draws on his academic expertise and years of active participation within the Wikipedia community to take readers inside the site, illuminating how it functions and deconstructing its distinctive organization. Against a backdrop of misconceptions about its governance, authenticity, and accessibility, Jemielniak delivers the first ethnography of Wikipedia, revealing that it is not entirely at the mercy of the public: instead, it balances open access and power with a unique bureaucracy that takes a page from traditional organizational forms. Along the way, Jemielniak incorporates fascinating cases that highlight the tug of war among the participants as they forge ahead in this pioneering environment.”

Polish edition
Publisher Poltext, Warsaw, 2013
ISBN 9788375612851
376 pages

English edition
Publisher Stanford University Press, 2014
ISBN 0804789444, 9780804789448
312 pages

Review (Piotr Konieczny, The Signpost, 2014)
Review (Forbes, George Anders, 2014)

Publisher (PL)
Publisher (EN)

Życie wirtualnych dzikich: netnografia Wikipedii (Polish, trans. Wojciech Pedzich, 2013)
Common Knowledge? An Ethnography of Wikipedia (English, 2014)

Michael Mandiberg (ed.): The Social Media Reader (2012)

With the rise of web 2.0 and social media platforms taking over vast tracts of territory on the internet, the media landscape has shifted drastically in the past 20 years, transforming previously stable relationships between media creators and consumers. The Social Media Reader is the first collection to address the collective transformation with pieces on social media, peer production, copyright politics, and other aspects of contemporary internet culture from all the major thinkers in the field.

Culling a broad range and incorporating different styles of scholarship from foundational pieces and published articles to unpublished pieces, journalistic accounts, personal narratives from blogs, and whitepapers, The Social Media Reader promises to be an essential text, with contributions from Lawrence Lessig, Henry Jenkins, Clay Shirky, Tim O’Reilly, Chris Anderson, Yochai Benkler, danah boyd, and Fred von Loehmann, to name a few. It covers a wide-ranging topical terrain, much like the internet itself, with particular emphasis on collaboration and sharing, the politics of social media and social networking, Free Culture and copyright politics, and labor and ownership. Theorizing new models of collaboration, identity, commerce, copyright, ownership, and labor, these essays outline possibilities for cultural democracy that arise when the formerly passive audience becomes active cultural creators, while warning of the dystopian potential of new forms of surveillance and control.

Publisher NYU Press, 2012
Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike (CC BY-NC-SA) license
ISBN 0814763022, 9780814763025
289 pages

publisher
google books

PDF

Journal of Peer Production, No. 1: Productive Negation (2012)

The inaugural issue of the Journal of Peer Production was published under the title Critical Studies in Peer Production. It was then hosted by Oekonux, a non-profit organization devoted to the theoretical and practical advancement of peer production. However disagreements about the direction of the journal led to the editorial team deciding to leave Oekonux and relaunch the project under a new name. The Journal of Peer Production is now hosted by the Foundation for P2P Alternatives, a non-profit organization aiming to study the impact of peer to peer technology and thought on society.

The Journal of Peer Production (JoPP) seeks high-quality contributions from researchers and practitioners of peer production. We understand peer production as a mode of commons-based and oriented production in which participation is voluntary and predicated on the self-selection of tasks. Notable examples are the collaborative development of Free Software projects and of the Wikipedia online encyclopedia. Through the analysis of the forms, operations, and contradictions of peer producing communities in contemporary capitalist society, the journal aims to open up new perspectives on the implications of peer production for social change.

Contributions by George Dafermos, Stefano De Paoli, Vincenzo D’Andrea and Maurizio Teli, Francesca Musiani, Michel Bauwens, Jakob Rigi, Christian Siefkes, Jean Zin, Stefan Meretz, Maurizio Teli, Toni Prug

Editors: Mathieu O’Neil (coordinator), Athina Karatzogianni, George Michaelides, Johan Söderberg, Maurizio Teli, Nathaniel Tkacz
Published in July 2012

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