Naturally emerging regulation and the danger of delegitimizing conventional leadership: Drawing on the example of Wikipedia

By: Dariusz Jemielniak

 

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Wikipedia is the largest collaborative movement in humankind history. I studied its community extensively in my six-year ethnographic project (with results out in 2014 in Common Knowledge? An Ethnography of Wikipedia at Stanford University Press), and came to a conclusion that Wikipedia movement is, actually, strongly resembling many of our Action Research tools and approaches. I summarize these similarities in the Handbook, but here I would like all fellow professors to consider familiarizing with Wikipedia, not only as a source of information, or a strangely interesting community to study, but also as an everyday tool for academic work. In a separate essay I argue that using Wikipedia in classroom is not only our ethical obligation to those, who are less privileged in terms of knowledge-access, but also that it actually makes a lot of sense from the point of view of a teacher. Here I would like to encourage everyone to join the Wikipedia Education Program, and offer a platform of discussion, consultation, and exchange related to using Wikipedia in any form at universities.