User:DennyColt/sandboxWPcommunity

The Wikipedia community is the group of people who edit and volunteer their time to build Wikipedia and to select what content in Wikipedia is best representative of the project's work. Prominent Wikipedians, as they are known, have commented on the importance of the communal aspects of the project and emphasized it as a major reason to help the project. Members of the community have a variety of incentives to participate. One study attempts to prove that a major incentive to contribute is the resulting prestige and respect within the community, although many wikipedians contribute through pseudonyms and this prestige does not translate into the "real life". The community has certain taboos and guidelines such as strongly disapproving notable members of the community editing their own articles. Jimmy Wales, a co-founder of Wikipedia has described the Wikipedia editors as "The Community," and expanded by saying, "Everywhere I go it's about more or less the same: about 80 percent male, geeky. The geeky smart people." Larry Sanger, who is the Editor-in-Chief of Citizendium and a co-founder of Wikipedia, wrote in regard to Wikipedia's oft cited problems, that "this arguably dysfunctional community is extremely off-putting to … academics" and as such appears "committed to amateurism." The project's preference for consensus over credentials has been labelled as "anti-elitism".

Open source publishing
According to Wikipedia staff, the community works to keep the encyclopedia's articles neutral in tone. The Wikipedia community also polices itself and the articles in the encyclopedia, while identifying problems and factual errors. According to Jimmy Wales, the community of the encyclopedia is built on trust, and regular members of the community would not insert disinformation, such as the falsely reported death of actor Sinbad in March 2007. From the community, editors can be promoted to administrative system operator status by a community review by their peers, via a "Requests for adminship" process. The New York Times stated that the community has a power structure, where the volunteer administrators have the authority to practice editorial control, delete articles that fail suitability requirements, and protect others against vandalism.

Wikipedia relies on the efforts of its community members to remove vandalism to articles. According to Theresa Knott, a Wikipedian, "Vandalism would be difficult to police if there were more vandals, but the ratio of vandal editors to non-vandals is too low." Wikipedia is a free encyclopedia where anyone can edit and is built on consensus of the community. In an editorial piece by Chris Anderson of the Time magazine, he summarized three little words about editing on Wikipedia: "edit this page" and the rest is history.

The New York Times was also quoted as saying, "[Wikipedia] is not the experiment in freewheeling collective creativity it might seem to be, because maintaining so much openness inevitably involves some tradeoffs...it's an online community that has built itself a bureaucracy of sorts — one that, in response to well-publicised problems with some entries, has recently grown more elaborate."

The community has certain policies and guidelines for Wikipedians to read and adhere to when publishing and editing content.

Recognition
The communal aspect of Wikipedia was recognized in 2004 by the Webby Award for the "community" category and recognized along with YouTube, MySpace and other user generated content sites by Time Magazine in declaring their 2006 Time Person of the Year to be "You".

Additional sources

 * 1) http://www.cnn.com/2003/TECH/internet/08/03/wikipedia/index.html
 * 2) http://reagle.org/joseph/2004/agree/wikip-agree.html
 * 3) http://www2.sims.berkeley.edu/academics/courses/is247/f05/readings/Viegas_HistoryFlow_CHI04.pdf
 * 4) http://www.itwire.com.au/content/view/4666/127/# http://blogs.zdnet.com/micro-markets/?p=899
 * 5) http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/12/06/wikipedia_bio/
 * 6) http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4534712.stm
 * 7) http://technology.guardian.co.uk/opinion/story/0,16541,1667346,00.html
 * 8) NY Times: A Contributor to Wikipedia Has His Fictional Side
 * 9) http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,129702-c,webservices/article.html
 * 10) http://www.economist.com/PrinterFriendly.cfm?story_id=8820422