Wikipedia and Social Collaboration (Line56)

The unfixedness of knowledge: discourse, genre, and mode in Wikipedia

Wikipedia (http://wikipedia.org/) is the world's largest online free-content encyclopedia. This means that unlike the content of traditional encyclopedias, such as the Encyclopedia Britannica, the content of Wikipedia is free. But perhaps a more important distinction is that Wikipedia can be edited by anyone, at any time. This may sound counterproductive, as the purpose of an encyclopedia --one generally assumes-- is to fix knowledge, not to open it up to constant and unsupervised manipulation. However, Wikipedia is proving to be a successful endeavor: as of the time of this writing, it contained approximately 1.5 million articles in more than 90 different languages. Wikipedia is challenging our ideas about the permanence of knowledge, and in the process allowing us to ask interesting questions about the nature of large scale online collaboration, the act of critical reading, and the emergence of new social literacies. In this paper, I will briefly discuss some characteristics of Wikipedia, mostly from the perspective of Gunther Kress' (2003) concepts of discourse, genre, and mode.