“I Don’t Feel Like It Is ‘Mine’ at All”: Assessing Wikipedia Editors’ Sense of Individual and Community Ownership

Abstract

Given Wikipedia’s breadth of coverage, social impact, and longevity as an impactful open knowledge resource, the encyclopedia has been the subject of considerable interdisciplinary research. Building on scholarship related to collaboration, authorship, ownership, and editing in Wikipedia, this study sought to better understand Wikipedians as writers, paying specific attention to their sense of ownership. While previous research has shown that editors engage in individualist editing practices at times, often ignoring community-mediated policy regarding ownership, findings from a mixed-method survey of 117 editors demonstrate the existence of both “individual” and “community” notions of ownership that often reinforce, or mutually inform, each other. This study adds clarity to these issues by demonstrating how feelings of individual ownership, voice, and pride in writing often occur in collaborative circumstances. This research ultimately extends our understanding of collaborative writing in what is one of the most well-known collaborative websites. Despite contemporary theoretical strides advocating for relinquishing ownership concepts in favor of distributed or ecological frameworks, the concept of ownership remains prevalent within digital writing communities, exemplified by Wikipedia.