Social construction of knowledge in Wikipedia

Abstract

This paper investigates how knowledge is constructed collaboratively in a crowd-sourced environment. More specifically, the study presented in this paper empirically analyzes online discussions in regard to Wikipedia entries on the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant Disaster that occurred in March 2011 in Japan. For this study, we examined the encyclopedia articles in both the English and Japanese versions of Wikipedia. The findings indicate similarities and differences between the two language versions. The implications of the study for collaborative knowledge production are also discussed.