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Community, consensus, coercion, control: cs*w or how policy mediates mass participation

Published: 04 November 2007 Publication History

Abstract

When large groups cooperate, issues of conflict and control surface because of differences in perspective. Managing such diverse views is a persistent problem in cooperative group work. The Wikipedian community has responded with an evolving body of policies that provide shared principles, processes, and strategies for collaboration. We employ a grounded approach to study a sample of active talk pages and examine how policies are employed as contributors work towards consensus. Although policies help build a stronger community, we find that ambiguities in policies give rise to power plays. This lens demonstrates that support for mass collaboration must take into account policy and power.

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cover image ACM Conferences
GROUP '07: Proceedings of the 2007 ACM International Conference on Supporting Group Work
November 2007
422 pages
ISBN:9781595938459
DOI:10.1145/1316624
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 04 November 2007

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Author Tags

  1. collaborative authoring
  2. community
  3. policy
  4. power
  5. wikipedia

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GROUP07
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GROUP07: ACM 2007 International Conference on Supporting Group Work
November 4 - 7, 2007
Florida, Sanibel Island, USA

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