Good Faith Collaboration: The Culture of Wikipedia

The image of a community shaped in a virtual environment sounded rather ‘psychedelic’ before the advent of the Internet. Rheingold (1993) proposed the term ‘virtual community’ to connote the intense feelings of camaraderie, empathy and support he observed among people in online spaces. In this field, Reagle makes a very good contribution towards undoing the image of online collective action as ‘non-real’ (an image still frequently present among scientific researchers). Furthermore, Reagle’s book is part of the move towards focusing more attention on open content communities (as he refers to them) as specific types of communities with a knowledge-making goal; and he goes beyond the most researched case of free source communities.