Psychological Analysis of Practical Experience in «Wikipedia» Development

Wikipedia is the fullest online open source encyclopedia, even more, it is multi-language; the work on its content is fundamentally based on principally new methods of distant group cooperation. One of the most characteristic patterns in preparation of new items in encyclopedia is the participation of competent volunteers who are able to describe the knowledge base which is dynamically developing, while the publishers of diverse other encyclopedias traditionally invite acknowledged licensed experts to prepare the items within their narrow fields of competence. Unlike this tradition, the administrators of Wikipedia rely on human capital, namely on the unclaimed (earlier) competence of thousands of people who do not call themselves experts but are eager to share information, work out rules of joint authorship and editing, make technical corrections of the encyclopedia items - and devote significant part of their life to this hobby-like activity. That is why up-to-day analysis of this experience as well as a review of multidisciplinary investigations, held mostly within science studies, sociology or computer studies, is highly important for psychologists. The paper presents a systematic review of the first-priority academic studies related to the experience of wikipedians. For example, the structural differentiation of Wikipedia as a dissipative adhocracy system is shown as a sort of folksonomy: the would-be authors first adapt and after that start their enlightening activity through mechanisms of self-actualization and self-transcendence which are believed to characterize the wikipedians’ own values and meanings. The analysis of processes of cumulation, reworking and keeping actual knowledge are profound for studies of the so-called transactive memory. The wisdom of crowd phenomenon is analyzed in the context of gaining a declared consensus while the participating wikipedians are antagonistic from the point of their cognitive dissimilarity. That is why neither quality nor safety of the Wikipedia information are comparable to the most highly qualified encyclopedias, such as the British Encyclopedia which are known to recruit the most well-known experts. We may conclude that to rely on competent volunteers’ participation means to be pragmatic, taking into consideration mechanisms of collective intelligence and collective thinking, which characterize the current state of the modern digital society. The analysis of the wikipedians’ motivation shows that it is often based on reciprocal altruism as well as other intrinsic motives, being opposed to extrinsic ones. When destructive Wikipedia related activity, such as vandalism, is found, it is usually taken as a deviant behavior, neighboring to the elements of the “dark triad” (i.e. psychopathy, narcissism or machiavellianism). The final conclusion says that the study of the specifics of the wikipedians’ personal traits and their prosocial behavior sufficiently enlarges the frontiers of current research in psychology.

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