week7: read GFC book --LAOXINYI

  1）Summary

I just finished reading Joseph Reagle's "Good Faith Collaboration: The Culture of Wikipedia", and I was really touched. I read this book to "understand how Wikipedia works", but after reading it, I felt more like I had learned a "philosophy of collaboration".

To be honest, I always thought that projects like Wikipedia, which are open, free, and editable by anyone, mostly rely on technical means and algorithmic mechanisms to maintain order. As a result, Reagle told me that what really made it successful was "culture" - especially the classic Wiki community creed: "Assume Good Faith ".

This book is not a technical book, nor is it a simple sociological paper. It is a field note written by Reagle as a Wikipedian + scholar. He uses the perspective of an "anthropologist" to study Wikipedia's culture, rule formation, collaborative process, dispute resolution, and even analyzes the history of the concept of "encyclopedia".

From the tradition of the Quaker community to H.G. Wells' "World Brain", from Wikipedia's NPOV (neutral point of view), V (verifiability), NOR (no original research) policies, to Jimbo Wales' "enlightened dictatorship" role, Reagle deconstructs this seemingly technical platform into a community story with flesh and blood.

2) what was interesting/useful in it. 

I think there are a few points that are particularly interesting:

1. "Good faith" as the institutional logic of platform operation

I thought that words like "Assume Good Faith" just sounded good. But the book really gives it enough weight - it is not a slogan, but the core mechanism of Wikipedia's operation. Everyone is willing to stay and write together because they believe that this is a reasonable place with room for discussion, bottom line, consensus, and patience.

2. Consensus does not mean no conflict

Chapter 5 "Consensus" is well written. Reagle did not whitewash Wikipedia as a completely harmonious utopia. He said that there are also disputes, editing wars, and user blacklists here. But the important thing is that Wikipedia has developed a set of systems to deal with these problems, such as administrators, arbitration committees, and section discussion processes. These are not "official instructions", but self-organizing structures evolved from community culture.

3. "Openness" is also a strategy, not blindly "anyone can do it"

The book also mentions the anxiety of the Wikipedia community facing "anyone can edit", such as the "encyclopedic anxiety" discussed in Chapter 7. Reagle said that this openness does bring challenges (such as fake news, ignorance, and deliberate destruction), but it also forces the community to continuously optimize the system and repair it from both technical and cultural aspects. This is particularly like an important issue in modern platform governance: the balance between openness and control.

3) What did you learn from reading it? 

Collaboration is not spontaneous, but "designed". Goodwill, patience, fault tolerance, rules, feedback mechanisms... these are the guarantees for collaboration to go far. Culture is more important than technology. Technology cannot solve the trust problem, people can. Participatory research perspective is too important. Reagle is both an observer and a practitioner. His "standing inside and writing" method makes the whole book particularly vivid, rather than an academic "cold observation".

Now we live in an Internet environment full of confrontation, quarrels, and traffic induction, and the word "goodwill" seems particularly scarce. This book reminds me that collaboration does not mean no differences, but a set of methods that "allow everyone to move forward with differences."

Wikipedia is not perfect, but it is a "possibility" in reality - it tells us: an open and collaborative community can really survive for a long time based on culture and trust.