Collective Remembering of Organizations: Co-Construction of Organizational Pasts in Wikipedia

Collective Remembering of Organizations: Co-Construction of Organizational Pasts in Wikipedia - scientific work related to Wikipedia quality published in 2015, written by Michael Etter and Finn Årup Nielsen.

Overview

Purpose – How organizations’ pasts are presented to the public is crucial, because this presentation shapes corporate reputations. Increasingly, various actors contribute to the public remembering of organizations with new information and communication technologies (ICTs). The purpose of this paper is to investigate the online encyclopedia Wikipedia as a global memory place, where the pasts of organizations are communicatively co-constructed by actors of a loosely connected community. Design/methodology/approach – The authors analyze 1,459 edits of Wikipedia pages of ten organizations from various industries. Quantitative content analysis detects Wikipedia edits for their reputational relevance and reference to formal sources, such as corporate communication or newspapers. Furthermore, the authors investigate to which degree current corporate communication in form of 177 press releases has an influence on the remembering process in Wikipedia. Findings – The analysis shows how the continuous construction o...