Multidimensional Online Self in Collective Action: an Empirical Study on Wikipedia’s Deletion Discussion

Multidimensional Online Self in Collective Action: an Empirical Study on Wikipedia’s Deletion Discussion - scientific work related to Wikipedia quality published in 2015, written by Yusun Jung, Nereu Kock and Thant Syn.

Overview

A user’s trust and trustworthiness is an important facet of her motivation for online knowledge exchange. Current online knowledge exchange becomes increasingly interactive and collaborative, which calls for a more dynamic understanding of online users in this regard. Authors argue that an online user’s self can be reified through her experience and activities within an online community over time rather than becomes a displacement of a corporal self. Drawing upon Goffman’s concept of the presentation of self (1959), authors propose a three-dimensional view of online self: backstage activity, an artifact of self-representation, and frontstage performance. Authors develop a research model that explains how a user establishes and maintains self as a trustworthy social member through the three dimensions of online self during collective action.