The Mechanism of Spontaneous Order in Online Knowledge Sharing Community: Taking Wikipedia as an Example

The Mechanism of Spontaneous Order in Online Knowledge Sharing Community: Taking Wikipedia as an Example - scientific work related to Wikipedia quality published in 2013, written by Xiaoyu Li.

Overview

In the background of information explosion and big data problem, online knowledge sharing communities confront new challenge of the mechanism of knowledge organization and sharing. Several of these communities, especially Wikipedia, base the knowledge sharing mechanism on spontaneous order by community users. By analyzing the network structure and evolution process of the community policy environment in Wikipedia, this paper finds out that the set of community policies and user guidelines has its rank of priority — some of which are of fundamental place and function. Different policy functions tend to converge in the evolving process, which proves the increasing stabilization of spontaneous order. By illustrating the mechanism of spontaneous order from the angles of user collaboration and CAS theory, this paper points out that the active user participation, the smooth information flow and the prudent control are key points for the Wikipedia knowledge sharing, which is also enlightening for understanding and constructing knowledge sharing mechanism in similar online communities. Keywords—online community; knowledge sharing; spontaneous order; Wikipedia