Writing Wikipedia: An online-offline ethnography about Wikipedians

Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, has an enormous impact on how information and knowledge is being codified, presented, and consumed today.

Writing Wikipedia: An online-offline ethnography about Wikipedians

Jörn SchulzTelekom Innovation Laboratories, TU Berlin, Germany

Introduction

Without looking it up, you know where the first Google or Bing search result for various terms like "Social Media" or "Maya calendar" or "Amsterdam" lead you to. Right – to Wikipedia, the biggest (online) encyclopedia the world has ever seen. By the time of writing this paper, the English Wikipedia featured more than four million articles and the German Wikipedia, the second largest language version, over 1.3 million entries. Across all 285 language versions of Wikipedia, a total of over 22 million articles...

Not a subscriber?

Schedule your live demo with our team today

WARC helps you to plan, create and deliver more effective marketing

  • Prove your case and back-up your idea

  • Get expert guidance on strategic challenges

  • Tackle current and emerging marketing themes

We’re long-term subscribers to WARC and it’s a tool we use extensively. We use it to source case studies and best practice for the purposes of internal training, as well as for putting persuasive cases to clients. In compiling a recent case for long-term, sustained investment in brand, we were able to support key marketing principles with numerous case studies sourced from WARC. It helped bring what could have been a relatively dry deck to life with recognisable brand successes from across a broad number of categories. It’s incredibly efficient to have such a wealth of insight in one place.

Insights Team
Bray Leino

You’re in good company

We work with 80% of Forbes' most valuable brands* and 80% of the world's top top-of-the-class agencies.

* Top 10 brands