Imagining the Wikipedia community: What do Wikipedia authors mean when they write about their ‘community’?

Abstract

This article examines the way Wikipedia authors write their ‘community’ into being. Mobilizing concepts regarding the communicative constitution of communities, the computer-mediated conversation between editors were investigated using Grounded Theory procedures. The analysis yielded an empirically grounded theory of the users’ self-understanding of the Wikipedia community as ethos-action community. Hence, this study contributes to research on online community-building as it shifts the focus from structural criteria for communities to the discursive level of community formation.