Analysing the evolution of online communities: developmental and narrative approaches

This research aims to analyse the evolution of "online epistemic communities" (OECs), focussing on the collective processes of article elaboration in Wikipedia. It responds to the important yet still open challenge in Cognitive Ergonomics of constructing methods for analysing/ensuring the quality of collective products, in relation to both their intrinsic characteristics (e.g. completeness, readability) and those of the collaborative processes (e.g. combining viewpoints, constructive/conflictual argumentation) that led to their production. This is particularly relevant for Wikipedia given its principle of “neutrality of points of view”, which has lead to many conflictual debates. Despite their often high ‘costs’ in time and effort, collaborative conflict resolution has potential for favouring knowledge elaboration (Baker, 1999), community building and — ultimately — better quality articles.