Knowledge Sharing in the Adminship Communities of the Eastern Eurpoean Versions of Wikipedia Pages

Abstract

Adminship in the Wikipedia community represents a specific kind of organizing activity of a virtual community of practice. It requires a high level of trust amongst the users and the engagement of an admin in the life of the community as a non-paid function, which is significant in terms of sharing and creating knowledge in the form of the content of Wikipedia. As in every form of human cooperation, it is subject to the cultural influences of the country, whose language version it represents. The aim of the research was to distinguish and describe the characteristics of the adminship and admins’ social and content-creating activities in the seven East European versions of Wikipedia (among others, Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary), while taking into consideration the cultural characteristics of the cultures involved. The method used was the quantitative content analysis of the admins’ activity in different spaces of Wikipedia activity (organizing, content-creating). In order to obtain the data of admins’ activity, the xTool was used, which is a dedicated online tool and database of Wikipedia’s users' activity. To analyze and determine the trends and correlations of admins’ activity in different language versions of Wikipedia, Statistica software was used. The results of the study suggest that despite the common history and characteristics of East European countries, there are some differences characterizing adminship work in terms of organizing and creating the knowledge process in different Wikipedia language versions, particularly considering certain cultural dimensions distinguished by Hofstede (e.g. power distance, masculinity).