QUALITY CONTENTS CREATION IN A COMMONS-BASED PEER PRODUCTION ON LINE ENVIRONMENT: THE IT.WIKIPEDIA EXPERIENCE

The increasing growth of Wikipedia poses many questions about its organizational model and its development as a freeopen knowledge repository. Yochai Benkler describes Wikipedia as a CBPP (commons-based peer production) system: a platform which enables users to easily generate knowledge contents and to manage them collaboratively and on freevoluntary basis. The quality of its output is one of the main concerns related to Wikipedia. How would a CBPP environment guarantee at the same time the openness of its organization and a good level of accreditation? Which aspects of the project have more influence on quality? The paper offers an overview of one of the quality processes in it.wiki (Italian Wikipedia): the Vetrina section (Featured Articles). It also suggests an explanation to quality accreditation issue which questions Benkler’s hypothesis. Thanks to a qualitative analysis carried out through in-depth interviews to Wikipedia users and through a period of ethnographic observation, the paper outlines Vetrina’s organization and the social factors related to quality definition. The goal of the analysis is to give a better understanding of co-generation of contents processes and at the same time it tries to investigate quality assessment in one of the best known open knowledge on line project.