Quality assessment process in Wikipedia’s Vetrina: the role of the community’s policies and rules

The increasing growth of Wikipedia poses many questions about its organizational model and its development as a free-open 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 free-voluntary basis. Quality is one of the main concerns related to such a system. How would a CBPP environment guarantee at the same time the openness of its organization and a good level of accreditation? The paper offers an overview of the quality assessment processes in it.wiki’s Vetrina section. It also suggests an explanation to quality assessment 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 factors related to the evaluation of quality contents.