La produzione di contenuti di qualità in un’organizzazione on line per la gestione collettiva delle conoscenze: il caso it.wikipedia.org

Based on free access and open collaboration among peers, Wikipedia represents a source of information for media, web contents and even for academic literature. Its popularity rises up many hypothesis and questions about its present organization and future development. The quality of information is one of the main concerns: how would a common based peer production 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 investigates the quality’s assessment processes in the Vetrina section (Featured Articles) of it.wiki (Italian Wikipedia) in order to define its social rules, policies and principles. Thanks to a qualitative analysis carried out through in-depth interviews and through a period of ethnographic observation, the paper also compares empirical results with theoretical hypothesis related to Wikipedia’s quality accreditation.