All That We Know Dariusz Jemielniak Common knowledge? An ethnography of Wikipedia. (Stanford University Press 2014)

AuthorDorota Joanna Bourne
DOIhttp://doi.org/10.1111/emre.12067
Published date01 March 2016
Date01 March 2016
Book Review: All That We Know
Dariusz Jemielniak Common knowledge?
An ethnography of Wikipedia.
(Stanford University Press 2014)
Dorota Joanna Bourne
University of Reading, Henley on Thames, UK
This article presents a review of an ethnography of Wikipedia by professor Dariusz Jemielniak: Common
Knowledge? An Ethnography of Wikipedia published in 2014 by Stanford University Press. Following an
introductory discussion on Wikipedia’s importance in today’s society and academic literature, the main content
and structure of the book are outlined together with the key points raised by Jemielniak in each chapter. Limitations
of the book and some critical comments on this work are presented in the third section. The article ends with the
conclusions regarding overall contribution of the book and its potential readership.
Keywords: Wikipedia; open collaboration projects; knowledge intensive organizations; ethnography
Introduction
If we were to find one place where all human knowledge
is stored, it would probably be Wikipedia. If only we
could capture it in a form of an object that could be
safely stored and transported, we would never have to
worry about the extinction of human knowledge created
so far. While this surely sounds like an exaggerationand
is more appropriate as a plot for a sci-fi story, it is not
that far from the truth.
Wikipedia was started as an online alternative to the
traditional encyclopaedia with its content written for
free by experts and made available online to the entire
population free of charge. In order to match the standard
of professional encyclopaedias, Wikipedia adopted a
peer review process for all entries and emphasised rig-
orous referencing as a means for maintaining quality of
content. What started out as a simple project quickly
grew in popularity and became a phenomenon that very
few are unfamiliar with today. Wikipedia is a much
talked and written about subject in popular as well as
academic literature. The latter resulted in 831 academic
journal publications with Wikipedia in the title and
2,179 publications with Wikipedia as a topic, all of
which appeared between 2002 and 2015 with their fre-
quency significantly increasing from 2005 and reaching
its peak in 2013.
Wikipedia still remains of great interest to the aca-
demic as well as non-academic audience. Whether you
love it or hate it, most of us have used Wikipedia as
source of information at some point. Some openly
dismiss it as a valid source of knowledge (e.g., Seife,
2000) whereas others, like Jemielniak himself, openly
encourage others to use it as well as actively participate
in its growth through their own edits and posts. I myself
belong to a group of users who is neither against nor
fanatical about it. I have always been quite skeptical
about using Wikipedia though, especially in academic
work. However, Dariusz Jemielniak’s book Common
Knowledge? An Ethnography of Wikipedia did dispel
some of the myths surrounding Wikipedia that I had and
also shed a lot of light on the source of my own miscon-
ceptions about it. For Wikipedia is one of those interest-
ing phenomena that most people know about, have an
opinion on but in fact know very little about.
Setting out to read Common Knowledge I prepared
myself for a skim-reading exercise rather than a cover-
to-cover session, which I ended up having to do. I have
Correspondence: Dorota Joanna Bourne, Henley Business School, Uni-
versity of Reading, Greenlands Campus, Henley on Thames RG9 3AU,
UK. Email: dorota.bourne@henley.ac.uk
DOI: 10.1111/emre.12067
© 2015 European Academy of Management
European Management Review, Vol. 13, (201 )
6
72
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