Good Faith Collaboration: The Culture of Wikipedia is a 2010 book by Joseph M. Reagle Jr. (a Fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society

Berkman Center for Internet & Society

The Berkman Center for Internet & Society is a research center at Harvard University that focuses on the study of cyberspace. Founded at Harvard Law School, the center traditionally focused on internet-related legal issues. On May 15, 2008, the Center was elevated to an interfaculty initiative of...

 at Harvard Law School

Harvard Law School

Harvard Law School is one of the professional graduate schools of Harvard University. Located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, it is the oldest continually-operating law school in the United States and is home to the largest academic law library in the world. The school is routinely ranked by the U.S...

), published by MIT Press

MIT Press

The MIT Press is a university press affiliated with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts .-History:...

. The foreword is by Lawrence Lessig

Lawrence Lessig

Lawrence "Larry" Lessig is an American academic and political activist. He is best known as a proponent of reduced legal restrictions on copyright, trademark, and radio frequency spectrum, particularly in technology applications, and he has called for state-based activism to promote substantive...

.

Good Faith Collaboration is based on Reagle's PhD dissertation. The book is a study of the history of Wikipedia

Wikipedia

Wikipedia is a free, web-based, collaborative, multilingual encyclopedia project supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Its 20 million articles have been written collaboratively by volunteers around the world. Almost all of its articles can be edited by anyone with access to the site,...

, its real life and theoretical precursors, and the culture which has developed around it. Reagle explores the history of collaboration, touching on the methods of the Quakers

Religious Society of Friends

The Religious Society of Friends, or Friends Church, is a Christian movement which stresses the doctrine of the priesthood of all believers. Members are known as Friends, or popularly as Quakers. It is made of independent organisations, which have split from one another due to doctrinal differences...

, the World Brain

World Brain

World Brain is a collection of essays and addresses the English science fiction pioneer, social reformer, evolutionary biologist and historian H. G. Wells written during the period 1936-38...

 envisaged by H. G. Wells

H. G. Wells

Herbert George Wells was an English author, now best known for his work in the science fiction genre. He was also a prolific writer in many other genres, including contemporary novels, history, politics and social commentary, even writing text books and rules for war games...

 and Paul Otlet

Paul Otlet

Paul Marie Ghislain Otlet was an author, entrepreneur, visionary, lawyer and peace activist; he is one of several people who have been considered the father of information science, a field he called "documentation". Otlet created the Universal Decimal Classification, one of the most prominent...

's Universal Repository.

The book received a positive review from Cory Doctorow

Cory Doctorow

Cory Efram Doctorow is a Canadian-British blogger, journalist, and science fiction author who serves as co-editor of the blog Boing Boing. He is an activist in favour of liberalising copyright laws and a proponent of the Creative Commons organization, using some of their licences for his books...

, who said that Reagle "offers a compelling case that Wikipedia's most fascinating and unprecedented aspect isn't the encyclopedia itself – rather, it's the collaborative culture that underpins it: brawling, self-reflexive, funny, serious, and full-tilt committed to the project."

In August 2011, Reagle was a keynote speaker at the Wikimania conference in Haifa

Haifa

Haifa is the largest city in northern Israel, and the third-largest city in the country, with a population of over 268,000. Another 300,000 people live in towns directly adjacent to the city including the cities of the Krayot, as well as, Tirat Carmel, Daliyat al-Karmel and Nesher...

, Israel

Israel

The State of Israel is a parliamentary republic located in the Middle East, along the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea...

. In September 2011 the Web edition of the book was released under a Creative Commons

Creative Commons

Creative Commons is a non-profit organization headquartered in Mountain View, California, United States devoted to expanding the range of creative works available for others to build upon legally and to share. The organization has released several copyright-licenses known as Creative Commons...

 license.

Time line

1895 - Otlet’s Permanent Encyclopedia: liberating ideas from the binding of books.

1936 - Wells’s World Brain: a vision of a worldwide encyclopedia using microfilm.

1945 - Bush’s memex: a vision of a hyper-textual knowledge space and new forms of encyclopedias.

1965 - Nelson’s Xanadu: a vision of hypertext.

1971 - Hart’s Project Gutenberg: a vision of providing ebooks through achievable means (“plain vanilla ASCII”).

1980s - Academic American Encyclopedia is made available in an online experiment; multimedia CD-ROMs soon follow.

1991 - Berners-Lee’s World Wide Web: a vision of highly accessible read/write.

1993 - Interpedia: an ambiguous vision lost among too many infrastructural options.

1995 - Cunningham’s WikiWikiWeb: making the Web easy to collaboratively edit.

1999 - Distributed Encyclopedia: many people should contribute independent essays that could be centrally indexed.

1999 - Stallman’s “The Free Universal Encyclopedia and Learning Resource.”

2000 - Distributed Proofreaders: distributing the task of proofreading among many.

2000 (March 9) - Nupedia launched: a FOSS-inspired expert-driven free encyclopedia.

2001 (January 10) - “Let’s make a Wiki.”

2001 (January 15) - www.wikipedia.com launched.

External links

• Online copy of Good Faith Collaboration --Web-based open content book released under under a CC-BY-NC-SA license
• Good Faith Collaboration in the Library of Congress
  Library of Congress
  The Library of Congress is the research library of the United States Congress, de facto national library of the United States, and the oldest federal cultural institution in the United States. Located in three buildings in Washington, D.C., it is the largest library in the world by shelf space and...
  
   Online Catalog
• Book review by R. Stuart Geiger, at the Wikipedia Signpost (dated 4 October 2010)