The Opportunities and Challenges of Wikipedia

The internet provides users with opportunities to create digital commons-based projects, which are based on collaborative production. Wikipedia is one of the most popular digital commons-based projects, in which tens of thousands of volunteer editors contribute this project. The internet users do not pay any money to access information/knowledge on Wikipedia. The other important point is that personal information of users is not sold by Wikipedia to third parties. Also, it has a huge data storage that enables users to find a great range of information although the reliability of content of Wikipedia is controversial. In short, Wikipedia is a good sample to analyze a digital commons project that are against the commodification of information/knowledge on the internet.Primary source of this book comes from the interviews I did at the University of Sussex in the UK. I benefited from thematic analysis in the process of data analyzing and categorization. The themes of the findings are: Free access to information/knowledge on the Internet; Popularity and Reliability of Wikipedia; Surveillance and Advertisements.