Research On Voting Mechanism Of Knowledge Construction In Wikipedia Encyclopedia

Wikipedia is the world’s first multilingual Internet encyclopedia to support collaborative writing by communities.It advocates "everyone can edit" and "equal creation of production knowledge",breaking the elite’s exclusive power and rule over the compilation of knowledge of traditional encyclopedias.Users in the wiki platform have relatively free access to information and speech opportunities.Therefore,self-organization becomes the unique order of group communication within the platform.As a matter of fact,in Wikipedia,unprofessional compilation and controversies and conflicts between different cultural backgrounds occur from time to time.It is inevitable that self-organized communities will fall into an unmanageable deadlock,which makes it difficult for the process of reaching consensus to be smooth.This is where editors need to promote better knowledge production by establishing community protocols,including voting mechanisms.Voting mechanism refers to that,in order to solve some seriously controversial issues on Wikipedia,Wikipedia users express each other’s positions quickly through voting,so as to show what opinions are supported by the majority of people.At the same time,consultation and discussion are carried out to promote consensus,so as to determine the feasibility and legality of compilation and modification of the entry knowledge.At present,the academic research on voting behavior includes four influential research paths,namely,ecology path,sociology path,social psychology path and economics path.Most of these researches focus on realistic democratic categories such as election,party identification and enterprise organization.Voting behavior of digital network communities has become a blank spot in this kind of research.Therefore,through the Internet political science approach,this paper will explore in depth the voting mechanism constructed by the self-organized community of Wikipedia in order to promote the compilation of knowledge and carry out the political struggle of knowledge when encountering large controversial issues,as well as how the self-organized community uses the voting mechanism to affect the legitimacy of knowledge.First of all,based on the discussion boards,historical editing and other text materials of voting related items,this paper sorts out the voting construction mechanism of the self-organized community in Wikipedia,including the voting function of "majority voting" and "majority reference",the contradictions and disputes between voting function and dialogue function,and the consensus of voting mechanism.Secondly,although the self-organized community of Wikipedia has made regulations on voting and developed a series of voting methods,on the one hand,the voting mechanism is not a legal regulation and cannot be forced to restrict users on the platform.On the other hand,in editorial practice,Wikipedia is not a democratic testing ground,and disputes cannot be resolved solely by voting mechanisms.As a result,some editors strategically use voting mechanisms and other "codification guidelines" in the process of compiling knowledge to play games between community organizations on controversial topics and content.Based on this,this paper studies the voting mechanism of self-organized community in Wikipedia by taking the "Nanjing Massacre" item in Wikipedia as an example.After a diachronic analysis of the text corpus,this paper finds that the voting game conducted by editors in the naming dispute voting of this article is mainly reflected in three aspects: establishing discourse authority in the conflict through voting options;Use other wiki policies to weaken or strengthen voting options;Resorting to voting procedures to reshape knowledge legitimacy.Finally,based on the above analysis,the fourth chapter will take voting mechanism as a kind of community "politics" from a macro perspective,expounding its internal meaning and characteristics.In addition,in the context of Wikipedia,it summarizes the way voting politics participates in the construction of knowledge legitimacy and its influence on knowledge construction.