Nos bastidores da wikipédia lusófona: percalços e conquistas de um projeto de escrita coletiva online

Abstract

This study broaches the factors that explain the appearance and determine the sustentation of the phenomenon of the voluntary collective writing on the social network that operates behind the scenes of the encyclopedia online Wikipedia Lusofona, with a vision to contribute to the field of research of the social networks mediated by computer understood here as communication networks. The work, from a qualitative perspective, recovered and updated contributions of classic concepts of sociology, social psychology and anthropology for the understanding of the processes of social interaction. The pragmatic perspective that individuals are socially constituted and that the social context within that of which it occurs is a complex of situated practices led us to choose certain theoretical and methodological options. One of the options was to adopt an alternative way to the paradigms of methodological individualism and social wholism, combining theoretical concepts of symbolic interactionism and the system of modern gift; another option was to create a model of suitable virtual ethnography with the methodological principles of naturalistic research, to trace a typology of the processes of social interaction in Wikipedia Lusofona. The empirical research, carried out during the period of 2006 to 2008, resulted in two bodies of data collected by way of a triangulation of methods. The first body resulted from the systematic observation, collection of data and analysis of the form of social organization and theprocesses of social interaction on the pages of Wikipedia Lusofona. This first body made possible the posterior phase of the research, which involved the execution of individual interviews by email with the participation of 26 registered Brazilian and Portuguese wikipedistas on the project. The analysis of the results, under the light of the theoreticalreferences, generated a typology of the complexity of the social forms that this dynamic, in constant transformation and mutable network manifests. The processes of social interaction show that cooperation assumes a sociological form of the first order, occurring in the register of unconditionality of the associative bond, and characterized as an altruistic contemporary gift to strangers, mediated by computer. The collaboration presents itself as a sociological form of the second order, subsequent and more complex, that transcends the characteristics of cooperation and reveals the presence of agonistic gift in forms of interaction like conflict, competition and dispute. The interactions under the form of collaboration occur in the register of conditionality, clashes, negotiations, that often result in the cohesion of the social network as well as in temporary or definitive withdrawals from the project.