Designing for Care in the Wikipedia Community

Wikipedia, while being one of the most successful projects for open knowledge curation, faces significant challenges that stem partly from the model for collaboration that is used, in which individual contributions are aggregated into a whole through a bureaucratic process. This process is hierarchical and reflects power relationships that hinder the further evolution of Wikipedia as a community effort by setting up significant barriers to entry for new editors as well as hindering contributions on a range of topics. We employ the frame of “care and efficiency” introduced by Rossitto et al. to describe a distributed participatory design process to introduce synchronous collaboration into parts of the Wikipedia community’s activities, specifically training and projects, two areas in which the care aspect is of particular importance.