Democratizing scientific vulgarization. The balance between cooperation and conflict in french Wikipedia

The free online encyclopedia project Wikipedia has become in less than six years one of the most prominent commons-based peer production example. The present study investigates the patterns of involvement and the patterns of cooperation within the French version of the encyclopaedia. In that respect, we consider different groups of users, highlighting the opposition between passerby contributors and core members, and we attempt to evaluate for each class of contributors the main motivations for their participation to the project. Then, we study the qualitative and quantitative patterns of cowriting and the correlation between size and quality of the production process.