My first reading suggestion is simply the Wikipedia article on Wikipedia. As with most Wikipedia entries, it’s hard to read it without falling into a wormhole of linked entries. I think it’s interesting to read not just because of its content (how much do we really know about Wikipedia?) but also because it’s an example of a digital scholarly community narrating its own history and identity. I would also suggest taking a look at the article’s talk page to get a peek at the complexity of the Wikipedia community’s norms, practices, and rules. I also found many strange and interesting “information” pages–meta-pages that aren’t part of the official encyclopedia–related to the community, such at the “village pump” (where editors discuss big-picture ideas and problems) and “WikiFauna” (a humorous taxonomy of Wikipedia editors).
My second suggestion is this recent article about Sci-Hub, “the first pirate website in the world to provide mass and public access to tens of millions of research papers.” The article also covers Aaron Schwartz, the activist who committed suicide after being charged for attempting to “free” millions of articles from JSTOR. The creator of Sci-Hub, Alexandra Elbakyan, defends her efforts as contributing a “community” of researchers. I was struck by how similar a lot of Elbakyan and Schwartz’s rhetoric is to that of Jimmy Wales from Wikipedia.
Neither of these suggestions are specifically about digital humanities communities, but I think that they raise a lot of issues related to digital academic communities that have big implications for dh.
