Scaling Consensus: Increasing Decentralization in Wikipedia Governance

  • Authors:
  • Andrea Forte;Amy Bruckman

  • Affiliations:
  • -;-

  • Venue:
  • HICSS '08 Proceedings of the Proceedings of the 41st Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences
  • Year:
  • 2008

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Abstract

How does "self-governance" happen in Wikipedia? Through in-depth interviews with eleven individuals whohave held a variety of responsibilities in the EnglishWikipedia, we obtained rich descriptions of how variousforces produce and regulate social structures on the site.Our analysis describes Wikipedia as an organizationwith highly refined policies, norms, and a technologicalarchitecture that supports organizational ideals ofconsensus building and discussion. We describe howgovernance in the site is becoming increasinglydecentralized as the community grows and how this ispredicted by theories of commons-based governancedeveloped in offline contexts. The trend ofdecentralization is noticeable with respect to bothcontent-related decision making processes and socialstructures that regulate user behavior.