Decentralization in Wikipedia Governance

How does “self-governance” happen in Wikipedia? Through in-depth interviews with twenty individuals who have held a variety of responsibilities in the English-language Wikipedia, we obtained rich descriptions of how various forces produce and regulate social structures on the site. Our analysis describes Wikipedia as an organization with highly refined policies, norms, and a technological architecture that supports organizational ideals of consensus building and discussion. We describe how governance on the site is becoming increasingly decentralized as the community grows and how this is predicted by theories of commons-based governance developed in offline contexts. We also briefly examine local governance structures called WikiProjects through the example of WikiProject Military History, one of the oldest and most prolific projects on the site. 1. The Mechanisms of Self-Organization Should a picture of a big, hairy tarantula appear in an encyclopedia article about arachnophobia? Does it illustrate the point, or just frighten potential readers? Reasonable people might disagree on this question. In a freely editable site like Wikipedia, anyone can add the photo, and someone else can remove it. And someone can add it back, and the process continues. In fact that's exactly what happened on Wikipedia from July 2006 through January 2007, until the community finally settled on including a cartoon about fear of spiders instead of a photo of the real thing. But not before hours had been spent on the topic by several editors. In fact, at the time this paper was written, more effort (roughly 6000 words of discussion) has been put into the debate about the photo than into discussion about the rest of the article (roughly 1500 words). If something as simple as a spider photo can generate this much controversy, how does Wikipedia deal with issues like the content of articles on Palestine or global warming? It seems almost miraculous that editors don’t get permanently bogged down in “edit wars” and that real work gets done at all. Yet somehow, despite common episodes of controversy and disagreement among authors, it does. In 2007, the Virginia Tech shootings led to a debate about whether a Wikipedia page should exist for each victim. How can such an issue be resolved? As we will see, policies and social norms have evolved over many years to guide the production of biographical content on the site and these were used to make decisions regarding Virginia Tech victims. But how are such policies created and how have they changed over time? How are policies interpreted and enforced? This paper investigates how the English-language Wikipedia is governed and how this process has evolved over time using biography-related policies as a central example. In the process of researching governance on the site, we learned that sub-communities called WikiProjects support decentralization by acting as local jurisdictions. In the last section, we focus on the structure of governance in WikiProjects by examining the project Military History as a case study. Wikipedia governance is always changing, adapting to new challenges. One of these challenges has been the substantial growth and flood of new editors that has accompanied the site’s popularity. Models of Wikipedia editing activity suggest that growth is sustainable [20]; however, this growth comes with costs. Kittur et al. and Viegas et al. have noted that as Wikipedia has grown, the costs of coordinating activities have also grown [10, 22]. We describe the ways in which governance in the site is becoming increasingly decentralized over time as the community responds to the challenge of growth and why the form that decentralization takes, including the emergence of WikiProjects, is consistent with literature on commons-based resource management. The trend of decentralization is noticeable with respect to both content-related decision making processes and structures that regulate user behavior. We build on the work of Viegas et. al. in using Ostrom’s principles of self-organizing communities to understand governance mechanisms on the site [14, 15, 23].