Netizenship/Wikipedia
It's a good idea - but it only works in practice, not in theory.--Common community joke
Have you ever looked something up or checked something on Wikipedia (please don't call it "wiki")? Of course you have. You may also know that anyone can edit Wikipedia articles (with exceptions that are covered in this study). "This sounds like it'd be a mess", you may have thought. This study will tell you why it isn't.
Just under what you are reading lies a world of discussion about what Wikipedia should say; this process is largely driven by the editors and contributors of Wikipedia themselves. That's what makes it unique and worthy of studying, for Wikipedia stands alone on the list of most-visited websites as one which is governed by its users and contributors. The causes of this powerful exception are almost as unique: an origin in the open-source software movement, an obvious goal, a strong resultant sense of purpose, and strict standards of ethics and conduct.
Wikipedia is fundamentally an anarchy; its first rule is ignore all rules: "If a rule prevents you from improving or maintaining Wikipedia, ignore it." Over time, democratic and meritocratic elements have been added to its governance as they have been found necessary. Over all of this stretches a constitutional monarch: the Wikimedia Foundation.
Wikimedia Foundation
The Wikimedia Foundation (called WMF by the community) is a nonprofit organization governed by a Board of Trustees, which consists of:
- Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia,
- Two members elected by the affiliates of Wikimedia,
- Three members elected by the community of users of Wikimedia projects,
- Four members appointed by these six members[1].
The principal responsibility of the WMF is to host and protect the Wikimedia projects, which are:
- The English Wikipedia (whose government will be the primary focus of this study),
- Versions of Wikipedia in other languages (of which there are over two hundred),
- The sister projects of Wikipedia, such as Wiktionary (a dictionary), Wikibooks (a collection of textbooks), and Wikisource (a collection of primary sources), all of which are freely editable and available in many languages, like Wikipedia.
The Wikimedia movement includes all the work of the WMF. Beyond the Wikimedia projects, the WMF also:
- Establishes and recognizes geographically-based affiliates, known as chapters, thematic organizations, and user groups, to promote use of and contribution to Wikimedia on a local level.
- Develops and maintains the MediaWiki software (which this wiki runs on).
The WMF reserves the right to take "office actions" to delete articles, block users, and check user IPs. The expansion of this power has been fraught with controversy. For example, in 2014, the WMF implemented a feature called "Superprotect" which would allow certain pages to be edited only by WMF staff. After a community outcry this feature was permanently removed in 2015[2]. Currently, reforms to further delineate the extent of this power are in progress[3].
The WMF is treated by the editors of Wikipedia as a necessary evil that guarantees the basis for their project's existence but is sometimes overly distracted from the main mission of Wikipedia: building a verifiable and complete encyclopedia.
Principles of Wikipedia
The five pillars of Wikipedia are[4]:
- Wikipedia is an encyclopedia.
- Wikipedia has a neutral point of view.
- Wikipedia is free content that can be used by anyone, even commercially.
- The editors of Wikipedia should behave civilly towards each other.
- Wikipedia has no firm rules.
The 5th pillar is the first principle of Wikipedia, so far as governance is concerned; the others will be touched on as necessary.
Editors are careful to keep their discussion and debate "under the hood" and out of the view of "mainspace", the namespace where all the articles and outward-facing content are. Hence, most readers of Wikipedia are not aware that controversies about what they read roil just beneath the surface of it. Every article has a "talk page" where discussion about the article (but, importantly, not about the subject of the article) takes place, and there is also a "Wikipedia" namespace for internal discussions and policies.
Anarchy
Wikipedia is, first and foremost, an anarchy.
Wikipedia does not have firm rules; it has policies and guidelines which are enacted, changed, and interpreted by consensus. Consensus requires less than unanimity but more than a simple majority vote; it requires that all legitimate concerns weighing on the question be appropriately considered[5]. (Even so, participants in major discussions will comment in "support", "oppose", or "neutral" sections, and number their statements within it, but they will still take care to call their statements "!votes", pronounced "not-votes"; their comments in favor or against are not votes, and "Support" or "Oppose" accompanied by no reasoning or just "per [for the same reasons as] <another user>" is frowned upon.) As such, it is notoriously difficult to enact or change a major policy or guideline.
The routine day-to-day work is also carried on by consensus, but these are strictly local and specific consensuses that cannot in any sense override the general and global consensus that formed the policies and guidelines. Content disputes (relating to the 2nd pillar) are decided by consensus on the talk page of the article. Citations to policies and guidelines, which the participants are powerless to change, are the order of the day in such talks. Content disputes are where the principle of consensus is preserved in its purest form. But in other disputes the community has seen fit to, by consensus, add democratic and meritocratic elements to their administration in order to make it more effective and efficient.
The system of deleting articles takes place on a page with a large number of sub-pages called Articles for deletion. Dozens of such discussions are posted every day. Discussions last for a week. Usually the creator of the article will show up and argue (more or less effectively) that it be kept. At the expiration of the seven-day period, an uninvolved administrator will decide whether the article is kept or deleted, if there is a clear consensus for either side. If there is no consensus (which is quite rare) or if no one bothers to comment (which is quite common), the discussion is relisted for another seven days (posted to the list of the new discussions for the day on which the seven-day period was to expire) until a consensus is reached. The most common reason for articles to be deleted is that they are not notable enough (the subject of enough reliable sources) for an article. Sometimes the consensus will be to merge an article into another, in which case the old article will redirect (take visitors automatically) to the article it has become part of.
Even the system of crime and punishment operates mostly via consensus. Simple cases of obvious vandalism (adding nonsense to articles, blanking pages, creating self-promotional articles, and the like) are, after a rapidly escalating series of warnings to the offender, punished by an indefinite block by an administrator. More complex cases and those involving violations of civility are dealt with on the ANI, short for "Administrator's noticeboard/Incidents", the drama capital of the wiki and a name most Wikipedia editors know to run away from really fast. The spectators there can, by consensus, impose sanctions on articles, block users, and in extreme cases even ban them. (It should be noted that a block from Wikipedia is equivalent to a ban from many instant messaging platforms. A block is a technical means to stop people from editing, which can be imposed by any admin, while a ban is a declaration that a person is not allowed to contribute to Wikipedia, imposed either at ANI or by the Arbitration Committee. Bans are more serious and rarer than blocks.)
There are two classes of quality articles: featured articles and good articles. (Articles that are lists of things have one quality class: featured lists, equivalent to both featured and good content articles.) They are listed and unlisted as such by consensus at Featured article candidates. Editors review articles and match them against the criteria, with coordinators instead of administrators closing discussions and promoting or demoting articles.
Democracy
Wikipedia contains democratic elements.
It holds elections for an Arbitration Committee. The Arbitration Committee consists of 15 members, half of whom are elected every other year (though before 2010, a third of them were elected every third year). The Arbitration Committee has no power over content disputes. Rather, its powers extend to banning problematic users from editing the site as a whole (site ban), from editing articles on specified topics (topic ban), or from interacting with users they have problems with (interaction ban). The
