the oligarchy of Wikipedia
February 22, 2015 11:24 PM Subscribe
"When you deny an organization the formal power to distribute power equitably—to acknowledge the inevitable hierarchies in social groups and deal with them explicitly—you inevitably hand power over to those most willing to be ruthless and unflinching in their pursuit of it. In other words, in the effort to create a 'more distributed' system, except in very rare circumstances where all participants are of good will and relatively equivalent in their ethics and politics, you end up creating exactly the authoritarian rule that your work seemed designed specifically to avoid. You end up giving even more unstructured power to exactly the persons that institutional strictures are designed to curtail."
- David Golumbia on inherent power inequalities in peer production projects, linguistic prescriptivism, and one very specialized Wikipedia editor named Giraffedata.
This post was deleted for the following reason: This article very strongly focuses on the "comprised / composed" guy, and as such I'm afraid will just become more of a repeat of this already open thread on that topic. If you'd like to try again with a more developed post about Wikipedia power distribution that doesn't focus so much on this one editor, that would be fine. -- taz
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