What a disappointing species we are. Stick us in a virgin paradise, and we create great honeycombed bureaucracies, vast bramble-fields of rules and regulations, ornate politburos filled with policymaking politicos, and, above all, tangled webs of power. Freed from history, freed from distance, freed even from our own miserable bodies, we just dig deeper holes in the mire. We fall short of our own expectations.<\/p>\n
Witness Wikipedia. For some of us, the popular online encyclopedia has become more interesting as an experiment in emergent bureaucracy than in emergent content. Slashdot today points<\/a> to Dirk Riehle’s fascinating interview<\/a> with three high-ranking Wikipedians, Angela Beesley, Elisabeth “Elian” Bauer, and Kizu Naoko. They describe Wikipedia’s increasingly complex governance structure, from its proliferation of hierarchical roles to its “career paths” to its regulatory committees and processes to its arcane content templates. We learn that working the bureaucracy tends to become its own reward for the most dedicated Wikipedians: “Creating fewer articles as time goes on seems fairly common as people get caught up in the politics and discussion rather than the editing.” And we learn that the rules governing the deletion of an entry now take up “37 pages plus 20 subcategories.” For anyone who still thinks of Wikipedia as a decentralized populist collective, the interview will be particularly enlightening. Wikipedia is beginning to look something like a post-revolutionary Bolshevik Soviet, with an inscrutable central power structure wielding control over a legion of workers.<\/p>\n It will be interesting to watch how those workers respond as they confront the byzantine bureaucracy that’s running the show. Will they continue to contribute, or will they become alienated and abandon the project? As Angela Beesley remarks, “The biggest challenge [for Wikipedia] is to maintain what made us who and what we are: the traditional wiki model of being openly editable.” Kizu Naoko singles out “lack of involvement” as a major threat to the project: “we need to go back to the first and foremost challenge: To keep the openness of the wikis that makes it easy for people to join.” The fate of Wikipedia – and perhaps the general “participative” or “open source” organizational model of online production – appears to hinge on how the tension between openness and bureaucracy plays out.<\/p>\n