I am going to reproduce here parts of my paper “Peer governance and Wikipedia”. The following text deals with some tentative proposals regarding the problematic side of Wikipedia’s governance, departing from the battle between inclusionists and deletionists.

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The main characteristics of peer governance are equipotentiality, heterarchy, holoptism, meritocracy, participation, openness, networking, and transparency. “The aim of peer governance”, as Bauwens (2009) stated in an interview he gave to us, “is to maximize the self-allocation and self-aggregation by the community and to have forms of decision-making that do not function apart and against the broader collective from which they spring”. However, we have to distinct the sphere of abundance, where self-allocation is ‘natural’, from the field of scarcity, where cost-recovery requirements demand choices. As it was articulated in previous chapters, for the latter, some formal democratic rules are needed. Following Bauwens (interview to Kostakis, 2009):

Rules and requirements that select for excellence and function against external attacks are legitimate, but processes that protect a privileged layer are illegitimate and destroy or weaken both the self-aggregation and the democratic procedures. So, what can go wrong?

1) The sphere of abundance can be designed to create artificial scarcities, which create limited choices and therefore power to choose…2) In the sphere of the Foundations, such as the Wikimedia Foundation, which manage the infrastructure of cooperation, a lot can go wrong as well…such as a lack of differentiation between community and private business interests, and the lack of community representation in the Foundation, amongst others…

So, when the private power of Jimmy Wales and the formal leaders of the Foundation, mix and merge with the informal powerbase of the privileged editors, there is a lot of potential for abuse, which seems to have been crossed on regular occasions.

Therefore, Wikipedia is constantly at risk of transforming itself into an inflexible, despotic hierarchy, as new disputes are emerging about the mode of content creation and governance. Co-ordination problems on interpersonal and interorganizational levels as well as gaps concerning the interests and the identities of the inter–Wikipedia communities result in governance crises and threaten the sustainability of the project. Bauwens (interview to Kostakis, 2009) advises that in the case of Wikipedia it would be essential:

…to return the project to its inclusionist roots, i.e. recognition of abundance; the strengthening of democracy and community representation in the Wikimedia Foundation; full transparency and business divestment in the Foundation. But a fundamental problem…to solve is the balance between participation and selection for excellence, how to make sure that truth does not become the rule of the majority and that expertise can finds its place.

Based on our interviews with (ex-)Wikipedians and experts, and on the examination of several internal and external forums, we side with a moderate inclusionist perspective of Wikipedia’s content. After all, to put it in Bruns’ style (2008), Wikipedia is about ‘representations of knowledge’.

However, what some worry about is the danger of the tyranny of the majority, and here comes the concept of meta-governance i.e. to operate in a context of negotiated decision-making. Bauwens (2009), partly echoing Jessop (2003) and the idea of the latter about the concept of meta-governance, said to us:

A possible solution is to create a mirror page for experts, who do not make the final decision, but can point to scholarly weaknesses in the open pages. I would also recommend the allowing of personal or collective forks, so that people can encounter a variety of perspectives, next to the official consensus page.

This is in accordance with the findings of Loubser and den Basten (2008) and the ideas developed by Benkler (2006) that in peer projects the reintroduction of certain elements of traditional organization (hierarchy or market; project-based organization etc) contributes to their sustainability. These elements are, after all, part of what we understand as peer governance, which is an heterarchical, hybrid mode of organization. Furthermore, Bauwens’ proposition of allowing experts to have their own distinct voice (even in the form of a mirror page) can be complementary to Forte and Bruckman’s (2008, p. 10) interpretation of Ostrom (2000) principles; that “the continued presence of the old-timers, who carry a set of social norms and organizational ideas with them”, contributes to the sustainability of the project. In addition, it is necessary a distinction among social and technical powers of administrators to be made, in order to avoid the power accumulation that we have been observing recently.