@ofehrmedia

Yes. No one is surprised when authority exists in a top-down organization. But when this first started happening on Wikipedia people acted surprised that radical openness, consensus, and cooperation could give rise to and co-exist with powerful enacted social structures.

However, the fact that these structures arise is a problem and a mystery when we think about commonsbased and cooperative production.

@groceryheist @ofehrmedia In the case of Wikipedia, did not structure self-elucidate and stiffen in reaction to troll editing? The first page to be locked was that for Jesus, IIRC. I'm reminded of ostensibly democratic regimes in the MidEast throwing up their hands and chucking elections at the prospect of Islamist-extremist-favoring majorities. It's a conundrum.

@risabee @groceryheist Wikipedia is a battleground by which some group(s) try to impose their views on others. It is especially visible in political and historical articles that have a bearing in the present. The problem is less visible with other topics like science.

@risabee @ofehrmedia Yes the growth in policy and tools on Wikipedia was in large part a response to high visibility and vandalism. Part of the rationale for replicating the analysis on Wikia wikis is that they don't face those issues to the same extent.

Yet we see the broad strokes of the Wikipedia 'rise and decline' narrative: policies become entrenched, newcomer contributions get rejected, and newcomers are less likely to survive over time.

@ofehrmedia @risabee

So I think the conundrum might be deeper than defending yourself from 'bad actors.' The analogy to democracy vs Islamism fits if you think about the contests between different views on what the community is about. Founders and early joiners may use power to maintain this vision, but at a cost for growth.

I'm also not ready to accept that /every/ organizational form will exhibit hierarchies. There might be forms we haven't found yet.

@groceryheist @risabee After 10'000 year of trying...possibly means that humans suck at it big time 😂

@groceryheist could you comment on how the plot in the blog post (wiki age vs normalized active editors) shows such a *mild* rise-and-decline pattern, from an initial 1.1 to a peak of 1.8, before a collapse to—well, I guess the plot is cut off, but just considering the rise-and-peak part, this seems very mild compared to the *exponential* growth we see in the big Wikipedias, then a top, followed by a gentler exponential decline.

The attached plot is on a *log* scale.

@risabee

@groceryheist @risabee Ah, I'm reading your paper finally and you answer exactly this question :) sorry for not reading before commenting!

@22 @risabee Thank you so much for reading the paper!

@groceryheist
I have an ideological dog in the fight, but to ask anyway; how much of this is about communities not existing in structural isolation? When the people and tools ultimately have to exist in a hierarchical system of organization in the wider world, is the repeat of hierarchical structures just the path-of-least-resistance response to external pressure of any kind? It isn't particularly testable, but it is important to talk about when asking why the pattern is generalized.

@Ashrand Oh yes! I certainly think it is plausible that institutional isomorphism plays a role like that you describe. It is difficult to test or demonstrate. A clever way of testing or demonstrating it could be super interesting.

@groceryheist Every organisational form will start to exhibit hierarchies, even if they are originally based on equality. That's just how human nature works - some individuals want to control things and usually succeed in making others accept 'their lead'. That's just a fact of life.