Nature and Roles of Policies and Rules in Wikipedia

* Article: Don’t Look Now, But We’ve Created a Bureaucracy: The Nature and Roles of Policies and Rules in Wikipedia by Brian Butler, Lisa Joyce, and Jacqueline Pike.

URL = http://www.katzis.org/wiki/images/7/76/Butleretal2008.pdf

This paper was presented at the 2008 Conference on Computer-Human Interaction (CHI) in Florence, Italy.

Abstract

"Wikis are sites that support the development of emergent, collective infrastructures that are highly flexible and open, suggesting that the systems that use them will be egalitarian, free, and unstructured. Yet it is apparent that the flexible infrastructure of wikis allows the development and deployment of a wide range of structures. However, we find that the policies in Wikipedia and the systems and mechanisms that operate around them are multi-faceted. In this descriptive study, we draw on prior work on rules and policies in organizations to propose and apply a conceptual framework for understanding the natures and roles of policies in wikis. We conclude that wikis are capable of supporting a broader range of structures and activities than other collaborative platforms. Wikis allow for and, in fact, facilitate the creation of policies that serve a wide variety of functions."

Discussion

"Many view Wikipedia as emergent, complex, messy, informal, popularly uncontrolled, non-organizational, and radically different from traditional organizations. They talk about it as if it was a utopia of freedom and independence similar to the way which early U.S. settlers viewed the new colonies. Consistent with this view, one of the founding principles of Wikipedia is “Ignore all rules,” which states that if a rule inhibits developing Wikipedia, the contributor should simply ignore it.

However, if one scratches the surface of Wikipedia by going beyond reading the article pages, one will find a complex structure of policies and rules which do lend themselves to this uncontrolled, independent view. With dozens of official policies, hundreds of rules, and more of each on the way, Wikipedia is well on its way to looking like a bureaucracy.

Scholars are examining this complex structure of policies and rules in order to better understand the nature and role of these policies and rules in Wikipedia and what developers and administrators of wikis can learn about policy formation and maintenance. Drawing from prior studies of rules and policies in a variety of contexts, including teams, traditional organizations, and legal systems, they propose different images of rules and policies, such as policies as rational efforts to organize and coordinate, constructions of meaning and identity, external signals, and negotiated settlements and trophies." (http://www.katzis.org/wiki/Policies_and_Rules_in_Wikipedia)