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Wikipedia Is Basically a Corporate Bureaucracy, Says Study (gizmodo.com)
Jennifer Ouellette, reporting for Gizmodo: Wikipedia is a voluntary organization dedicated to the noble goal of decentralized knowledge creation. But as the community has evolved over time, it has wandered further and further from its early egalitarian ideals, according to a new paper published in the journal Future Internet. In fact, such systems usually end up looking a lot like 20th-century bureaucracies. [...] This may seem surprising, since there is no policing authority on Wikipedia -- no established top-down means of control. The community is self-governing, relying primarily on social pressure to enforce the established core norms, according to co-author Simon DeDeo, a complexity scientist at Indiana University. [...] "You start with a decentralized democratic system, but over time you get the emergence of a leadership class with privileged access to information and social networks," DeDeo explained. "Their interests begin to diverge from the rest of the group. They no longer have the same needs and goals. So not only do they come to gain the most power within the system, but they may use it in ways that conflict with the needs of everybody else.""The Iron Law of Oligarchy, demonstrated by Wikipedia," wrote Sean Carroll, theoretical physicist at Caltech. "Rebel all you want, ultimately you become The Establishment."
For all the complaints against bureaucracies, they are often the only way a large organization can run. As organizations grow and mature, they often evolve into bureaucracies. Bureaucracies are often a very efficient way of performing work. The main problem with them is they tend to become static, and inhibit future change. Parts of bureaucracies work to keep themselves in business, and resist change that would eliminate them, even if they become obsolete.
The first mistake people make is in thinking that bureaucracies have top down control. In a bureaucracy, no one individual (or small group of individuals) have control. Ultimately, bureaucracies come into existence to protect people from being held accountable for their actions. Any organization which does not have a strong leader who takes responsibility for the bad things which happen in the organization (and thus holds those most responsible for those bad things accountable) will turn into a bureaucracy. Even an organization with such a leader will become a bureaucracy if they have to delegate decision making too far down the organization from themselves.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Wikipedia is playing King of the Hill.
The person that spends the most time making edits is the Editor. And there are a lot of self-important busy-bodies that will revert casual edits because they can. Some will attempt to justify it with official-sounding reasons for reversing, others will simply revert without much comment.
This is why I don't contribute to Wikipedia anymore, and why I do not browse it as much as I used to. The idea was interesting, but due to the way it was set up, the trolls run the place.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
This may seem surprising, since there is no policing authority on Wikipedia
Yes there is.... Haven't you ever heard of "New Page Patrol" ? There are such things as Oversighters (History Suppression); The WP Foundation has Police power through Oversighter, and Control of stewards who assign Administrative permissions to some users, who then act as police, Selective Deletion (Destroying/Hiding historical information about past actions), Banned Users, Requests for Discussion, Votes for Deletion, Speedy Page Deletion (eg BLP), and Banned Content
no established top-down means of control. The community is self-governing, relying primarily on social pressure to enforce the established core norms
There are top-down means of control in regards to certain actions (Oversighting).
For example, as long as Steve Jobs was alive and running Apple, Apple was not "corporate", because its identity was intrinsically tied to Steve Jobs.
You're getting confused between "corporate" (a separate legal entity) with Steve Job's reality distortion field (whatever you think it was).
However, no one would have used "corporate" to describe Apple while Steve Jobs was alive because the perceived "personality" of Apple while Steve Jobs was alive was the same as the perceived personality of Steve Jobs.
By that argument the following companies are not "corporate" because they had strong CEO personalities: GE with Jack Welch, HP with Carly Fiona, Microsoft with Bill Gates or Steve Ballmer, Oracle with Larry Ellison, and eBay with Meg Whiteman, etc.
Wikipedia pages represent the range of views of the British Empire that exists in the world, from a force for order and civilization on the globe to an evil empire. The main article leans towards the traditional historical views, but pages on genocides, war crimes, etc. are also there. I'm sorry if that doesn't satisfy you, but it doesn't make it "highly biased". What would be highly biased is if Wikipedia presented the British Empire in the one-sided view you hold of it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
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