What a study into Wikipedia’s norms can teach us about creating non-hierarchical social structures
Due to the open nature of its edits, internal links and community interactions, Wikipedia’s editor community is an information-rich example of how communities, social norms and hierarchies form.
The findings of ‘The Evolution of Wikipedia’s Norm Network’, a complexity science-based study into this phenomenon, are telling with regards to human nature and group behaviour. The core rules and norms by which Wikipedia and its editing policy operate were formed and documented early in the encyclopaedia’s lifespan, and reflect the behaviour and expectations of its early editor group.
“For example, if early users are predominantly university students with flexible working hours, for example, they may develop norms that implicitly rely on the possibility of responding to criticism in short, rapid bursts. If later arrivals do not have the same flexibility, but the norms persist, they will find themselves at a relative disadvantage in conflicts that arise, even if the amount of effort they devote to the system each week is the same.”
Anyone who’s been involved in group creation of almost any kind will recognise some of the other hypotheses the study examines in the context of Wikipedia: “that early users later form an oligarchy that monopolizes power, subverts democratic control, and comes into increasing conflict with the larger collective. If this is true, the enduring centrality of their own interests in the norm network may be a source of power.”
The paper’s conclusions support this, as well as finding that core norms established by ‘old-timers’ mean that this initial group has enduring influence on the norms used both in general and by smaller, decentralised sub-communities among Wikipedians.
Speaking to Gizmodo, study co-author Simon DeDeo observed that:
“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. 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.”
DeDeo also found that interest groups with different priorities formed: “the early users laid down these seeds, everybody clustered around them, but the seeds were in different neighborhoods. And over time, those seeds got pulled apart from each other.”
While the core norms (such as “be civil”, “don’t type in all caps”, “assume good faith”) were created to serve specific functions, they came to grow in importance beyond their functional origins, attaining a status akin to founding myths, even in the face of points at which they become mutually contradictory
DeDeo: “They function less to regulate behavior and more to justify the system and give it a sense of legitimacy.”
The phenomenon of contradictory myth-status norms is rarely addressed, instead contributing to tribalism among Wikipedian sub-groups.
An understanding of the way in which unintended hierarchies, social norms and structures form and develop is vital to anarchist and syndicalist thought and theory, and this study is a fine example to examine due to the equal and egalitarian intentions of the system.
Wikipedia isn’t quite an example of direct democracy in action, but it displays a number of important hallmarks of pure democracy, within the implicit limitations created by the technological and demographic skewing that results from its base requirement of internet access at a time when this was less widely available than it is now, as well as the fact that it reflects the unequal makeup of online and knowledge communities at that time. However, its longevity and the sheer volume of extant documentation showing the course it’s taken are also virtually unprecedented.
Drawing practical conclusions
If, like me, you have an interest in forming non-hierarchical groups, governance systems and, potentially, societies then research of this kind is incredibly important.
Most of us have seen the way in which unspoken hierarchies tend to manifest even in theoretically egalitarian systems, favouring the “established wisdom” of elder members, the perceived dynamism of those with the loudest voices or best rhetorical ability, the weight of popularity behind those with the best social skills and, as so closely examined in the study, the increasing weight of norms and intra-group tradition.
Such a tendency towards unquestioned hierarchy and tradition are as typically human as they are damaging to egalitarian and non-hierarchical social structures, whether they’re a household, a worker-owned enterprise, a syndicalist commune or national-scale attempt to organise along Marxist communist lines — a challenge given that, like an anarchist society, a communist one as per Marx inherently exists in a state of evolving flux dependent upon the needs of the society*. Note that real-world testing has shown on a number of occasions that the people/groups with a specific power-oriented agenda and a large stash of weapons tend to trump fuzzier ideas about gradually evolving a society to maximise personal freedom and general equality when you try to scale this kind of thing up.
The small-scale equivalent would be the eloquent, irritatingly persistent person who always insists on the correctness of THEIR personal vision for the Anarcho-Syndicalist Social Club Weekend Outing. Every. Bastard. Time. Or, more worryingly, the person in a theoretically egalitarian household who through persuasion, manipulation and established influence is able to exploit newer/less forthright members of said household.
In its least damaging incarnation, unintended hierarchy manifests in the form of a handful of willing people doing all the work in a group and ultimately becoming disillusioned and burnt out.
Unspoken hierarchy can be annoying, pernicious and even dangerous, and once a norm or a tradition is set, “that’s how we’ve always done things” can bind us into behaviour patterns that can easily evolve into Kafkaesqe nonsense.
That said, a non-hierarchical org’s technology working group should probably be headed by the persons with the most experience in technology, someone who’s been a carpenter for 15 years should have key decision-making influence when it comes to designing new wooden structures, the person who does most of the cooking should probably be a key decision maker on what supplies get bought next week, following the safety instructions on the bench saw is a useful tradition, and we should probably listen to what an old hand has to say about the last time we tried this shiny and exciting ‘new’ idea someone just came up with.
An insistence on full and unweighted direct democracy and on remaking the wheel is something that drives many non-hierarchical groups into disarray and disillusionment, and insisting that everyone’s opinion on everything is by default equally valid can be remarkably foolish, particularly in the practical domain.
Finding a balance between these extremes is in many ways the fundamental challenge of non-hierarchical group dynamics, and it’s not one I claim to have any kind of answer to, beyond active personal responsibility and policing of our own behaviour as both individuals and groups.
The splintering phenomenon that the study observed in the manifestation of discrete groups of Wikipedia editors with varying norm priorities and special interests is, I think, something we can and should learn from.
Because of the known scaling issues when it comes to maintaining non-hierarchical groups, it’s worth considering that perhaps splintering isn’t actually the worst thing that could happen, and in small-scale physical non-hierarchical groups, could potentially be encouraged as an alternative to trying to hold together a cluster of people whose interests have become exclusive of one another in some way.
What a study into Wikipedia’s norms can teach us about creating non-hierarchical social structures by K.G. Orphanides is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Based on original post.
