Scaling Consensus: Increasing Decentralization in Wikipedia Governance
TL;DR
Wikipedia governance paradox: scaling triggered decentralization through increased rule complexity, not hierarchy.
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Documents the governance transition every scaling organization faces: when informal consensus breaks down, what replaces it? Forte and Bruckman show that successful scaling produces distributed bureaucracy, not hierarchy—rules substitute for chiefs. The paper provides empirical evidence that density-dependent governance evolution occurs in human organizations just as it does in biological systems.
Key Findings from Forte & Bruckman (2008)
- Wikipedia governance became more decentralized as community size increased—counter to typical organizational patterns
- English Wikipedia accumulated 50+ formal policies totaling 150,000 words by 2008
- Policy citation increased while policy creation slowed, suggesting regulatory carrying capacity
- Decentralization paradoxically enabled through increased rule complexity—codified policy reduces coordination costs
- Specialized governance structures (administrators, arbitration) emerged only after population thresholds exceeded informal consensus capacity