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Experts are forced to engage in pointless debates with Wikipedia’s bureaucratic guardians, many of whom are persuaded only by hyperlinks, not cogent arguments.
Other aspects of Wikipedia’s history are vividly described but lack discerning intellectual treatment. Lih sheds little light on the “routinization” of the charismatic and ultimately benevolent authority of Jimmy Wales, how that authority evolved into a vast bureaucratic apparatus with a Kafkaesque system of rules. And while Lih notes user ambivalence toward voting, he leaves it largely unexplained. The attitude seems to have grown from an earlier Wiki culture developed by Meatball Wiki, one of the projects preceding and inspiring Wikipedia. The meatballers saw voting as an unnecessary distraction. “Don’t vote on everything, and if you can help it, don’t vote on anything,” read one page on the site.
Wikipedia’s elders adopted those views, realizing that voting could be easily gamed and should not be used often. Instead they settled on a kind of enlightened autocracy: ordinary users would express their views on an issue, after which the more powerful administrators would interpret the vox populi and make a decision. Most of the time, consensus would emerge early on, and the decision was easy; however, as Wikipedia began attracting relatively diverse crowds of editors, achieving consensus grew more difficult. Voting opportunities were further reduced as articles became higher-ranked on Google. A high Google rank means more exposure, which led to more vote-rigging. No longer would there be “votes for deletion,” merely “articles for deletion,” which Wikipedians would discuss. A disinterested administrator would gauge the consensus and make a final decision.
For a site that wants to democratize and revolutionize access to knowledge, such a conservative stance on voting seems puzzling and worth studying in detail, but Lih does not explore this incongruity. There is no guarantee that a more democratic Wikipedia would survive, but it would be interesting to investigate why users so quickly and confidently opted for consensus- rather than voting-driven decision-making.