Week 9: Community Governance - The Boundaries of Collaboration and Power-----MUYE

 1) Read the summary

This week's reading focuses on how the editorial community of Wikipedia governs itself. The materials detail the administrator system, the community consensus mechanism and the dispute resolution process. Wikipedia adopts the principle of "consensus first" rather than "majority vote" and promotes decision-making through Talk Pages. This decentralized collaboration mechanism is regarded as one of the key factors for the success of Wikipedia. However, reading also points out that there are many inequalities in this system in reality: Active editors often hold the power of discourse on the rules, while novice editors are prone to being "reverse editors" or rejected in the early stage due to their lack of understanding of the rules.


2) Interesting discoveries

I particularly noticed the proposal of the concept of "Wikipedia elitism" - although Wikipedia is open to everyone, in reality, a relatively closed small circle has formed among active editors, who often have greater say in the editing of entries and even influence "what knowledge is worth retaining". And those beginners who attempt to contribute local or niche knowledge, if they are not familiar with the Wiki norms, are very likely to be deleted, modified or even warned. This undoubtedly hinders the expansion of the diversity of knowledge to a certain extent.


3) Discussion perspective

I think we should further explore how to establish a more inclusive guiding mechanism within the Wiki community. For instance, could an "editing mentorship system" be introduced, where experienced users assist newcomers in integrating into the community, understanding the rules, and enhancing their editing skills? Furthermore, the Talk page discusses whether there are implicit power structures in the language itself - such as whether high-level terms or formatted discussions force some users to "remain silent"? These are all the issues that I hope to discuss in depth in class.

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