Rule Ambiguity, Institutional Clashes, and Population Loss: How Wikipedia Became the Last Good Place on the Internet

Scholars usually portray institutions as stable, inviting a status quo bias in their theories. Change, when it is theorized, is frequently attributed to exogenous factors. This paper, by contrast, proposes that institutional change can occur endogenously through population loss, as institutional losers become demotivated and leave, whereas institutional winners remain. This paper provides a detailed demonstration of how this form of endogenous change occurred on the English Wikipedia. A qualitative content analysis shows that Wikipedia transformed from a dubious source of information in its early years to an increasingly reliable one over time. Process tracing shows that early outcomes of disputes over rule interpretations in different corners of the encyclopedia demobilized certain types of editors (while mobilizing others) and strengthened certain understandings of Wikipedia’s ambiguous rules (while weakening others). Over time, Wikipedians who supported fringe content departed or were ousted. Thus, population loss led to highly consequential institutional change.

@manucode@feddit.de I am also in agreement that I don’t know how a federated wikipedia solves what made Wikipedia so great. Per the paper above, fringe editors saying “the flatness of the world is a debated topic” gradually got frustrated about having to “present evidence” and having their work reverted all the time, and so voluntarily left over time. And so an issue page goes from being “both sides” to “one side is a fringe idea”.

From reading the Ibis page, this seems a lot closer to fandom than the wikipedia. Different encyclopedias where the same page name can be completely different.

Skepchick also had a great video about the topic: https://www.patreon.com/posts/92654496