View source for Research:Newsletter/2012/March

===Sociological analysis of debates about flagged revisions in the English, German and French Wikipedias===
<div style="float:right; padding-top:0.5em; padding-left:0.5em; margin-left: 1em; margin-bottom: 1em; width: 200px; border:1px solid #CCC;">[[File:FlaggedRevs-2-1.svg|100x100px|Icon for accepted]][[File:FlaggedRevs-1-1.svg|100x100px]]<p style="font-size: 80%">At the center of debates on "Coercion or empowerment": Icons signifying accepted (left) and not yet accepted (right) revisions under a [[:w:Wikipedia:Flagged revisions|flagged revisions]] scheme<p></div>
In an article to appear in ''Ethics and Information Technology'', Paul B. de Laat analysed debates occurring in the English, German and French Wikipedias about the evolution of the rules governing new edits.<ref>de Laat, P. B. (2012). Coercion or empowerment? Moderation of content in Wikipedia as 'essentially contested' bureaucratic rules. ''Ethics and Information Technology'', 1–13. Springer Netherlands. [http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10676-012-9289-7 '''DOI'''] {{open access}}</ref> As noted by the analysis of the English Wikipedia's rules, by Butler et al., 2008,<ref>Butler, B., Joyce, E., & Pike, J. (2008). Don't look now, but we've created a bureaucracy: The nature and roles of policies and rules in Wikipedia. ''Proceeding of the twenty-sixth annual CHI conference on Human factors in computing systems'' – CHI '08 (p. 1101). New York, New York, USA: ACM Press. [http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/1357054.1357227 '''DOI'''] • [http://hci.uma.pt/courses/socialweb08F/5/butler.pdf '''PDF'''] {{Open access}}</ref> these rules are numerous and have increased in number and complexity; they range from the more formal and explicit (intellectual property rights) to the more informal.

De Laat's work is based on a study of the discussions around the proposal to introduce a system of reviewing edits before they appear on screen ([[:w:flagged revisions|flagged revisions]], discussed on English Wikipedia at [[:w:Wikipedia:Flagged revisions|Wikipedia:Flagged revisions]]). It focuses on the perennial debate around the construction of knowledge commons theorized by [[:w:Elinor Ostrom|Elinor Ostrom]]:<ref>Hess, Charlotte and Ostrom, Elinor (2006) A Framework for Analyzing the Knowledge Commons, in Hess, C., & Ostrom, E. (Eds.). ''Understanding Knowledge as a Commons: From Theory to Practice''. MIT Press, 2006, pp. 41–81 {{closed access}}</ref> being a collective, open project, it must be accessible to most, but as its production becomes important for its "owners" (readers and producers), boundaries have to be set to protect its integrity. De Laat's article describes and analyzes the tensions and permanent adjustments needed to manage these apparently opposed goals. 

In a [[:w:Max Weber|Weberian]] analysis of bureaucracy, applicable to Wikipedia policies, he shows that two views can be invoked to explain the intensity of the discussions. He summarizes the debate as a clash between (i) those who saw the flagged revisions as "a useful tool for curbing vandalism", enabling and empowering users and editors, and (ii) those who denounced it as "a superfluous bureaucratic device that violates egalitarian principles of participation", designed to introduce a more controlled and hierarchical environment. He muses that "an intriguing question that remains to be answered, of course, is: What brought the three language communities to ultimately choose or reject such a review system? Why is it that, each in their own ways, the Germans voted for acceptance, the French for rejection, while the English have been wavering all the time between acceptance and rejection"? (p. 11) This question, and Wikipedians' views of flagged revisions, can shine light onto what kind of community Wikipedia should be, according to various factions of editors. As De Laat answers it, "many of those who reject the system of review do so from a vision of Wikipedia as an unbounded community that shares knowledge without mutual control and suspicion, while many of those who embrace the review system do so because they have a vision of Wikipedia as an organization producing reliable knowledge that keeps vandalism outside its borders". De Laat suggests that further research is needed to fully understand the factors affecting the decisions on different Wikipedias taken with regard to flagged revisions, postulating a hypothesis to be tested in further research that "those whose mother tongue is German may possibly be more deferential to hierarchy than those who speak either French or English, and therefore may prefer the order and respectability introduced by a system of reviewing".