Jennifer Ouellette reports on recent studies of Wikipedia’s editorial hierarchy. While the site was founded on democratic ideals, the reality has turned into something quite different:
Their analysis demonstrates that Wikipedia is actually quite conservative from an evolutionary standpoint: it preserves those aspects that worked early on. As the community added new members and grew rapidly, 89 percent of the core norms stayed the same. Nobody ever overthrows an existing norm, and nobody creates a new norm that becomes as dominant as the original core norms. If a particular norm was important in 2001, chances are it was still important in 2015.
