Wikipedia: Example for a future Electronic Democracy? Decision, Discipline and Discourse in the Collaborative Encyclopaedia

This article describes the organisational mechanisms of the online encyclopedia Wikipedia. First we analyse the decision making process (DMP) including debates and consensus which Wikipedia employs, and make a connection with the Habermasian model of rational discourse.Then we analyse the disciplines, in the Foucauldian sense, which underly and permit this DMP. We find that on the theoretical p…