Joseph Reagle

Hey Joseph,

Much in line with the conclusion of your blog post on May 18th, your quote today in the New York Times mentions the presence of implicit rules or norms governing individual behavior in Wikipedia. However, this quote (and blog entry) seems oddly juxtaposed with the central message of the article, that wikipedia has governance. With ArbCom recently making a number of rulings regarding some hotly-contested pages on Wikipedia with enforcible bans on specific IP addresses, the article seems to indicate that wikipedia is neither a pristine example of the emergence of cooperative behavior from pre-formalized norms nor an environment where cooperative behavior can be maintained completely unmanaged by coercive entities. At least not on the fringes of that environment at the moment.

Although institutions and norms can clearly co-exist, this post seems to want to differentiate between the two in order to emphasize the importance of norms, and it seems to do so by conflating 'technical' solutions with institutions and 'moral' solutions with norms. However, I'm not sure that the terminology used by Hardin and other social scientists studying population growth, fishery management and other commons issues 40 years ago can be used as interchangeably with current nomenclature as this post seems to take for granted.

Unless I'm mistaken, for Hardin, technical solutions relate to efforts to maximize crop yields, develop reliable contraceptives and other scientific endeavors focused on providing solutions that facilitate, rather than constrain, market behavior. Since tragedies of the commons have no technical solutions, Hardin concludes that some 'moral' effort to create mutual coercion, mutually agreed upon by the majority, is necessary to create sustainable exploitation of natural resources and prevent resource extinction, human misery and the collapse of environments in the world. In this sense, 'morality' refers to a condition of governance, regulation or management of common resources which need not be institutionalized formally, but certainly requires some coercive force to prevent defection. This coercive force may be internalized as Kant's categorical imperative or operate socially through a system of shame, ostracism or approbation, but, since each of these strategic responses suffer to short-term self-serving behavior, this coercive force tends towards institutionalization over time in order to be comprehensive.

That norms and institutions share coercive similarities seems especially important once we begin to look at the emergent behavior for commons systems over time. As this particular article illustrates, with wikipedia's expansion and complexity, informal norms have become insufficient for dealing with some of the disputes, vandalism and predatory behavior that increasingly threaten the commons. In their place, formal institutions have been created with greater transparency, democratic qualities and at least 4 of the 8 Ostrom design principles, which have the capacity to solve intractable problems through more coercive measures.

Since the issue in question [Scientology] resides on the margins of wikipedia, what is amazing is the relative resilience of pages with the most traffic to invasive behavior. There certainly exists a norm within the community of readers/editors to self-police and maintain the standards of information through self-sacrifice despite the capacity for anyone to alter it. However all editing behavior is ultimately constrained by protocols, filters and restoration points, and official sanctions exist to circumscribe the excessive unruly behavior of participants or to prevent the editing of contested pages. So, it is fair to say wikipedia is far from informally policed.

However, the fair, or unfair, distinction which is drawn between norms and institutions seems to only skirt the central thrust of Ostrom's argument that values arise from the structure of the system. It is when mechanisms of monitoring are available, due to say limited group size, that trustworthiness becomes possible. Or sustained interaction for the value of reciprocity. In discussing the future of wikipedia ourselves, we are in some sense debating the way that it should be structured so as to maintain the commons for everyone. And, where the intrinsic structure of user interaction is insufficient to establish the values of cooperation, or in this particular case, outweigh the ideological commitments to political, religious or national affiliation, the recourse is to form a coercive apparatus that can.

I am suggesting that institutions evolve as the complexity of the system evolves and participants with a preference for cooperative behavior are forced to deal with behavior which they cannot otherwise control. To prevent predatory behavior, cooperators create formal procedures meant to limit its effects. However, this transition from norm driven to institutionally constrained interaction is nothing more than an (usually ad hoc) attempt to restructure the environment to restore the evolutionary advantage of cooperative behavior, much the same way that regimes of 'morality' attempt to structure behavior.

Institutions restructure behavior in the environment to induce cooperation and limit the effects of predatory participants but, insodoing, they also eliminate many of the conditions which made 'morality' based informal inducements to cooperation function properly. The apparatuses associated with constructing and maintaining institutions quickly reorient the nature of association between participants in the system, making it prone to future invasion by a different kind of self-serving behavior. It is no longer the poor fisherman that represents a threat to the commons, but the official who administers its oversight. In institutionalized cooperation, it is the regulatory agencies which become the largest threat to the commons through co-optation by the industries that they regulate.

This is why Hardin returns time and time again to the dilemma: "Quis custodiet?". Without any sufficient 'technical' solution, I might add. And why, ultimately, norms and institutions cannot be disentangled when analyzing the emergence (and dissolution) of cooperative behavior.