The Politics of Knowledge and the Online Republic

Digital Universe's Larry Sanger has posted another of his thoughtful essays, this time on the central issue of the "politics of knowledge":

[T]he main arena of the new politics of knowledge is project governance. Wikipedia is famously unaccommodating of the usual privileges of experts; there is no special place them in Wikipedia-land. You might arrive at Slashdot possessed of the finest-tuned understanding of tech news, but when you join in making and rating comments, you become just another rank-and-file member until, perhaps, you prove yourself by the lights of Slashdot (which might or might not correspond to anything deserving the name “expertise”). On Digg, your vote counts the same as everybody else’s. And so forth.

So radical egalitarianism is built into the governance models of many collaborative projects. When, therefore, the Creative Public votes with their feet for Web 2.0 resources that reject the need of editors, such as Wikipedia, Digg, and MySpace (again, the latter may not be collaborative, but it’s definitely editor-free), they are thereby denying epistemic authority to the people who otherwise would be their editors.

Along the way, he introduces the idea of the "online republic":

Let me explain rather better what I mean by an “online Republic,” and then why I think that it is the only system that will have desirable epistemic consequences, in the long run. Bear in mind first that Republics have a definite democratic aspect, since power and authority in the project in actual practice (not just in the PR material) must emanate from the participants–not from the website owners. But not just anyone can count as a participant for voting purposes. Insofar as we are talking about an online polity that is shaped not by just anyone’s arbitrary whim but by “law,” there must be a process whereby someone becomes a member of the community and thus subject to its “laws.” In practical terms, this means no doubt that “full citizenship” must be earned through participation and through a declaration not to undermine at least the fundamental laws of the polity (i.e., engage in “insurrection”). The “fundamental laws” are essentially a community charter, which is carefully written, carefully interpreted, and, once established, very hard to change. The rule of law arguably requires a robust, well-respected constitution: if laws are very easy to change, legislators and judges can, with a flick of the pen, change the entire system into something else entirely. Finally, a Republic requires the free election of representatives, the basic qualifications of which (if any) are described by the charter, who both make and enforce the rules of the project.

His essay also has some handy links to other relevant materials, including this New Yorker feature on Wikipedia, currently the best overall introduction to the project and its history.